An exclusive new poll shows incumbent Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim 'in a bit of trouble' and Coun. Pete Fry with a 'tenuous' lead, Leger pollster Steve Mossop says. But with a third of respondents still undecided and a crucial final week to go, anything can happen.

New polling for Postmedia News shows the race for the Vancouver mayor’s office shaping up to be a tight showdown with the challenger, Green Coun. Pete Fry, slightly ahead of the incumbent, ABC’s Ken Sim.

In a poll conducted by Leger for Postmedia, 23 per cent of respondents said they would vote for Fry if the election were held today, followed closely by Sim at 19 per cent.

The other three candidates were all in single digits. TEAM for a Livable Vancouver mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick and the Vancouver Liberals’ Kareem Allam were tied with six per cent each, followed by Vote Vancouver’s Rebecca Bligh at five.

The poll found 62 per cent of respondents believe Vancouver is heading in the wrong direction, compared with Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond and Coquitlam where less than half of respondents said the same. The Vancouver mayor’s approval rating was only 32 per cent, with 62 per cent of respondents saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing.

Those numbers are “almost the worst that you can get out of any election that we cover,” said Steve Mossop, Leger’s executive vice-president for Western Canada.

“Those numbers often spell doom” for an incumbent politician at any level, Mossop said, but he still considers Fry’s lead at this stage “tenuous.”

It’s more common in municipal races than provincial and federal elections to see a high number of undecided voters late in a campaign. The Leger poll, conducted between Sept. 23 and 30, found more than a third of respondents were undecided.

“That means that we’re not going out there with a prediction that Pete Fry is going to win. But what I will say is that it does look like Ken Sim is in a bit of trouble,” Mossop said.

“When you have that ‘wrong direction’ number over 50 per cent, whoever’s in power is vulnerable. … In the 35 elections I’ve covered, it’s a litmus test, if you will, for election day,” Mossop said.

The incumbent mayor would be even more vulnerable if he were up against a single main candidate, he said, “but when there’s more candidates that have even a chance of winning, it can make those incumbents do better.”

Leger’s online poll, with 1,207 adults from around Metro Vancouver and 365 respondents in the City of Vancouver, is reported to be accurate to within plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Results were weighted according to age, gender, region, and education.

The Vancouver polling also shows Fry with more support among white voters, and Sim with more support among Chinese voters and others.

Leger’s poll released a week before the 2022 Vancouver election showed Sim with a commanding lead, 18 percentage points ahead of then mayor Kennedy Stewart. Sim defeated Stewart by 20 points that year.

Fry had more than double the support of Sim among voters aged 18 to 34, the two were tied with voters between 35 and 54, and Sim has the edge with voters over 55. The good news for Sim is that those older voters are typically much more likely to vote in municipal elections than people under 34, Mossop said.

The good news for Fry is that he has a lead among those respondents who said they definitely plan to vote.

Participation is often low in municipal elections, and this year — with an overlapping provincial campaign — is likely to be even lower than the 36 per cent turnout Vancouver recorded in 2022, Mossop said. Vancouver’s record high turnout for advance voting earlier this month and increased demand for mail-in ballots reflect a broader change in voter behaviour as more people opt to avoid the crowds of the general election day, Mossop said, and may not translate to a larger overall turnout.

All five of the main mayoral candidates appeared Thursday evening at a panel hosted by The Vancouver Sun and Stuart McNish of Conversations Live.

They largely stuck to the messaging they have repeated so far on the campaign trail and in earlier debates.

Sim emphasized public safety, and talked about the two plebiscite questions ABC added to the ballot, one around cracking down on public consumption of drugs and another about creating a secure facility in Vancouver to detain people with severe mental health and addiction problems.

Fry criticized ABC for pushing a “fear narrative” over the past four years and doing a disservice to the city by perpetuating the idea that “Vancouver is dying and that Vancouver is really broken.” He said he believes a better managed city hall can improve residents’ quality of life and public safety.

Allam said he is running to try to “bring young people back to the City of Vancouver,” aiming to create economic activity and improve front-line services.

Hardwick lamented how Vancouver’s livability has eroded over recent decades, as city hall “lost the plot, instead of focusing on its residents and neighbourhoods, focusing on housing targets that were aspirational and ultimately about revenue streams for the city.”

And Bligh said she rejects the idea that this election is a battle between progressives and conservatives. She said she is focused on winning the support of the “silent majority” of people who work hard, pay their bills, and are “doing everything right but feel that the city is slipping away from them.”

A different poll, also released Friday, conducted by Canada Pulse Insights for CityNews and Omni TV, put Fry at 29 per cent and Sim at 28 per cent among decided voters who said they will definitely vote or have already cast a ballot. That poll, conducted between Sept. 28 and Oct. 6, showed Allam closer to the two front-runners, at 19 per cent, followed by Hardwick at 13 and Bligh at seven.