Vancouver’s 2026 Budget: A Chilling Repeat of 2001 😬📉💔
When Vancouver City Council passed its 2026 budget — a property tax freeze paired with $50 million more for police 🚓💰 — so many of us felt an immediate jolt of déjà vu.
Because we’ve seen this before.
We lived this before.
This is Gordon Campbell 2001 all over again — and it’s terrifying. 😢
Austerity Repackaged as “Zero Means Zero” 🎁➡️💣
Back in 2001, Gordon Campbell promised tax cuts ✂️ — and delivered them by gutting social services, slashing ministries, and leaving vulnerable people stranded with nowhere to turn.
- Women’s centres closed 🚪
- Mental health supports cut 🧠💔
- Housing programs gutted 🏚️
- Environmental protections trashed 🌲❌
- Legal aid slashed ⚖️
- Thousands of workers laid off 📉
The suffering that followed was REAL.
We remember. We survive with scars.
And now, Vancouver is being pushed down that same road again. 😟
Ken Sim’s 2026 Budget: Same Playbook, New Packaging 📘➡️📗
The city’s “Zero Means Zero” tax freeze sounds great on a flyer… but it comes with over $120 million in cuts to the very services that keep a city alive.
Here’s what’s losing funding:
- 🎨 Arts & Culture — cut
- 🌍 Planning, Urban Design & Sustainability — cut
- 🧡 Community Services — cut
- 🛠️ Facilities & infrastructure care — cut
- 🧱 Climate and equity programs — cut
- 🧑🔧 Up to 400 city workers — gone
Meanwhile?
🚨 Police budget gets +$50 million.
It’s the exact same pattern we lived through in 2001:
Defund care → Fund control.
Shrink community → Expand enforcement.
And it never ends well.
Who Suffers When Budgets Look Like This? 😔👵👩🦽🧑🧒
The same people who always suffer under austerity:
- Renters struggling to stay afloat 🏠💸
- Low-income workers and families 🍽️
- Disabled people 👩🦽
- Seniors on fixed incomes 👵
- Indigenous communities 🧡
- Kids and teens who rely on community centres 🧒🎭
- Artists and cultural workers 🎨
- City employees trying to keep services running 🧑🔧
When we cut planning, housing gets worse.
When we cut sustainability, our future dims.
When we cut community services, people fall through the cracks.
When we add more policing, inequality deepens. 🚓➡️💔
A Budget Is a Moral Document 📝❤️
Budgets show who we prioritize… and who we are willing to sacrifice.
In 2001, British Columbia sacrificed the vulnerable.
In 2026, Vancouver is risking the same.
Let’s be honest: a 23-page budget (down from 373 pages last year) is not transparency.
It’s a red flag. 🚩
This city is making choices that will reshape the next decade — and not in a good way.
We Lived the Consequences Before… and Vancouver Is Going Dark Again 🥺🌑
Those of us who lived through the early 2000s remember the harm, the fear, the closures, the homelessness explosion, the poverty, the chaos, the unraveling of community and environmental protections.
We watched services disappear.
We watched neighbours struggle.
We watched inequality balloon.
We watched the province go dark. 🌑
Now?
Vancouver is dimming the lights again.
And we’re terrified because we KNOW how this story ends.
Unless people speak up, organize, and demand better, we’re headed straight toward another era of cuts, suffering, and preventable human pain.
History is warning us.
Will anyone listen? 😢🙏
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