Stewart, as underwhelming as he was, got booted out for not making unhoused people in the Downtown Eastside disappear.
Well, that, and the VPD's "union" backing Sim and ABC late in the election campaign, and also with the help of an enormous propaganda push aimed at convincing Vancouverites that there was some serious wave of "random attacks" happeningโ
But really, throughout the Vancouver, it's pretty common for people to drop the pretense of even being liberal, let alone "progressive", when it comes to unhoused people. "reopen the old mental asylum and chuck them back in there" is a pretty common take, and it's more often for people to just want them to be thrown in actual prisons.
Like, faux progressivism is basically the regional sport for the whole South Coast and the southern half of Vancouver Island, but it's just unhinged when it comes to.
You know.
The same people who've endured a decade of increasingly toxic drugs, several decades of the most intense edge of housing unaffordability, Pickton and undoubtedly other serial killers who haven't been caught, being violently expelled from the West End in the early '80s, and more.