A small controversy erupted last month when it was revealed that Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim transformed a City Hall meeting room into his own personal gym. Sim’s “Mojo Dojo Casa House,” or the “Ken Gym,” was refitted with a new Peloton bike (starting price $1,845.00 CAD), free weights and a plyometrics bar. When Councilor Pete Fry found the door to Sim’s gym unlocked, he photographed the room and posted the images on X (formerly Twitter). The before-and-after shows City Hall’s oak walls and carpeted floors giving way to what resembles a frat boy’s neglected living room.
This minor controversy might seem insignificant if it hadn’t followed on the heels of Sim’s hollowing out of Vancouver’s Park Board and his recent call for its dissolution. The Park Board runs dozens of well-loved public gyms across Vancouver. In a context of impending cuts, Sim’s private gym hit a public nerve.
Add to this the indefinite closure of the widely revered Kits Pool, after municipal workers found that the pool was leaking 30,000 litres of water per hour (“not a typo”). As a result of increased public pressure over the Kits pool – a campaign ratcheted up by the gym affair – Sim announced that council would begrudgingly fund the pool’s repairs. Unable to charm his way out of this particular embarrassment, the Mayor was forced to open the City’s wallet for something besides police and park rangers, even if the measures falls in the too little, too late category.
Does this mark a pause in Sim’s approach of austerity for the City’s community centres, gyms and horticulture departments? Not likely.
Ken Sim likes to talk about swagger. A lot. He talks about swagger so much you may be tempted to concede that it is his only original idea – however, it turns out New York City Mayor Eric Adams debuted it as a catchphrase in 2022. Nevertheless, Mayor Sim has gotten considerable mileage from the seven-letter word. In his first annual “State of the City” address to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, Ken Sim declared: “I envision a Vancouver in the not-so-distant future, that is super exciting. A Vancouver with a renewed swagger.” Interestingly, another news coverage reports Sim said “A mayor with a renewed swagger” [emphasis mine] – the narcissistic slippage here is telling, though both phrases are inane in equal parts.
Whatever the phrase may mean, Sim has made it clear that swagger – the renewal of swagger – is at the heart of his political program for Vancouver. Swagger is his raison d’etat. We are living in the making of Sim’s world; a Vancouver/mayor that struggles to be re-swaggered. As such, the morbid symptoms of this radical transformation must be diagnosed and studied.
If the reporting on the gym affair has revealed anything that we didn’t already know about the Mayor, it is, apparently, that he can read. The clue: as Sim yuks it up with journalists huddled in his public-private man cave, the camera captures a slim, black volume lying conspicuously on his desk. It is The Book of Swagger: People, Places, and Things That Have Swagger — And Some That Don’t! (2023).
Like a favorite pocket version of the Bible or Mao’s little red book, this tome is at the heart of Sim’s political thought and program. Despite being listed at $22.95 CAD on Indigo.ca it appears the paper edition is tragically out of print. In lieu of an analysis of the text, let us consider the promotional copy:
Discover Your Swagger
Start trends instead of following trends.
Be more prosperous and successful.
Travel to exotic places.
Drive a snappier car.
Wine and dine in swank restaurants.
Fly on airlines that exhibit elegance.
Adopt a more refined taste for food.
Exhibit smartness in personal style.
Do sensational things others won’t do.
Live your life with artistry and flair.
It does not require a close reading to reveal that this is one of those best-selling nothing books – a book of empty ideas for aspiring middle managers with fittingly empty heads. Although the book and the notion of swagger contain no meaning or substance to be interpreted, they are emblematic of how the Mayor thinks – or more accurately doesn’t think.
Hearing the Mayor talk about vibes and swagger is as embarrassing as it sounds. If the Mayor has swagger it is the fumbling energy of a middle-aged dad standing in the kitchen of a high school party, desperately trying to fit in, thinking he can roll with the teenagers by dropping his pet word (swagger) in every second sentence, or telling anyone who drifts into earshot that the Rolling Stones are coming to town.
In the absence of content, we can understand Sim’s political non-thinking via another favoured phrase in his limited lexicon: ‘vibes’. In a short amount of time, the ABC-dominated council has effectively deadened political discourse in Vancouver, replacing debate and civic engagement with a kind of governance-by-tweet. Instead, citizens of Vancouver are entreated to royal decrees issued from City Hall, usually in the form of 2m20s videos on ‘X’ announcing new condo developments.
An unserious mayor makes for unserious politics. Yes, it can be fun to laugh at a Mayor dressed as the village idiot. In some cases it is imaginable that it would be cute to have such a Mayor, with a big pair of safety scissors at a ribbon-cutting, etc. It’s less funny when you tally up what he’s actually done as Mayor. Let’s try that now.
So far, Ken Sim has:
✓ Hired 100 cops;
✓ Realized he has hired 100 cops and doesn’t have the money in the budget for anything else;
✓ Returned the $3.8 million from the ‘Empty Homes Tax’ to developers for no good reason whatsoever;
✓ Cancelled the Britannia Community Plan because it no longer has the money to go through with the project because the city has hired 100 cops and canceled the ‘Empty Homes Tax’;
✓ Voted to cut the City of Vancouver’s commitment to pay all employees a “living wage” (because nothing says ‘good vibes’ like underpaying your employees);
✓ Scrapped the social housing commitment at Little Mountain.
The longer we continue to treat Ken Sim unseriously – as his on-air antics invite us to do – we eventually forget that he sits atop the executive of the ruling class. Just because the Mayor might be less than genius, this doesn’t mean he can’t get anything done if we are willing to factor in the ABC coterie and proxy “advisors.” The latter was evident early in Sim’s tenure when he announced that he will open up the City’s books to a gang of “volunteer” consultants. Like welcoming foxes into the henhouse, Sim’s friends from Deloitte have wasted no time in taking a red pen to the City’s assets – naming rights to parks and pools are just the beginning of Vancouver’s public fire sale.
Sim’s vibe-guy supremacy has already done its work. Despite ABC’s track record of public sell-offs and now open corruption, Vancouver’s municipal left and center-left parties remain on the margins. For COPE and the rest of the municipal left, Sim-gym-gate should be low-hanging fruit.
What remains of the loyal opposition on City Council is dismal. Consider again Green Party Councillor Pete Fry, our heroic whistleblower. Despite his bombshell discovery of Sim’s taxpayer-funded luxury chill zone, all that Fry could muster in critique was that he didn’t get invited to hang out. Both Fry and Boyle were shockingly unable to map how the Sim Gym is symptomatic of a larger issue, namely the systematic privatization of City and Park Board assets.
That there has been little civil society resistance to this open abandonment of democratic values is also in fact by design. Only months into office, ABC Councillors pushed through a policy that requires City-funded bodies to maintain “respectful communications” with civic officials or otherwise face defunding. For all their chest-thumping swagger, the ABC party’s skin is rather thin.
For now, we are living at a time when organized political resistance has been replaced by mildly counter-hegemonic tweets. In times as dumb as these, Vancouverites are left to hope that the right ‘Seabus meme’ will take down the empire. It’s Ken Sim’s city – we’re just living in it.