Leaked Footage Reveals Mayor Ken Sim Lying To Chinese-Language Media About Sean Orr
“Ken Sim Lies, People Die.”
Feb. 26, 2026
VANCOUVER, BC – In new footage recorded earlier this month, Ken Sim spread blatant lies about Councillor Orr by claiming that he was “handing out free illegal drugs on Christmas Day to people on the streets” earlier this month to Chinese-language media.
These comments by ABC’s Mayor Ken Sim are a clear violation of the City’s Code of Conduct for elected officials, and may constitute a violation of the Canadian Criminal Code, section 298.1.
On Christmas Day, Sean Orr was visiting family for the holidays on the Sunshine Coast.
“They’re not sorry they did it, they’re sorry they got caught,” said COPE Co-Chair Sam Smart. “This is a strategy that far-right parties are using around the world to divide people, spread disinformation about their opponents, and pass the agendas of the super-rich.”
“This disgraceful, harmful, and unethical behaviour should not be tolerated from any elected official, let alone the Mayor of Canada’s third-largest city,” said COPE Co-Chair Nate Stanley. “This two-faced strategy from Sim and his ABC team is dividing people and pitting communities against each other. It is unacceptable.”
On Wednesday, it was revealed that ABC Councillor Lenny Zhou spread nearly identical lies in a Mandarin-language WeChat video, accusing “opposition councillors” of “handing out drugs before Christmas.”
On Wednesday, all four opposition City Councillors - Sean Orr, Rebecca Bligh, Pete Fry, Lucy Maloney - held a press conference exposing this divisive and two-faced political strategy, causing Zhou to apologize. In response to media queries about Zhou’s comments, Mayor Ken Sim thanked Zhou for “taking responsibility for sharing information that was not accurate.”
We now know that Sim himself was a source of the disinformation Zhou repeated. In fact, in the audio obtained by Canadian Press, Zhou can be heard directly translating the lie for him into Chinese.
“Lies like this are being actively spread by the far-right to create moral panics for their own election campaigns,” said COPE City Councillor Sean Orr, “The job of a Mayor should be to bring people together, not divide people with disinformation and lies.”
In 2025, according to the B.C. Coroners Office, 314 people died in Vancouver due to the toxic unregulated drug supply.
Harm reduction programs that save lives have been endorsed by the Canadian Supreme Court, Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, the Canadian Association of Social Workers, the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, the Canadian Nurses Association, the 2021 Health Canada Expert Task Force of Substance Use, the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, and the City of Vancouver.
ABC Vancouver endorsed harm reduction programs in their 2022 platform.
Lenny Zhou, on Twitter in February of 2024 said: “It's disheartening to see some elected officials & community leaders denying harm reduction for their political gains.”
COPE will always stand up for people’s lives, integrity, and telling the truth.
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CONTACT:
Sean Orr, COPE
sean@copevancouver.ca
cope@copevancouver.ca