Progress Vancouver has been deregistered as a political party and its candidates have been disqualified from running in local elections until after the 2026 municipal vote, Elections BC announced Tuesday.
In a press release, Elections BC says the civic party failed to meet campaign financing disclosure requirements. The party and six of their candidates missed the initial deadline of Jan. 13, but did file by the late deadline of Feb. 13. However, Elections BC says the report from Progress Vancouver did not fulfill the legal requirements.
"The report did not provide information about the organization’s campaign finances, including campaign contribution details and campaign-period expenses attributed to specific candidates," says Elections BC in the release, noting the report disclosed "several apparent violations" of campaign financing rules.
Among them:
- a non-permissible loan of $50,000,
- contributions without reporting the required information (missing or incomplete contributor names and addresses),
- prohibited campaign contributions from outside British Columbia, and
- contributions more than the annual campaign contribution limit.
Elections BC notes that since March 10 they've attempted multiple times to contact the municipal political party to rectify the issue.
"Despite this Progress Vancouver did not provide a supplementary report that addressed the legislated reporting deficiencies by the compliance deadline," states the release.
As such, candidates, including mayoral candidate Mark Marissen (and former premier Christy Clark's ex-husband) and former NDP MLA candidate Morgane Oger, can't put their name on the ballot until after the next civic election in 2026. The remaining candidates are:
- Mauro Francis
- Marie Noelle Rosa
- May He
- David Chin
- Asha Hayer
- Jonah Gonzales
Six of the candidates were running for city council spots while Gonzales was running in the region.
In the 2022 election, Marissen received about 3.5 per cent of the vote, finishing fourth overall. Hayer performed the best of the city councillor candidates, collecting 13,107 votes.
Progress Vancouver is a relatively new party; they were founded in 2018 as Yes Vancouver. In their first election that year, Hector Bremer ran for mayor.
Vancouver Is Awesome has reached out to Progress Vancouver and Marissen's team for comment and will update this story if they call back.
