Vision Vancouver was elected on a platform of opening up city hall. During the civic election, we heard loud and clear that people wanted back into the decision-making process. Neighbourhood planning, citizen advisory committees, labour relations—these were just some of the areas that we heard needed reform to ensure that residents could have a voice in creating the city’s future.
Despite the enthusiasm for the possibilities of the future, our first year on council was spent having to deal with the fallout of the past. In 2007 and 2008, the NPA made a series of secret decisions, one of which was to make the city the financial backer of the Olympic Village. Public anger over the NPA decisions was relentless, and still reverberates today.
One of the first things our council did was release all Olympic Village documents that provincial privacy laws allowed us to. Since then, no matter how uncomfortable some of the details might have been, we’ve continued to provide the public with ongoing information on the Olympic Village so that they can be actively involved in the debate about the village’s future.
Next up was dealing with the NPA’s shutdown of several citizens’ committees. Seniors, people with disabilities, multicultural communities, the LGBTQ community, and women, who were shut out of city hall by the NPA, now all have committees specifically designed to give them a clear voice at city hall.
From there we started on a long road of neighbourhood planning process reform. Previous city councils, dominated by the NPA, have often created structures to deliberately minimize community input.
We have worked to aggressively root out these structures. When we identify deficiencies between the community’s need to be consulted and outdated, cloistered structures of “consultation”, we’ve gone one step further to ensure the community a real voice and genuine input. To this end, we have created innovative new pilot programs like the Marpole nodal planning process for Marine and Cambie and the West End mayor’s advisory committee.
We’ve also asked that city staff, who are doing groundbreaking work in supporting our direction to open up government, don’t take positions on proposals while the public is still being consulted. To be clear, councillors rely on the expertise and guidance of city staff, and we are working together to ensure that there is both real and perceived fairness throughout the staff-led consultation process.
Vision Vancouver is also the only civic party to have disclosed donations it has received since the 2008 election, all of which is posted publicly on the city’s website. The NPA refuses to say who is giving them money.
We are building towards the future we imagine is possible. Vision Vancouver councillors have brought forward many new innovations that have received international recognition. Projects like the data.vancouver.ca open data catalogue were the first of their kind in the country, and backed by a world leading policy initiative on open government.
Public engagement on Greenest City, done through the talkgreentous.ca project, has directly engaged over 50,000 citizens—or 10 percent of the city’s population—on the next steps on our path to become the world’s greenest city.
We took explicit steps to engage with multicultural communities for the first time in the city’s budget consultation process, and initiated the Dialogues Project that brings First Nations, immigrants, and urban aboriginals to share their experiences and build them into common policy.
In the new year more new projects will come online: Vancouver’s first-ever citizens’ summit, the launch of up to three new neighbourhood planning processes, and the report on the office of citizen engagement—a key campaign promise from 2008.
Can we do more? Absolutely.
The starting point is asking the tough questions. Shortly before sitting down to write this article, I was in a council meeting where the city manager reported on the results of the city’s first-ever employee survey. With 54 percent overall employee satisfaction, there are definite challenges that we need to address as an organization.
But the real elephant in the room was that there was no way to benchmark the results against past employee satisfaction surveys, because no other government in Vancouver’s history has even asked the question, let alone take on the tough task of identifying employee concerns and then developing a plan to resolve those issues as the city did today.
Instead, past governments have let the concerns fester and result in outcomes like the 2007 strike that left residents without city services for several months. It’s hard to imagine the previous NPA council asking the same hard questions, let alone publishing the results publicly for everyone to see.
Residents need to ask themselves whether they want a government that looks after itself—by avoiding the tough questions—or whether they want a government that looks after Vancouver by ensuring that residents, businesses, employees, and the media can examine our work. Disagreements are normal in a diverse city. Council’s job should be to give those disagreements a voice, listen, and develop the best proposals we can to move Vancouver forward in an increasingly complex world.
Andrea Reimer is a Vision Vancouver city councillor.
