Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s former chief of staff says he is strongly considering a run for mayor in the October 2026 civic election—a run that would pit him against the very person and party he helped win a landslide victory in the 2022 race.
Kareem Allam said Monday that a committee that includes former elected officials and ex-political staffers has been gauging the level of support he has in the community and found that people would support him in a run.
“I want to run for mayor because I think I can do a better job,” Allam told BIV. “And I want to run for mayor because I love this city and I'm not happy with its direction.”
Allam said he didn’t think it would come as a shock to municipal politics watchers that people want him to be on the ballot in 2026, given his public criticisms of the polices of Sim and his ABC Vancouver colleagues.
He pointed to Sim’s desire to abolish , the efforts to pause investigations by the, big increases in and not allowing any net
Allam was also critical of the city-led action in April 2023 to escalate efforts to dismantle the encampment on East Hastings Street sidewalks, which to a group of non-profit representatives in the Downtown Eastside.
Allam said he promised the group that council would not support the decampment without a housing plan in place, telling Lodestar Media in May 2023 that “they believed me, they trusted me and then it turned out to not be true.”
The veteran political strategist said to show he was serious about his potential run for mayor that he planned to file his name Monday with Elections BC so that he could begin taking donations.
Kevin Falcon, provincial NDP
He wouldn’t say if he would be starting his own party, or joining an existing one, but confirmed he has donated money to OneCity, which has never run a mayoral candidate but elected candidates to council and school board.
Allam is a former BC Liberal who ran Kevin Falcon’s leadership campaign and then joined the provincial NDP before the 2024 election. He is a currently a partner with the Richardson Strategy Group.
Despite his interest in a mayoral run, he said he would step aside if three other people he’s spoken to decide to run. He would only name Green Party Coun. Pete Fry as one of the potential candidates, but was told by Fry that he is not interested in seeking the mayor’s seat
Coun. Rebecca Bligh, who was recently expelled from ABC and now serves as an independent, was not among the three people Allam had in mind. Bligh has told BIV that she is not ruling out a run in 2026, noting in that there is what she described as a vacuum of leadership in Vancouver.
Allam’s interest in running for mayor would not have been imagined when looking back to the fall of 2022 when he and Mike Witherly ran ABC Vancouver’s campaign. The party elected all its candidates, winning majorities on council, school board and park board.
But it was only a few months later, when Allam was serving as Sim’s chief of staff, that he was fired in February 2023. Allam said he was fired without cause and paid a “generous” severance.
He wouldn’t provide further details.
Legal battle
Fast forward to May 2025, and he and longtime municipal politics enthusiast Alex Tsakumis were named in a lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court by Sim. The notice of claim alleges Allam and Tsakumis defamed the mayor in comments related to an alleged impaired driving incident.
In February, BIV reported that the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner released details that quelled rumours that Sim was being investigated for allegedly being impaired while driving during an incident in January 2023.
Sim has ever happened and called for the release of an investigation report to support his position and publicly show that he was not stopped for drinking and driving.
He also wanted the report released to show that the Vancouver Police Department did not “cover up” any investigation, which was part of the rumour and only discredited the force, the mayor said.
“Any allegation that I was driving under the influence is an outright lie,” Sim said at the time. “All this stuff was fabricated. That incident never happened.”
Allam said Monday that because the matter is before the courts that he could not comment on the lawsuit. He said he planned to file a response to Sim’s notice of claim, but emphasized the legal dispute had nothing to do with his consideration of a mayoral run.
“It was all starting to crystallize well before Ken filed his notice of claim in court,” he said. “But once he did that, the number of phone calls I started getting just exponentially increased.”
Added Allam: “I have zero ill will towards Ken. I've never attacked Ken my whole entire life. I've had differences with him on policy. I've had differences about style, and I wish him success as the mayor of Vancouver. We want him to succeed. I want him to succeed, but he's not, and that's it.”
ABC Vancouver byelection defeat
Sim has told BIV that he plans to seek re-election.
In April, ABC Vancouver’s byelection candidates Jaime Stein and Ralph Kaisers finished sixth and seventh in a 13-person race for
Sean Orr of COPE and Lucy Maloney of OneCity were elected.
Asked by reporters about the loss, Sim cited the party’s 94-point plan and how he and his majority have completed more than 80 per cent of the platform planks, including hiring 100 police officers and adding mental health workers to various teams in the city.
“What we wanted to do as well is make sure that we had a united city, where everyone was coming along together,” he said two days after the byelection results.
“Obviously, regardless of how we feel or the accomplishments that we've made, there are people in this city that don't feel that way…so we're taking a really hard look as to why people feel that way and what we can do to be better.”
The next general civic election is October 2026.
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