It was the night of Oct 15, 2022, and members of Vancouver’s left-wing Coalition of Progressive Electors were nursing their wounds in a bar on the east side of the city.
They had just suffered a devastating defeat—dropping to their lowest vote share in two decades, failing to reelect well-known anti-poverty activist Jean Swanson, and electing just one school board trustee, Suzie Mah.
As empty bottles of cheap beer piled up around them, they worried about the incoming ABC administration, which they knew would quickly shed its centrist garb and govern to the hard right, inflicting pain on the poor, homeless, and struggling.
“We’re not going out like this,” Zakir Suleman, a 34-year old COPE organizer in the Downtown East Side, recalled thinking.
He and fellow organizer, Jed Weiss, jumped on stage for the next karaoke set. Soon they were erupting in song to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.”
Originally published by The Breach.
