Vancouver Mayor-elect Ken Sim unclear about mental health nurse hiring details

Vancouver Mayor-elect Ken Sim has made a big promise to address crime in the city, but some details around when locals will see it become reality — and how — remain unclear.

During his campaign, Sim promised the hiring of 100 new mental health nurses to work alongside Vancouver Police officers.

But in speaking to the media Monday, just days after he was elected, the incoming mayor could not provide much clarity around who would actually hire the nurses and when they would come in.

“What we’ll do is we’ll provide the funding and the resources. Sorry, I’m a chartered accountant, so when you’re asking me that question I’m getting really technical. Are they hired by this legal entity or that legal entity? Those are details that we will leave to the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Police Department, but we have to pull away from this,” he said in response to a CityNews question.

“Technically, I’m not too sure. The point is, the substance of it, is they are working together. That’s what we’re going to do. We want to make sure that we hire 100 police officers and 100 mental health nurses and they work together,” Sim explained.

Vancouver’s next mayor Ken Sim says regardless of who is technically employing these 100 mental health nurses, it will be the City of Vancouver paying for this. Listen for more @CityNewsVAN https://t.co/IRtTmL0DG5 https://t.co/UmlKwukKXv

— Martin MacMahon (@martinmacmahon) October 17, 2022

“At the end of the day, as mayor and council, what we do is we paint the vision and we lend our support. It’s really up to the VPD to decide how they operationalize it. So, technically, who hires whom, I’ll leave that up to the VPD, but we already have a precedent of this, right? We have Car 87 — it’s a collaboration between Coastal Health and the VPD.”

Sim defeated incumbent Kennedy Stewart in the election Saturday. Sim’s newly created ABC Vancouver slate also saw a landslide victory, with every candidate it ran elected to office.

However, Sim’s campaign did not go without controversy. The Vancouver Police Union broke tradition to endorse him and his party, with many criticizing the move amid discussions about policing and politics.

Going hand-in-hand with his promise of additional mental health officers is the hiring of 100 new VPD officers, a process he believes will start within the year.

Funding for new nurses, officers in Vancouver

Sim says the “size of the investment” into these additional officers and mental health nurses will amount to “less than one per cent” of the overall operating and capital budget, which he adds is “over $2 billion.”

The funding, he notes, will come from “reprioritization.”

“What we’re going to do when we’re in office is we are going to go line by line on those financial statements and we’re going to see where we can reprioritize. But I want to be very clear, and we said this during the election, we’re going to maintain all the current service levels. We’re just going to look for those things that are discretionary that we don’t necessarily have to — we can make a better choice,” the mayor-elect explained, pointing to some decisions made by the current administration as examples.

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Amid an affordability crisis in Vancouver and beyond, Sim continues to promise that taxes will not increase to fund the new officers or nurses.

“We have to go through all the financial statement. We 100 per cent agree with that: we are going through an affordability crisis and rates of property tax increases of six, eight, 10 per cent are not sustainable,” he explained.

“We are also going through a safety crisis. When you have four random assaults on individuals every single day, 575 per cent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, 36 per cent increase in assaults, we don’t even know where property crimes are anymore because people aren’t even reporting them. We have to get a handle on that as well, and these are the pragmatic choices that we’re going to be making when we’re in office.”

Sim will be officially sworn in as Vancouver’s new mayor next month.