TEAM Slams Lack of Speaker Verification at Public Hearings

Latest farce at City Hall shows Council should have listened to TEAM’s Hardwick in 2020

VANCOUVER (July 28, 2026) – TEAM for a Livable Vancouver is calling on City Hall to ensure that people speaking to City Council are who they say they are and have a legitimate stake in local issues.

This comes after people from as far away as California called into the recent public hearing on the controversial Villages Plan, taking up a big chunk of Council’s time late into Wednesday night. Meanwhile, speakers who actually live in Vancouver waited, sometimes for hours, to express their opinions.

“The vulnerabilities we are witnessing today are the predictable results of warnings ignored,” says TEAM mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick, who tried to improve the process when she served on Council from 2018 to 2022.

“Under the current system, our public process has become entirely decoupled from the local electorate, leaving the gates wide open. This has been abused for many years, allowing vested interests to ‘stack the deck’ and give the appearance of a majority position”.

Hardwick says the core issue is to ensure speakers are the real deal. In 2020 she introduced a motion aimed at doing just that. In person, speakers would verify themselves as Vancouver residents, or not. Online, there’d be secure digital identity authentication and solid privacy protections.

But her motion was severely watered down. Council wouldn’t agree to even minor improvements such as requiring speakers to formally state their name, residency, and nature of interest.

“Instead, there was a toothless amendment just requiring speakers to say whether they live in Vancouver or not,” Hardwick says. “That’s not good enough.”

Six years later, things are much worse, she says. Virtual and telephone call-in options mean people can “call in from anywhere, completely unverified, operating on a broken honour system.” Every contact gets equal weight, whether it’s an automated template email, an out-of-boundary phone call, or a deeply impacted local resident.

The Vancouver Charter makes it clear that City Council represents the people within the city’s geographic boundaries, says Hardwick. Council’s job is to listen to them. “That’s why TEAM’s motto is ‘residents matter!’”

A TEAM-majority Council would bring in digital identity authentication with solid privacy protections to ensure councillors know who’s writing or speaking to them -- whether they’re Vancouver residents, whether they’re affected by the issue at stake, and whether they represent an organization or commercial interest.

The process for counting written correspondence would also change. Submissions from unidentified contributors would no longer be counted as multiple pieces of correspondence while a legitimate petition with many verifiable names is counted as one.

“Transitioning toward a verified, transparent, and structurally sound public engagement framework is no longer an operational choice — it’s a democratic necessity,” Hardwick says. “The City of Vancouver needs to fix this mess immediately.”