Veteran civic affairs observer says that over the long term, highhandedness toward citizens can “bite you in the butt.”
by Carol Volkart
It’s been a tough summer for Vancouver residents who think they should have a say in what’s happening in their city.
Bam, bam, bam -- the hits from the ABC-majority council have just kept coming. Bombshell last-minute reports and surprise amendments, rushed through with minimal or no public input, are transforming our city. As people’s attention was focused on holidays and media was at its thinnest, council has been busily at work:
View cones have been gutted, undermining decades of careful planning, based on a week-old report that quickly zipped through council.
A major climate-change policy on natural gas was suddenly reversed on the basis of an out-of-the-blue amendment.
The city’s Integrity Commissioner’s work was frozen after a surprise amendment at the end of a late-July council meeting.
Council moved ahead with the provincially required ban on public hearings for most rezonings, but went even farther than needed, and rushed the process through without public consultation.
With only a week’s notice, council approved a strategy for creating a new Official Development Plan by 2026, even though it lacks the robust public engagement it’s supposed to be based on. Opposing speakers including former TEAM councillor and mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick were ignored.
Council decided behind closed doors to pay a developer $38.5-million for a new market rental apartment building. No explanation of this unusual move was provided.
The city announced that the Broadway Plan, already raising fears of mass demovictions and destruction of some of the city’s best streetscapes, will be turbocharged with further density and more and higher towers if amendments are passed in November.
City Hall’s staff directory was suddenly deleted from the website in late June, hiding the names and titles of the bureaucrats wielding the strings behind the scenes.
ABC’s high-handed dismissal of the basic tenets of democracy – that a government is meant to listen to and represent its citizens -- is beginning to draw attention beyond the usual pro-citizen-engagement circles.
Long-time civic affairs reporter Frances Bula told CBC’s The Early Edition host Stephen Quinn on July 30 that the ABC council reminds her of Vision Vancouver, with its dismissive attitude to opposition. But its ad hoc style is something new.
“There’s something different about this mayor and council; the way they just pop up with things and there’s no suggestion like, ‘Let’s get staff to look at this, let’s do a little bit of consultation’ or anything. It’s just ‘No, let’s get rid of view cones, let’s get rid of the park board, let’s stop the work of the integrity commissioner for now.’”
Decisions like the reversal on natural gas, which Bula said will cause a major disruption in the development industry, came in a surprise amendment during a routine update on the city’s climate policy.
“And all of a sudden there’s this big major thing. Councillor Brian Montague just kind of brought in an amendment saying, ‘Oh, by the way, let’s get rid of the natural gas current rule so they can put it in if they want.’. . .Something like that, you know that it causes a lot of uproar in the development community when you zigzag back and forth like that.”
Council’s decision on the park board was similar, Bula said. “It was just like, ‘We’ve come up with this plan; we’re getting rid of the park board,’” without first hashing out the pros and cons in a public conversation.
“You get the sense that there’s this background conversation going on, not even necessarily with the councillors, with other people, who we don’t know who they are, and then there’s just an announcement.”
Bula said she sees council’s approach as typical of people from the business world. “They’re used to making these unilateral decisions; they don’t have any obligation to consult on what Rosemary Rocksalt bagels [a business founded by Mayor Ken Sim] should be doing. They’re just not used to it. And they don’t get that that’s part of the job.”
So, Quinn asked, “should people be concerned about the democratic process and what’s happening at council?”
“I think they are,” replied Bula, adding, “It’s not going to work well. That’s what happened with Vision Vancouver. People got really sick of that attitude of Vision Vancouver that we can do whatever we want and it doesn’t matter because we got all these votes and the rest of you can go pee up a rope.”
While ABC still has general support, she said, eventually people tire of being dismissed.
“The public starts to react against that, where they feel like it’s just a little too high-handed. . . . So it’s going to take awhile. But eventually that kind of thing does bite you in the butt.”
In a July 29 interview with Quinn on the same issue, former ABC, now-independent park board commissioner Laura Christensen said that when faced with opposition, ABC’s pattern “from day one” has been to either stifle it or to get rid of the opponents.
She experienced that first-hand on the park board: “When we stood up to him [Ken Sim] about some things he wanted to get done, he planned to abolish us.” (Christensen and two others elected with ABC left the party and became independents after Sim suddenly announced in late 2023 that he’d ask the province to change the city charter so the park board can be abolished and its responsibilities shifted to council.)
Christensen said the freeze on the work of the Integrity Commissioner “was a real surprise to everybody” and raises questions of why. “It really seems like they’re trying to hide something by doing that, and it’s not the transparent, accountable governance that ABC ran on.”
The last-minute natural gas reversal follows a similar pattern – there was no public notice and no chance for input, she said. Nor, she said, were there any media announcements afterwards or any press releases. “They’re really hiding these decisions. They’re putting them at the last meeting of the summer when people aren’t really paying attention to politics and public meetings.”
The ABC council’s lack of transparency and failure to consult with the public is a constant theme of organizations-- such as the CityHallWatch Media Foundation and the Coalition of Vancouver Neighbourhoods -- that track City Hall closely.
In its July 9 letter to council opposing the gutting of view cones, for example, the coalition noted the report “is being brought forward in the middle of the summer with no meaningful advanced public process,” and urged council to refer the report back to staff for “further public consultation and a proper process.”
In its same-day letter on the removal of public hearings, the coalition said this is being done “without ANY advanced public consultation process and only within days of posting them online. . . . “We find the current schedule for local and city-wide policy changes to be completely unrealistic and unreasonable.”
Transparency? Consultation with citizens?
How amazing to go back to ABC’s 2022 election platform and read that it actually had a category called “transparency, accountability and good government.”
It included such things as a 50% reduction in FOI fees, enhanced whistleblower protections, and asking the province to oversee a lobbyist registry. It promised to publish line-item budgets for the last five years and for the years ahead, limit partisan activity from mayoral office staff, ban ads not directly related to “public safety, community engagement, or legislative requirements,” stop erratic directions to staff on technical matters, streamline government collaboration, and establish a satellite City Hall office in Chinatown.
True, it never promised to consult with citizens or to avoid blindsiding them with last-minute, unpublicized measures that would dramatically change their city. The omission should have been a red flag, but who could have known that this fundamental underpinning of democracy needed to be written down?
By comparison, TEAM for a Livable Vancouver’s 2022 policy platform made it clear that consultation with citizens and neighbourhoods was central to its philosophy.
“We believe that neighbourhood-based planning, consultation, and collaboration should form the heart of the City’s operations, policies, and future planning,” it said.
“The integrity, transparency, and robustness of this democratic, people-focused process is the foundation upon which resilient, inclusive neighbourhoods are built. . . . It is incumbent upon the Mayor, Council, and City Staff to engage with people from across the City through this process to create a safe, prosperous, and livable city for all Vancouverites.”
Among TEAM’s proposals: City-supported neighbourhood organizations so residents and local businesses could advocate for their interests; limiting in-camera meetings to only when secrecy is truly essential; publishing and publicizing materials one month before matters go to council so people have a chance to react; creating a lobbyist registry, and exploring alternative models of local government.
At the time, TEAM was seeking to reverse years of citizen-squelching governance by Vision Vancouver and former mayor Kennedy Stewart’s council; it had no idea that what was ahead would be even worse.
With two years to go before the next civic election in 2026, TEAM is working hard toward forming a new Vancouver City Council that believes that yes, residents should have a say in what’s happening in their city.
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