How Vancouver Residents Are Losing Their Voices

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is the only civic party to protest Bills 13 and 15

by Carol Volkart

Vancouverites from an earlier era of city planning who recall working with neighbours and city officials to shape the future of their communities may be surprised to learn who’ll be doing that job in the years to come.

Under Bills 13 and 15, both expected to be passed this month, the provincial government would assume control over virtually every aspect of municipal planning.

Bill 13 gives the province power over zoning, building permits, affordable housing, sign bylaws and even landscaping requirements. It changes the Vancouver Charter, once the signifier of the city’s autonomy, so any local rule “has no effect” if it doesn’t align with provincial rules.

Bill 15 gives the province control over “provincially significant” infrastructure projects, including transit-oriented developments (TODs), which cover much of Vancouver.  As a result, the province will have near-total planning authority in our city.

Premier David Eby says the bills are needed to fast-track housing, infrastructure and other projects in the face of a housing crisis and threats from the U.S.

Critics, including the Union of B.C. Municipalities, many B.C. mayors, and advocates for community planning, say they are an anti-democratic over-reach of provincial powers that remove municipal authority and silence the public.

“In British Columbia, democracy is being redefined—not through elections or referendums, but through legislation with quiet names and sweeping consequences,” Erick Villagomez of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning wrote in an article in the Vancouver Sun and a lengthier version in Spacing Vancouver. The new bills “replace negotiation with command,” giving the province “unprecedented authority to override local planning, ignore zoning bylaws, and silence public consultation.”

This new approach is sharply different to the type of community consultation that occurred in the past. A prime example is Dunbar, where a year and a half of surveys, workshops and meetings involving residents and city officials resulted in the creation of the Dunbar Community Vision, approved by council in 1998. It was part of the CityPlan process, in which the city set overall directions, then supported residents as they planned how to move their community toward them.

Remarkably for today’s times, the city stipulated the changes were to be done “in a way and at a scale and pace that suits the community." 

Plus, the city was meticulous about ensuring the resulting plans truly represented what the majority wanted. After a general survey sent to every Dunbar household and business, there was a second, random one to ensure the initial one accurately reflected public opinion.

Since then, the importance of citizens’ input has been downgraded to the point that the 1990s’ exercise seems unthinkable. Over the years, councils have cut citizens’ speaking times, encouraged them to comment by phone or write instead of in person, relied more and more on online information meetings and surveys, and prioritized “stakeholder” groups over the public in developing plans. In 2023, it repealed more than 70 volunteer-created community plans and visions like Dunbar’s, on the grounds they were no longer relevant given the ongoing development of a new Vancouver Plan.

But now, city councils themselves are being downgraded as they lose their authority to the provincial government.

And many are not happy.

“Transferring power to the province will not lead to better decisions,” Union of B.C. Municipalities president Trish Mandewo told the Northern Beat online news site. “Over the past couple of years, we have seen the province changing the priorities in how they approach legislation, and in some cases, ideas that are developed at a political level have been rushed into law without appropriate and meaningful consultation with stakeholders.”

Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie called Bill 15 “a dangerous piece of legislation” that enables the province to override “just about any regulation or anything that the municipal government has set in place to safeguard the interests of the city and the residents.”

In the same article, Sparwood Mayor David Wilks told the provincial government: “If you want to run the District of Sparwood, just tell me you want to run the District of Sparwood and don’t have a mayor and council.”

Vancouver City Council has not spoken out against the new legislation. That follows its pattern of embracing – and even going beyond – earlier provincial legislation imposing new urban densities provincewide, while other municipalities pushed back.

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is the only civic party in Vancouver that has pushed back. “Removing control over land use change from local government and transferring it to the provincial government is the latest step in undermining our democracy,” former TEAM City Councillor Colleen Hardwick said in a May 12 news release. “This increasingly top-down, centralized, autocratic control removes all accountability to residents.

TEAM urged Vancouver residents to tell their MLAs and the members of City Council that enough is enough: Local democracy is worth fighting for, and the city’s autonomy needs to be preserved under the Vancouver Charter.

Villagomez’s article said citizens might be a lot more vocal if they had more information. But he said the legislation was drafted in such “dense, technical, and opaque” terms that it’s hard for both the public and opposition politicians to understand.  “Few outside of legal or planning circles fully understand their implications, which, perhaps, is part of the point.

“If the public knew what was at stake, the response might look very different. If the opposition had the full picture, their questions might grow sharper.

"Everyone deserves to know how profoundly these changes reshape the way decisions are made in our cities. Until then, the transformation continues—quietly, but radically.”

As for the practical impacts of such legislation, it means city rules don’t count if provincial ones say otherwise. For example, if a neighbourhood plan limits a development to six storeys, a developer could propose 20 if the province allows it. “The City must process the application, even if it violates its own plans,” wrote Villagomez. “This isn’t just a change in scale. It’s a change in who gets to decide what cities look like.”

In many cases, he said, the decisions will be made by people who don’t even live in the communities they’re reshaping. “They are detached from the everyday realities of the neighbourhoods their policies transform – from the local parks, corner stores, transit stops, and civic rhythms that give a place its character and needs its nuance.”

When speed is king, everything that makes urban planning worth doing – “public trust, community vision, and the legitimacy that comes from dialogue rather than decree” – is lost, he wrote. “When local planning becomes provincial command, cities stop being self-governing communities. They become construction sites with a script.”

But most important may be the message the new legislation sends to citizens.

Three decades after the city took pains to ensure that Dunbar residents were carefully consulted about the future of their neighbourhood, the concerns of those same residents aren’t part of the picture. Their voices don’t count. Nor do those of the city council members they elected to represent them.

The damage may not only be to livability, the Vancouver Sun’s Doug Todd says in a column about the legislation, “but also to democracy, and especially to the public’s already wavering trust in its elected leaders.”

(The legislature resumes sitting May 26 to 29. Those who wish to express an opinion on this issue still have time to contact City Council, Premier David Eby and their local MLAs.)