Opinion: After ABC's commanding election win, the party has the power to make big decisions, including controversial ones. But it also matters how they explain those decisions to the public
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s proposal to eliminate the city’s elected park board came as a surprise to most people, including, apparently, his own ABC party’s elected park board commissioners.
The idea of abolishing the 133-year-old elected body seemed to move very quickly: ABC’s own park board commissioners learned of the plan on Dec. 5, Sim announced it to the public less than 24 hours later, and the following week, council’s ABC majority approved the mayor’s motion asking the province to dissolve the park board.
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Sim and his staff say this is the kind of “bold action” he has been elected to take. But the speed with which this proposed major governance change came to council last week, with so many unanswered questions, has also rubbed some people the wrong way.
In local government, there is a balance to be struck between acting decisively and rushing things through with so little transparency that politicians risk alienating the public.
This was a common theme in the deluge of letters to the editor this newspaper has received recently: Many readers, including those who don’t defend the park board status quo, simply feel blindsided by the way this has been rolled out without the mayor providing much in the way of public explanation.
This idea also came up repeatedly at last week’s meeting where council approved Sim’s motion — with the three non-ABC councillors in opposition — where 86 members of the public spoke in opposition to the motion and nine in support.
As last week’s meeting and the big decision approached, Vancouver’s three non-ABC councillors, the media, and the public still had many questions that weren’t being answered by the mayor’s office around this major governance change.
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The three members of council not affiliated with ABC — Green Couns. Adriane Carr and Pete Fry and OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle — criticized the mayor and his party for pushing through such a major change without helping the public to understand what’s behind it.
They also said it is just the latest example of the ruling party’s style of governing. All three non-ABC councillors have raised concerns over the past year about ABC’s tendency to introduce substantive last-minute amendments on the floor of council that have major implications, then use their majority to approve them with minimal opportunity for debate or questions.
It’s a different dynamic than last term, when Vancouver had a mixed council where no party had a majority. If ABC’s opponents criticize the ruling party now for making decisions in private and moving too fast to pursue their agenda, the previous council was criticized for the opposite reason: overly long meetings with too much bickering and not enough decisions getting made.
But before last term, most Vancouver councils in recent decades had a single-party majority, including, most recently, Vision Vancouver’s three consecutive majority terms between 2008 and 2018. Vision, too, was sometimes criticized for a lack of transparency.
In 2014, during Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson’s third and final run for the mayor’s office, he memorably issued a public apology on the campaign trail for when he said his administration had sometimes “overstepped and pushed too far” in pursuing its agenda, moving “very far and very fast.” He said he needed to listen to voters more.
At the time, political experts speculated whether the apology could hurt Robertson’s chance at re-election. But he won a third term.
Carr, council’s only current member who served under the Vision majority, said ABC’s style of governing increasingly reminds her of those days, adding: “I don’t think people should look at being elected as kind of an ability to dictate decisions and ram things through.”
After Sim announced his plan, former Vision Vancouver Coun. Andrea Reimer told CBC Radio’s Stephen Quinn she believes the mayor had “done a lot of damage to himself with this move, and potentially also to the public’s trust in democracy.”
Reimer, now an adjunct professor at the University of B.C.’s school of public policy and global affairs, said she was neither for nor against an elected park board. But, she said: “In public service how you do something is at least as important as what you’re doing.”
“One of your main jobs as mayor is to be able to keep people moving together toward a common vision, and none of this speaks to that ability,” she said.
Boyle says she was frustrated that so little information was available before the council decision on the mayor’s park board motion, considering the importance of such a decision, she said. “But I think it also breeds distrust among the public, which is what I keep hearing from people. … In order to make big changes, you need to bring the public along.”
In recent months, Fry has frequently expressed frustration about what he calls a lack of transparency and accountability with the way council business has been conducted. He recently introduced a motion seeking, among other things, to make the voting results of in camera decisions public after the decisions themselves are no long considered sensitive and released. Carr and Boyle supported the motion, but the ABC majority shot it down.
Near the end of last week’s meeting as council prepared to vote on the mayor’s motion, Fry commented that he looked forward to raising ABC’s handling of the park board decision during the 2026 municipal election campaign, “because I think this is a disastrous move, and it will not go over well.”
It remains to be seen whether Fry’s prediction will be correct, especially with the next election almost three years away.
After ABC’s mayor and council candidates swept to power through last year’s commanding election win, the party has the mandate to govern and the authority to make big moves, including controversial ones. But it also matters how they explain those decisions to the public.
dfumano@postmedia.com
twitter.com/fumano
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