As of 11 am today, Adriane Carr of the Green Party has officially resigned from her position as a Vancouver city councillor, ending a civic political career that has now spanned 14 years.
This reduces Vancouver City Council’s current makeup to nine members instead of the full complement of 11, including Mayor Ken Sim, and after accounting for the December 2024 resignation of OneCity city councillor Christine Boyle.
On a temporary basis for a few months until after the upcoming by-election this year, it also leaves Green Party city councillor Pete Fry as the only member of the opposition in City Council against the ABC Vancouver-led majority hold in the body — assuming the Green and/or OneCity parties are able to hold onto their seats with newly elected officials.
During this morning’s press conference, shortly before submitting her letter of resignation to the City of Vancouver, Carr expressed a desire to spend more time with family, as well as her growing frustration with working with the ABC-led majority, including the Mayor, over the first two years of the current four-year term ending in November 2026.
“I have lost trust and confidence in the Mayor. In my opinion, some of his actions do not genuinely mesh with his mantra that we are all one team,” said Carr.
She highlighted the Fall 2024 removal of herself and Fry from various external positions representing the City on the board and committees of the Metro Vancouver Regional District. These positions, which also provided supplementary compensation from the regional district, were filled by ABC city councillors.
Carr also asserted that recent conduct in private meetings was the “tipping point” in her decision to resign but was unable to elaborate further due to the policies of in-camera meetings.
Carr was first elected as the Green Party’s first city councillor in 2011. Up until today, Carr was the longest-running sitting Vancouver city councillor.
Over her time in office, she has prioritized climate action and other environmental issues.
Under the second and third terms of Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver-majority between 2011 and 2018, and then the majority formed by an alliance comprised of COPE, Green, and OneCity councillors and Mayor Kennedy Stewart for the term between 2018 and 2022, Carr was able to swiftly advance numerous motions relating to climate action, such as motions relating to opposition against the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, divesting the municipal government from fossil fuels, improving green building designs and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to reduce emissions, and supporting congestion pricing (road tolls) as a regional priority.
In July 2022, under the previous makeup of City Council, Carr’s member motion for the municipal government to participate in environmental activist group West Coast Environmental Law’s “Sue Big Oil” class action lawsuit was approved. But less than a year later, after the civic election, it was reversed by the ABC-led majority in March 2023.
Carr says this decision to reject the City’s funding for the class action lawsuit against major oil companies was a sticking point.
“ABC rejected my attempts to try and modify the budget to include some money to Sue Big Oil. I think that Sue Big Oil is really important because it gets the fossil fuel companies to change,” she said today.
“In one of my motions, I just asked for a penny per taxpayer, $6,600, as a start-up, although all the other municipalities that would join that campaign would be contributing the money they’ve set aside to fund that court case. So it wouldn’t cost the city much. It’s just an absolute commitment to make sure that the polluters pay.”
At the time, Sim argued that such a lawsuit was not pragmatic nor a sound use of public funding. Before reducing the suggested contribution amount, the original motion by Carr in 2023 suggested directing the City to contribute $1 per resident or roughly up to $700,000.
More recently, in November 2024, City Council reversed a July 2024 direction that would have restored the ability to use natural gas for new homes, after some ABC city councillors changed their minds in a rare instance where the ABC-led majority voted differently, against party lines.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that on the issues that really drive me, that drove me to run for office, and have been predominant issues in my life around particularly sustainability and the health of this planet, I can’t make much progress,” said Carr, on part of her driving rationale to leave office in the middle of the current term.
Carr also reflected on the previous City Council led by Mayor Kennedy Stewart, with this previous majority alliance comprised of COPE, Green, OneCity, and Forward Together members being called “dysfunctional,” which contributed to the election of the ABC-led majority. Today, she said she disagrees with this characterization.
“This super-majority ABC Council has convinced me it’s better for democracy to have a mix of parties and councillors who are prepared to collaborate and cooperate with the goal of putting public interest first, instead of a majority and especially a super-majority that really doesn’t have to listen to any other opinions, that has the ability to push through whatever is on their agenda,” said Carr.
“I think the former Mayor, Kennedy Stewart, was dead wrong when he called last term’s council dysfunctional. Okay, we had long meetings, everybody in here knows that. We had long meetings, we had lots and lots of speakers. That’s democracy. It’s involving the public in informing our decisions. That term that was referred to as dysfunctional actually produced a phenomenal amount of good work with different parties collaborating across party lines.”
In the 2011 civic election, Carr narrowly won her city councillor seat for the first time after a recount, earning 48,648 votes — coming just 90 votes ahead of COPE’s Ellen Woodsworth.
While she ranked 10th in the number of votes for City Council in the 2011 civic election, she soared up to first place in the 2014 civic election, winning 74,077 votes.
In the 2018 civic election, she again came up at the top among the city councillor candidates, raking in 69,739 votes, with Fry coming a close second at 61,806 votes.
But in the 2022 civic election, all three non-ABC councillors came in a distant last, filling the eighth, ninth, and 10th city councillor seats, with Carr winning 41,831 seats, Boyle winning 38,465 seats, and Fry winning 37,270 seats.
Prior to civic politics, Carr unsuccessfully ran for federal office twice, as the Green Party of Canada’s MP candidate in 2008 and 2011 for the riding of Vancouver Centre. In the 2000s, she was also the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia.
Although the municipal government has yet to release its plans for running the by-election to fill the city councillor seats vacated by Boyle and now Carr, it is expected to be held sometime in early 2025.
Carr says she plans to campaign for the Green Party’s candidate in the upcoming by-election, who has yet to be selected. Beyond the by-election, she is considering co-authoring a book with her husband, potentially focusing on suing oil companies.
Boyle vacated her seat after the October 2024 provincial election, when she was elected as the MLA for the riding of Vancouver-Little Mountain under the BC NDP. Boyle also holds the cabinet position of the BC Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation.
Carr emphasized the need for the OneCity and Green parties to limit the number of candidates they run in the by-election to avoid competing for the same pool of left-leaning voters.