TEAM candidates position themselves as a voice of opposition to ABC majority

What happened: Colleen Hardwick and Theodore Abbott have been named as the candidates for TEAM for a Livable Vancouver in this spring’s municipal by-election. 

• Abbott describes TEAM as a “big tent” party capable of forming a broad coalition, with supporters from the right and left of the political spectrum. 

Runs in the family: Hardwick, a councillor from 2018-2022 and a 2022 mayoral candidate, has a long-standing familial history in Vancouver politics. Colleen’s father Walter Hardwick served on city council from 1969 to 1974, working to establish the mixed-income community of False Creek South. Colleen’s grandmother, Iris, was the city’s first female park board commissioner, serving from 1956-1960. 

• Dive deeper: The TEAM party of today calls back to The Electors’ Action Movement party – co-founded by Walter – which enjoyed municipal political success in the 1970s after organizing around opposition to a proposed freeway through Strathcona and Chinatown.  

“My background, knowledge, and experience when it comes to the city is pretty deep and long-standing. I can hit the ground running as soon as I walk in the door,” if elected, Hardwick told Vancity Lookout. 

A new voice: Abbott graduated from Capilano University in 2024 with a Bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, focusing on urban geography and urban studies. Abbott is also the host of the On Site Report podcast, which explores aspects of city planning in Vancouver since the 1970s. 

Growing up on Commercial Drive, Abbott, 27, jokes that he got his first degree hanging out in cafes with the neighbourhood’s activists and thinkers. He described how the major changes he saw in his neighbourhood, and the city at large, impacted him in the early 2000s. 

• “The city was rapidly becoming this globalized metropolis, this city that was less and less kind to average Vancouver residents. This was something that I found pretty disgruntling and quite troubling, especially the gentrification that I saw in East Van,” Abbott told Vancity Lookout. 

Abbott said he’s always been involved in community organizing and activism, working with environmental movements in the 2010s, with Cap. U.’s student union, and for TEAM.  

The intricacies of housing: Hardwick and Abbott are squarely focused on housing policy. They want to slow the rate of development, rezonings, and land-use changes in the city, with a specific focus on halting, or at least pausing, the Broadway Plan. 

The area plan, amended this past December, calls for 41,500 new homes in a 500-block area that contains 25% of the city’s rental stock, much of which are older apartment buildings with low- to middle-income residents, according to Storeys. 

• “We're living in a time when our policies are all driven by developer interests,” Abbott alleged, pointing to the affordable rental stock within the Broadway Plan area that’s at risk of being demolished and redeveloped.  

“The displacement that we're seeing right now in Vancouver, and that we've been seeing for the last decade, is pretty egregious,” Abbott said, adding that TEAM recognizes Vancouver needs more housing, and would advocate for the development of more co-op and senior housing. 

Hardwick pointed to False Creek South and Champlain Heights as models of municipal, provincial and federal governments working together in the 1970s and 80s to fund mixed-income communities with access to nature and green space, and a range of housing types including social, co-op, and market housing. 

“Areas of the city like the Arbutus Walk, False Creek South, or even Champlain Heights, exemplify a form of urban planning that is much more in line with the human scale and livability,” Abbott echoed.  

• Neither Hardwick or Abbott would commit to advocating with the province to institute rent controls on units, rather than on tenancies. Known as vacancy control, this is one tool that’s been proposed by advocates to address the lack of housing affordability for B.C. renters. 

A party in opposition: TEAM for a Livable Vancouver was started by Colleen Hardwick in 2021, in advance of the 2022 municipal elections. “I knew I could not operate as a solo act,” Hardwick said. 

• After not getting any candidates elected in 2022, TEAM is back in this by-election with the explicit goal of opposing Mayor Ken Sim and the ABC majority. 

Asked if there’s any room for collaboration with ABC councillors or Green Coun. Pete Fry, Hardwick said she sees her role as councillor, if elected, as oppositional. 

Both Hardwick and Abbott said they don’t see Coun. Pete Fry and former councillors Christine Boyle and Adriane Carr – whose seats they’re trying to fill – as meaningful opposition to the ABC majority, based on their voting records on area and land-use plans that TEAM opposes, like the Broadway Plan and the Vancouver Plan. 

• “Even if I can't make any of the kinds of changes that I'm talking about… At least if I'm on city council, I can shine a light on what's broken,” Hardwick said. 

“It's very likely that a lot of what will bring forward won't pass,” Abbott admitted. “But generating media coverage and media attention on issues like the Broadway Plan, and making residents feel as though their voices are being heard at City Hall for the next 18 months is, I think, going to be really, really important for generating momentum for movements like Pause the [Broadway] Plan,” Abbott said of TEAM’s role on council.

“I see this as the thin end of the wedge… we're hoping [TEAM candidates being elected] will give us two men on the chess board, so to speak, so that we can start to prepare the ground game for [the 2026 municipal election],” Hardwick said.

Elected park board support: Hardwick and Abbott both expressed their support for the elected park board, saying they would engage with Premier David Eby to advocate for the province not to amend the Vancouver Charter and allow Sim to absorb parks and recreation under direct city governance.

Moreover, Abbott argued, “the way that Ken Sim is going about trying to abolish the park board is completely undemocratic. So whether you think we should have an elected park board or not, that's one side of the coin. The flip side is, I don't think anyone would support the completely undemocratic way in which he's gone about trying to achieve this… I think it's a real attack on democracy,” Abbott said. 

• Hardwick said she’d ask Eby and the province to “not take Ken Sim’s suggestion seriously. He is unserious. He doesn't know what he's doing in the first place, and it's the wrong thing to do,” Hardwick said. 

Last word: Abbott said TEAM believes Vancouver neighbourhoods are completely being ignored, and, as a city councillor he’d advocate “for a return to a form of civic governance that listens to its communities and grows in conjunction with [them], rather than just seeing residents as collateral damage.” 

• One practical form that could take – which Abbott said he’d advocate for – would be instituting a ward system, where some councillors would be elected within certain neighbourhoods to represent those specific areas, rather than Vancouver’s current at-large system, which elects representatives city-wide. 

“We really need knowledgeable people in [city council] because if we don't, the outcomes will not be very desirable,” Hardwick said when asked why people should vote for her, adding “I feel a very strong sense of responsibility to apply what I know and try and turn the ship around, but I can't do that sitting on the sidelines.”

Our coverage: Vancity Lookout is committed to continuing to bring you the perspectives, positions, and arguments from the people and parties campaigning for your vote in the upcoming by-election on April 5th. We hope to interview every major candidate in the lead-up to the by-election.

• Catch up on our previous coverage – including nomination tactics and a Q&A with OneCity candidate Lucy Maloney – and stay tuned for more.