Colleen Hardwick Is Running for Mayor Again

Colleen Hardwick’s single-family home is part of Vancouver history.

The Kits Point house was purchased by her parents in the early 1980s. Hardwick, a third-generation Vancouverite, purchased it from her mother’s estate in the 1990s.

Yet it retains the look of a house firmly rooted in mid-20th-century architecture and interior design — something that feels like it’s disappearing in Vancouver’s near-constant state of multi-unit residential redevelopment.

Hardwick’s father, urban geography academic Walter Hardwick, sat on Vancouver city council from 1968 to 1974 under the TEAM municipal party. Today he’s most famous for helping turn False Creek South from a swampy industrial zone into a mixed residential and commercial neighbourhood, with low-rise strata, rental and co-op buildings.

“I literally grew up with urban land economics at the dinner table, because my dad taught urban geography” at the University of British Columbia, Hardwick said in a mid-May interview with The Tyee at her home.

Initially the younger Hardwick followed in her father’s footsteps, pursuing an undergraduate degree in urban geography at UBC. But Hardwick took a detour into local film and television production from the 1980s to the early 2000s, working on projects starring the likes of David Bowie, Reese Witherspoon, Mark Wahlberg and Dennis Miller.

Hardwick raised her own children in the Kits Point home. Today she and her husband, actor Garry Chalk, live on the upper floors of the house. The basement suite is occupied by one of Hardwick’s daughters, her son-in-law, two grandchildren and their dog, Bear.

Urban planning is still a household topic of discussion, because Hardwick is once again running for mayor.

A city councillor from 2018 until 2022, Hardwick was initially a member of the Non-Partisan Association, better known as NPA. But in 2021 she and fellow NPA councillors Sarah Kirby-Yung and Lisa Dominato left the party to sit as independents.

Hardwick developed a reputation on council of voting against new housing developments. She repeatedly asked city staff to provide data supporting the city’s housing targets — data that Hardwick is still waiting for today.

Hardwick is also a stickler for what she considers staying within a municipality’s jurisdiction, even if the province and federal government aren’t fulfilling their responsibilities regarding housing, transit or reconciliation with First Nations.

In 2022, Hardwick revived her father’s party, now called TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, and ran for mayor. She pledged to stop residential upzoning and end the city’s dependence on community amenity contributions, or CACs, from developers. She’s also promised to crunch the numbers on how many homes Vancouver actually needs. Then, as now, Hardwick maintains that residential towers are bad for residents’ mental health.

In 2022, Harwick placed third behind incumbent Kennedy Stewart and his successor, current mayor Ken Sim. Undeterred, Hardwick is running for mayor again this fall with TEAM.

“I’m doing this because I feel a deep sense of responsibility to apply substantial background knowledge and experience in this area,” she said, adding she isn’t aware of any other mayoral candidates who understand the history and context of Vancouver urban planning like she does.

“My objective is to course correct and to recover balance for the city in a sustainable way for future generations.”

When The Tyee met Hardwick at her home in mid-May, the dining room wasn’t available for urban planning discussions like she used to have with her dad. All available space was taken up by outerwear and hallway furniture to accommodate an expected carpet cleaner.

Instead we sat in her home office just across the hall. A small room lit up by a big window, the space feels even more cramped by the shelves upon shelves of urban planning, filmmaking and Vancouver history books, not to mention the stacks of file folder boxes, some with papers dating back to her time on council.

Candy, Hardwick’s new golden-hued puppy, curls up in the crook of her arm. It’s where the pup will stay for the duration of our hour-plus interview. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Everyone has their own version of what kind of city Vancouver is. What kind of city is it to you?

Colleen Hardwick: Well, it’s my hometown. I was born and raised here, as were both my parents. My grandparents came here as children with my great-grandparents, always to seek out a better life, jobs and opportunity. That’s why people generally move to new places. They don’t leave where they’re from because things are good there.

Vancouver exists because it was the terminus of the railway, the port to the Pacific. And it grew off the back of natural resource extraction industries: forestry, fisheries, mining. But we’ve seen a marked shift over the last 40 years since Expo 86, from resource-based to real-estate-based economy.

Now I have two grandchildren living here, an…