As an activist, Pete Fry has focused mostly on environmental and urban-planning issues.

As a newly elected city councillor, Fry now finds himself someone who will be representing Vancouver’s racial diversity as well.

In a place where more than half the residents are visible minorities (meaning persons other than whites and Indigenous), the Green Party politician will be the closest embodiment of a person of colour at City Hall.

In the October 20 civic election, voters chose eight women and two men for council. Except for Fry, who describes himself as a “person of mixed race”, all of them are white.

“I do see myself in a position where I’m obviously more responsible,” Fry told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview Tuesday (October 23).

Fry knows that he’s expected to be a voice for the city’s diverse cultures.

“I’ve already had people from communities reach out to me and say, ‘You have to speak for us now. You have to be our representative, in many respects. We want you to remember us,’ ” Fry said.

Fry is also acutely aware of limitations that were shaped by his personal circumstances.

“I can appreciate how my mixed heritage bestows me with the role and responsibility of the councillor to represent the diversity of our city,” he said.

However, Fry also noted that his light-brown skin, “very white Anglo-Saxon name”, and “ethnic ambiguity” don’t place him in a situation to “share the same lived experience as someone with darker skin or a name not native to the English tongue”.

Fry was born in Ireland. His father is British, and his mother is originally from the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. His parents met in Dublin, where they were studying at the time.

He was a toddler when the family came to Canada, and the prime minister then was Pierre Trudeau.

“This is why my mom is such a hard-core Liberal,” Fry said, referring to Hedy Fry, the longest-serving female member of Parliament and the representative for Vancouver Centre.

As Fry put it, he grew up in Canada as an English-speaking and “able-bodied cis[gender] male” who was “imbued with the cultural norms and contexts of the West Coast”.

“I can’t speak to the lived experience of a queer black man or a Muslim woman or an Indigenous elder,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that our framing of diversity reflects actual diversity and intersectionality.”

According to Fry, he intends to ensure that this approach is reflected as the new council looks at policies and renews advisory committees.

The city currently has a volunteer-based cultural-communities advisory committee whose mandate is to inform council about ways of enhancing the inclusion of such communities in the city’s life.

Based on the 2016 census, Vancouver has the largest number of visible-minority members in B.C.

A total of 319,005 Vancouverites identify as members of ethnic groups, representing 51.6 percent of the population. Of these, the biggest communities are Chinese, at 167,180; South Asians, at 37,130; and Filipinos, at 36,460.

As to why the results of the last election did not mirror the city’s diversity, Fry has his own opinion.

“I do want to think that Vancouverites in general are progressive enough that it wasn’t just…[that] they weren’t voting for ethnic candidates,” Fry said. “I think it was largely luck of the draw and how the campaigns ran.”