Attack ad deployed as Vancouver mayoral race gets personal between Sim and Stewart

Two front-runners in the Vancouver mayoral race have started sniping at each other and telling voters their opponent can’t be trusted as the campaign takes on a nasty tone with just six weeks to go before election day.

Kennedy Stewart edged out Ken Sims by less than 1,000 votes to win the city’s top job in 2018 -- and as the rematch takes shape, it’s beginning to look like familiarity breeds contempt.

“Kennedy Stewart’s new tax is what he’s calling road pricing,” the narrator says in an ad Sim’s ABC Vancouver Party put online and on the radio this week.

The ad accuses Stewart of planning to implement mobility pricing for drivers entering the city’s core if he is re-elected.

Stewart did vote to allocate $1.5-million so city staff could study the feasibility of mobility pricing – but so did Rebecca Bligh, Sara Kirby-Yung and Lisa Dominato, three incumbent councillors now running under the ABC Vancouver banner with Sim.

Despite supporting the study, and the city’s Climate Action Emergency Plan, Stewart says if he is re-elected he won’t implement mobility pricing.

“Let me be clear, I do not support this tax. Ken Sim has made this up,” Stewart told CTV News in an interview Wednesday. “He’s misleading voters and he has to pull his ad campaign because it’s simply not true.”

Sim and ABC Vancouver do not plan to stop running the ad.

“I don’t think the mayor can be trusted on his road tax,” Sim responded when asked if he thought Stewart was lying. “Trusting Kennedy Stewart on his road tax is like trusting a rabbit to ship lettuce.”

CTV News political analyst George Affleck says by controlling the early narrative, Sim has landed the first punch in the rematch between the two men.

“Campaigns are won in many different ways, but if you’re on the defensive, that’s never good,” Affleck said.

Stewart doesn’t see it that way.

“I think Ken Sim is desperate,” he said. “I think that he really has come up with no ideas of his own and so the easiest thing to do is what they do in the U.S. – attack, spread fear – and this is what he’s doing.”

Affleck doesn’t anticipate the campaigns will shift to policy debates anytime soon because the winning formula in modern political campaigns is often focused on inundating voters with one or two specific messages and controlling the narrative.

“I think it’s a taste of things to come. It’s going to get ugly,” he said. “And then you throw in a couple of other mayoral candidates and it’s going to get really ugly in Vancouver, so prepare yourself.”