Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.

When former Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart wrote a whole book on how drugs were decriminalized in the city and province—something he personally helped along with his work at city hall—the ending was pretty triumphant.

Decrim: How We Decriminalized Drugs in British Columbia was published in 2023 and it even had a chapter entitled “Haters” in which Stewart took shots at his critics. But any sequel would be more in the vein of The Empire Strikes Back, at least plot-wise.

Possession of small amounts of illegal drugs was officially decriminalized in the province through a three-year pilot program that began in January 2023. Earlier this year, after political tides had shifted, the ruling BC NDP announced that they would not be renewing the program.

Asked if he was disappointed in the decision, Stewart doesn’t mince words.

“Yeah, you’re right about that, but it came much earlier than the cancellation,” he tells the Straight over the phone. “It came when the province decided to just ram it through. We had been working for a long time at the local level—with the chief of police, with the Indigenous nations, with the drug-using community, and with federal officials—to craft a Vancouver-only decrim policy. Everyone had signed off on it. The province for some reason took over and just frankly blew it. That’s where the disappointment comes from.”

Stewart says that the province didn’t consult with the First Nations groups and didn’t have the RCMP aboard.

“Vancouver was so well-suited for it—it was unanimously supported by council, and remember my council was so fractured,” he recalls. “[Former minister of mental health and addictions] Judy Darcy, if you read her book, she was totally overwhelmed with this thing. And then [her successor] Sheila Malcomson was really sent on a mission to disrupt this. It’s a complete policy disaster in a bunch of ways—so many people are still dying, and they haven’t addressed much of it.”

Politically, the issue of decriminalizing possession of illegal drugs has become somewhat poisonous, with parties of all stripes raging about drug use in the streets of Vancouver.

“That’s what happens when you have these self-inflicted policy disasters—they can have ripple effects,” says Stewart, who is currently an associate professor at SFU’s School of Public Policy. “It’s going to take a while for this to calm down. Right now we’re in hysteria, and it’s not based on science or anything. It’s because the province really shit the bed here. And they have no answers now. They say their answer is involuntary care. They’re lying about that… It’s going to cost them billions of dollars. Their actual solution is to let people die.”

Asked for comment, the Ministry of Health said that “no one solution will end this crisis” and that the province is expanding mental health and substance use care with a range of supports across the spectrum.

Stewart has never been particularly shy to say what he thinks, and four years on the sidelines of politics has got him thinking a lot about what he might do if he were to take the mayor’s chair again. He hasn’t ruled out running in the October municipal election yet, even as the number of candidates seemingly increases every week.

He says he’s been fielding calls from staffers in Mark Carney’s Liberal government that have asked him about running.

“I think it’s because [Vancouver’s current municipal] administration cannot work with the federal government,” he says about Ken Sim’s ruling ABC Vancouver party. “[CBC reporter] Justin McElroy used to tease me that I was the dealmaker in chief or whatever, but I was able to secure us through COVID a billion dollars for housing in the city. Now you’re seeing housing collapse, and the mayor is completely asleep at the switch. He doesn’t return phone calls, he doesn’t have task forces. He doesn’t do anything. He’s invisible. He’s trying to sell his bitcoin, and that’s it.”

Of course, there are going to be other challengers in the mayoral race. Green Party councillor Pete Fry and OneCity’s William Azaroff are primed to compete for the left-of-centre vote.

Meanwhile, Sim, the Vancouver Liberals’ Kareem Allam, Vote Vancouver’s Rebecca Bligh, and TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick seem set to jockey in the middle. Azaroff in particular seems to be the Stewart stand-in of this coming election, as Stewart endorsed OneCity candidates during the 2018 election when he ran as an independent and won. But the former mayor thinks he has the edge in experience there.

“I spent 11 years in political office; I doubt that guy’s even visited the legislature. There’s a pretty big difference,” Stewart says of Azaroff, the CEO of nonprofit Brightside Homes. “I worked with mayors and premiers across the country to help our city survive the worst disaster it’s ever had, COVID. And he’s negotiated some housing agreements.”

Housing was an important part of Stewart’s platform when he was elected mayor, and it would remain as such, even if his tactics might be different this time around.

“We have to make some changes to get more investment here,” he says. “We need to revisit funding programs and immediately get non- and for-profit housing developers together and build a task force. Otherwise, our economy is built on real estate, and everything has stopped. The feds want someone who can land the deals—they have the money, they need to know the deals will land. I know that’s why I’m getting calls about this.”

In any case, Stewart thinks he has time before he has to make a decision. He knows he will run as an independent if he does decide to run, and with the election not until October, he’ll be waiting in the wings for some time.

“I’ve spoken to most of the mayoral candidates,” Stewart says. “I said, ‘Why are you out so early? Ken Sim is sitting on $2 million, and once he figures out who the main challenger is, he’s going to pound the crap out of them.’ The billboards will start going up, radio ads with nefarious things. And worse still, the parties on the left are already attacking each other. They’re going to keep hurting each other, and whoever ends up emerging will be weakened running into a $2 million smear campaign.”

To be fair, Stewart knows a thing or two about this. In the 2022 campaign, Sim claimed multiple times that Stewart was going to implement a road tax if re-elected. Stewart denied that allegation.

Asked if he has any regrets during his time in office, Stewart hesitates a bit. He mentions getting cornered by Global News on a question about street safety, and wishes that he had put forward a bill on running Vancouver’s municipal elections with a ward system instead of the current at-large system, even if it likely wouldn’t have passed. But he does ultimately reflect on what might have been different if he had been out there a bit more.

“I’m not a showy kind of guy,” he says. “I’m a practical, let’s get this done kind of person. I guess I could have been a little more showy; I could have done a bit more of that type of thing. But it’s not really in my nature.”