Category Archives: #VanPoli Civic Politics

#VanPoli | Vancouver City Council | Wiebe MUST Resign | Pt. 1

September 22, 2020#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Vancouver City Councillor Michael Wiebe Caught in a Conflict of Interest. Must resign.

On Sunday morning, September 20th, at 10:30 a.m., Charlie Smith, the longtime editor of The Georgia Straight, and avid and well-practiced journalist covering municipal politics in Vancouver, broke the story that UBC professor and esteemed municipal affairs jurist Raymond Young, following an exhaustive three-month investigation authorized by the office of the Mayor of Vancouver, “declared that [Green Party Vancouver City] Coun. Michael Wiebe is disqualified from holding local office until the next election, due to a conflict of interest.” Says Young in his report …

“Despite apparently being knowledgeable about conflicts of interest, on May 13th, Councillor Wiebe put forward the amendment [for] ‘staff to work directly with business operators to identify immediate patio seating options.’ Councillor Wiebe had to know that he was a business operator,” Young wrote. “His proposed and passed amendment enabled Councillor Wiebe to wear two hats when dealing with city staff: that of the Council member and that of the business owner.

“This was a clear conflict of interest situation that he deliberately set in motion. This conflict of interest cannot be viewed as an inadvertent action.”

Raymond Young recommended in his 14-page report — submitted to Mayor Kennedy’s Stewart’s office on September 12th — that “it would be ‘appropriate’ for Wiebe to resign his seat on council,” arising from a conflict that involved his ownership of Eight ½ Restaurant Lounge, and substantive financial interest in the Portside Pub, both of which businesses directly benefited from Wiebe wearing ” two hats when dealing with city staff: that of council member and that of business owner,” Young wrote in his findings.

At this point, let’s backtrack a little, to more fully contextualize the timeline of events that led up to Raymond Young’s determination that Councillor Michael Wiebe must resign his seat on Council, and disqualify him from holding office on city council, the park board, other local government, or as a trustee under the Islands Trust Act until the next general election.
On June 5th, 2020 at 9:48 a.m., The Straight’s Charlie Smith published an article calling into question the propriety of Wiebe’s involvement in “participating in the discussion of a matter, vote on a question in respect of a matter because of a direct or indirect pecuniary interest.”

On his financial disclosure statement and on his Linkedin profile, Wiebe lists himself as the owner/operator of Eight 1/2 Restaurant Lounge (151 East 8th Avenue). It won approval for its application for a free temporary patio permit from June 1 to October 31. These permits allow business owners to use on-street parking space or sidewalks in front or beside their establishments.

According to the May 13 city council minutes, Wiebe did not absent himself from discussions or voting on a motion to “approve in principle the prioritization of additional staff and budget resources to support the allocation of flexible, innovated, and expedited patio space”. In addition, that motion directed staff “to seek out cost recovery opportunities where possible and where reallocation of public space may be for private use”.

On May 27, Wiebe seconded a motion by NPA councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung calling on council to temporarily waive all permit and application fees associated with the temporary expansion of patio spaces.

Under section 145.2 of the Vancouver Charter, a council member must issue a declaration if they consider that they are “not entitled to participate in the discussion of a matter, or to vote on a question in respect of a matter” because of a direct or indirect pecuniary interest. If a councillor has a direct or indirect pecuniary interest, the council member must not remain or attend at any part of a meeting in which this matter is under consideration. In addition, a councillor cannot participate in a discussion, vote on the matter, or influence the voting on the matter.

“A person who contravenes this section is disqualified from holding office as described in section 145.911 [disqualification for contravening conflict rules] unless the contravention was done inadvertently or because of an error in judgment made in good faith,” the Vancouver Charter states.

On June 4th, 2020, Vancouver City Hall had issued a permit to Eight ½ Restaurant Lounge, one of 14 restaurants to receive approval for a patio. Wiebe submitted his application on June 1st. According to various reports, in the weeks leading up to June 1st, Wiebe worked with city staff to prepare the drawings and provide all of the necessary documentation required for a successful patio application — giving him a lead time for his application that would have been unavailable to other applicants … which is to say, those not sitting on Council, and those citizens who did not have as ready access to city staff as would be the case with a sitting City Councillor.

On June 6th 2020, non-practicing lawyer Michael Redmond, based on The Straight story above, lodged a Code of Conduct complaint with the City of Vancouver, triggering Raymond Young’s city-authorized investigation.
Upon receipt of the Code of Conduct complaint, Councillor Wiebe attended at City Manager Sadhu Johnston’s office to be advised of the complaint, and to sign off on the appointment of the individual who would conduct the investigation. Mr. Wiebe readily agreed to Mr. Young taking on the role of investigator, committing to his full co-operation with the investigation.

In fact, that June 6th meeting in the City Manager’s office was the last time Mr. Wiebe appears to have given any thought at all to the investigation, for in point of fact, he did not either meet with Mr. Young, nor provide answers to any of the questions submitted by Mr. Young to Mr. Wiebe, nor did he provide any aid whatsoever to Mr. Young in the conduct of the Code of Conduct complaint that had been lodged against him. Mr. Wiebe, it would appear, only gave thought to the matter when Charlie Smith published his Sunday morning, September 20th article in The Georgia Straight.There has been speculation in the community as to whether someone in the Mayor’s office was the source who provided Raymond Young’s report to The Straight. In fact, VanRamblings is advised that it was the complainant, Mr. Redmond, who provided Mr. Smith with a copy of the Young report, which he had received from Mr. Young on September 12th, the same date the report was submitted to the Mayor’s office. We understand that a second municipal affairs reporter — who we expect was CBC municipal affairs reporter, Justin McElroy — was also provided with a copy of the report.

In the curious and curiouser department, when Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung lodged a formal Code of Conduct complaint against her fellow Councillor, Jean Swanson, City Manager Johnston sent out notification of the complaint to Council and senior city staff. The Code of Conduct complaint against Ms. Swanson was amicably resolved when Councillor Swanson provided an apology to Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung.

Vancouver City Council. Councillor Colleen Hardwick looks askance at a Council colleague

In the past two years, Councillor Colleen Hardwick has had two Code of Conduct complaints filed against her, the nature of both investigations requiring Ms. Hardwick to engage the services of a municipal affair lawyer, Bob Kasting, requiring of her the expenditure of monies in legal fees to respond to each complaint.

Relating to both Code of Conduct complaints, the City Manager posted e-mails to Council and senior staff informing them of the filed complaints.

Relating to the first complaint filed against Councillor Hardwick, The Breaker News’ Bob Mackin published an article on July 11, 2019, writing the following …

Lawyer Henry Wood dismissed pro-density activist Peter Waldkirch’s Jan. 16 complaint against Colleen Hardwick, finding no evidence that the 2018-elected councillor used her PlaceSpeak.com civic engagement company improperly.

Waldkirch’s complaint to city manager Sadhu Johnston took issue with a page on the PlaceSpeak website showing Hardwick and an image of city hall with the headline “You don’t need to wait for an election to have your voice heard — I’m listening.” Waldkirch, a research lawyer, alleged that Hardwick was confusing citizens and using public office to benefit her private company.

“I do not believe it is appropriate for her to use it for city business and there is at least the appearance of this,” Waldkirch wrote in the email to Johnston, obtained via freedom of information.

Waldkirch went further on Twitter, just over 30 minutes after his initial complaint to Johnston. He publicly accused Hardwick of “attempted privatization” of public engagement and called PlaceSpeak a “black box.”

In his report, Wood wrote, “We are dealing with a soft launch of a consultation site on which the only question posed was ‘Do you think that you are being heard by the City of Vancouver?’ There is no obvious potential conflict arising from the substance of that issue.”

Further to the above, Councillor Hardwick had offered the services of PlaceSpeak to all members of Council, at no charge, furthering lessening any appearance of impropriety or conflict.

Note might be made at this point that, as is the case with the Code of Conduct complaint filed against Councillor Wiebe, investigators hired to investigate Councillor Hardwick received in excess of $20,000, on each occasion, for their investigative work, and the writing of a report.

Yes, that’s right, in excess of $60,000 has been paid to date to investigators conducting inquiries, and the writing of reports, related to Code of Conduct complaints lodged against two Vancouver City Councillors. One Councillor was exonerated … twice. One was not.

Note should also be made that although the City Manager’s office posted e-mails to Council and senior staff relating to the Code of Conduct complaints filed against Councillors Swanson and Hardwick, at no time did the City Manager post correspondence to Council and senior staff respecting the Code of Conduct complaint filed against Councillor Wiebe.

One is left to wonder, why would that be the case?

Note should further be made that Councillor Hardwick took the matter of the Code of Conduct complaints seriously, and determined early on that she would require the services of her own legal counsel in order that she might properly respond to each Code of Conduct complaint.

Councillor Michael Wiebe, on the other hand, appears not to have taken the Code of Conduct matter at all seriously, and unlike his more mature distaff Council colleague did neither engage the services of legal counsel to traverse the rocky shoals of legal engagement, nor in any way, shape or form co-operate with the investigation, not meeting with investigator Young, nor answering any of the questions provided to him by Mr. Young.

Why is it that Vancouver City Councillor Michael Wiebe chose to — it seems abundantly clear to this writer — not take the filing of a Code of Conduct complaint against him at all seriously, why did he consciously choose not to engage the services of his own legal counsel and, finally, why did Councillor Wiebe not co-operate with Raymond Young in the conduct of the investigation of the serious Code of Conduct complaint filed against him?

#VanPoli | Vancouver City Council | Vapid & Not on Your Side

May 30, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

Today’s VanRamblings column was originally intended to take our “new” Vancouver City Council to task, a City Council in which we are profoundly disappointed — who have against all reason turned out to be a reactionary amalgam of self-serving, do-nothing municipal politicians who have surrounded themselves with sycophants who praise them for their “good works”, a group of electeds who not only have lost the thread of why it was they were elected (read: build affordable housing!), but rather who have proven these past seven months to be just like the character in the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, who seem to as the child in the story says appears not to be “wearing anything at all!”
We here at VanRamblings had intended on employing satirical commentary, combined with our tried-and-true hyperbolic approach to recording our thoughts on the screen in front of you for the Thursday post today.
But, alas, we’re simply not up for doing that on this tremendous day!

VanRamblings’ new carbon blue Vessi shoes. Comfy. Stylish. 100% waterproof!

For you see, it is a wonderfully sunny day in Vancouver, deserving of a walk along the beach and an opportunity to spend time with friends. Today, VanRamblings — our disappointment in our “new” Vancouver City Council notwithstanding — find ourselves enjoying our new carbon blue Vessi shoes that are comfy and swell-looking and oh-so-stylish, which makes us happy.
So, in consequence, VanRamblings will hold off until next week to spell out exactly why we find ourselves dispirited in respect of Vancouver’s “new” do-nothing, survival of the fittest Darwinian City Council, and instead will set about to enjoy the day, while thinking to our self: why was editor, author, columnist, political activist, father, lover of baseball, and person of principle (always!) Derrick O’Keefe not elected to Council, to hold the current ne’er-do-well group of “oh we love our City staff, they’d never give us advice and provide direction to us that is anything other than true to the interests of the citizenry of our fair city” members of our inept Council to account?
Arts Friday on Friday. Stories of a Life on Saturday. Music Sunday Sunday.
And back to municipal political writing on Monday or Tuesday. See ya then.

#VanPoli | The Rapid, Unforgiving Pace of Development in Our City

May 29, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

May 2019. Artist rendering of a planned residential tower on the northwest corner of Alma and West Broadway, in the Point Grey neighbourhood.

Meet the thin edge of the wedge, the future of residential neighbourhood development along the Broadway corridor, just one part of the changing architectural landscape planned for the city of Vancouver.
While the building above is under construction, the Musqueam and Squamish Nations development on the Jericho Lands, just one block west, will be well underway, with residential towers and townhouses planned for what will be the largest development project in the City of Vancouver in a generation, designed to house up to 30,000 residents on the 90-acre site.

And lest you believe that our city, over the course of the next 15 years will not undergo a massive change to the landscape of our city, there’s always the Oakridge Centre re-development at Cambie and West 41st Avenue …

And let us not forget, either, the development of the Heather Lands just north of Oakridge, a 21-acre site between West 33rd and 37th between Willow and Ash centred around Heather Street, built on First Nations land that will see the construction of 2500 new homes, which according to the development’s pro forma will house 40%, or more, secured low or moderate-income households, with the remaining homes “market rentals”.

The Heather Lands, set to begin construction. 2500 homes north of Oakridge.

While Rome Burns Our City Councillors Will Be Attending Gala Gala Do’s

All of the above is by way of saying: if our novitiate Vancouver City Councillors don’t soon get a handle on the planned development of our city, long in the works under the previous Vision Vancouver civic regime, our city will be well on its way to substantive architectural change and dramatically increased density well before our elected officials at Vancouver City Hall are able to have an impact on the future livability of our city, what kind of housing will be built across our city to address our current affordable housing crisis, what our neighbourhoods will look like 20 years from now, and how much land will be set aside for parks and community amenities.
At the moment, the pace of change is rapid and unforgiving — yet, after seven months in office, our Vancouver City Councillors seem not to have developed, or even given much thought to developing, a coherent City Plan that will not only preserve but enhance the livability of the Vancouver they, as our elected officials, and we as the general public, love and cherish.
Time for our Vancouver City Councillors to put on their big girl and boy galoshes, and settle down to the primary task at hand: creating our city.

Taxpayer vs Citizen | Responding to Right Wing Propaganda

May 28, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Decision Canada 2019, News, Politics, Thought for the DayRaymond Tomlin

The suffering hero of our times is, we are told, the tormented taxpayer.

Conservative politicians mount campaigns to protect the taxpayer, editorial writers evaluate politicians and their policies on whether they will increase or decrease the “burden” to taxpayers, and some self-described taxpayers have formed faux, corporate-funded organizations to plead their cause & lament their plight. Thus, you have the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison, in her New York apartment. Photo | Tim Knox

At a speaking engagement, a few years back, at a New Yorker festival, Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher and professor emeritus at Princeton University, Toni Morrison, offered insightful commentary on topics about race, gender, writing, and other issues. One particular observation made by Ms. Morrison was quite memorable …

The complexity of the so-called individual that’s been praised for decades in America somehow has narrowed itself to the ‘me’. When I was a young girl we were called citizens — American citizens. We were second-class citizens, but that was the word. In the 50s and 60s they started calling us consumers. So we did — consume. Now they don’t use those words any more — it’s the American taxpayer, and those are different attitudes.

The phrase “taxpayer’s money” is almost always propaganda — that must be rejected and resisted by all of us who support progressive politics.A better phrase is “public money”.

So, why do so few in the news media, if any at all in these times of corporate-owned media, refuse to use the term public money, replacing it instead with the far from benign word taxpayer?

Public money is the property of the entire public, not of taxpayers.

Taxes are a way to pool our resources and develop common infrastructure that can have a positive impact on us all. They build our roads and bridges, pay for our police and firefighters, our system of justice, offer support for raising children and contribute to reducing child poverty, provide income security and housing for people who are in need, contribute to foreign aid, and help to ensure our environment is clean and safe. All of these things are much cheaper and effective when we pay for them collectively.

The taxes paid by previous generations benefits us today, and the taxes we pay hopefully act to benefit the generations of tomorrow.

David Brooks. Toronto-born American centre-right, self-described “moderate centrist” political pundit and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times

In 2016, New York Times columnist and PBS political commentator David Brooks wrote about the difference between taxpayers and citizens …

You can be a taxpayer or you can be a citizen. If you’re a taxpayer your role in the country is defined by your economic and legal status. Your primary identity is individual. You’re perfectly within your rights to do everything you legally can to look after your self-interest.The problem with the taxpayer mentality is that you end up serving your individual interest short term but soiling the nest you need to be happy in over the long term.

A healthy nation isn’t just an atomized mass of individual economic and legal units. A nation is a web of giving and getting. You give to your job, and your employer gives to you. You give to your neighbourhood, and your neighbourhood gives to you. You give to your government, and your government gives to you.

If you orient everything around individual self-interest, you end up ripping the web of giving and receiving. Neighbours can’t trust neighbours. Individuals can’t trust their institutions, and they certainly can’t trust their government. Everything that is not explicitly prohibited is permissible. Everybody winds up suspicious and defensive and competitive. You wind up alone at 3 a.m. miserably tweeting out at your enemies.

And this is exactly the atomized mentality that is corroding North America.

Years ago, David Foster Wallace put it more gently …

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We’ve changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries — we’re actually conscious of our rights as citizens and our nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie.”

This is where the Canadian Taxpayers Federation comes in, a shady, secretly-funded (who are, in fact, funded by right wing elements within Canada’s corporate culture), unrepresentative organization that sells itself as a populist “citizens advocacy group” looking to cut waste and ensure accountability in government, when such couldn’t be further from the truth.

Larry Haiven, a professor in the faculty of management at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, says most of CTF’s stances on issues — and particularly their relentless calls to lower taxes — are …

“the most simplistic garbage. It assumes that nothing that is purchased with our taxes is of any use for us. Despite CTF’s anti-tax, spending-is-out-of-control rhetoric, taxes are lower now than they’ve been in decades, leaving governments struggling to provide essential services.

Provinces and the federal government have been cutting taxes frenetically, frantically, for the past 25 years. Governments across Canada are taking in about $250 billion less than they did 15 years ago. You have to weigh that against everything the Taxpayers Federation says.”

Yet night in, night out the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is given a platform on the corporate-owned and operated evening news, with folks on Shaw-owned Global TV, anchors like Chris Gailus and Sophie Liu, and Bell Media CTV Vancouver hosts Scott Roberts and Mi-Jung Lee fulfilling their supplicant role as handmaidens to their corporate bosses & not on our side.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation media presence is truly remarkable when you consider it has a membership of five people.

You read that correctly: five.

Writes Dougald Lamont for CBC News Manitoba …

This might come as a surprise, but the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is not now, nor has it ever been, a grassroots, member-based organization where anyone can pay $10 to sign up (or sign up free) and have a say in how the organization is run.

Instead, it has supporters — about 90,000 of them, who, like followers on Facebook, can like, comment, answer surveys and make donations, but they have no actual say in how the organization is run.

While the CTF’s mandate is to hold elected officials to account, who holds the CTF’s five members to account? Each other. Who decides who else can become a member? They do. It should be no surprise that the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has, as a result, faced accusations of being an Astroturf organization — a fake grassroots organization.

Writing in The Tyee, journalist David J. Climenhaga says the following …

Right-wing billionaires Charles and David Koch are among the funders of the international Atlas Network, a Canadian Taxpayers Federation partner. Photo credit: DonkeyHotey.

“The Canadian Taxpayers Federation,” writes Climenhaga, “a self-described non-partisan tax watchdog and taxpayer advocacy group once headed by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, has always been tight-lipped about the sources of its own funding and support. This may be mildly ironic, given its vocal demands for transparency in government policy.”

Since the 1980’s and the rise of the Koch brothers in the U.S. and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in Canada, there has been a deliberate effort to reframe citizens as “taxpayers” and public spending as “taxpayers’ money,” as if taxpayers are shareholders. CBC’s Dougald Lamont writes …

Journalists and politicians in every political party routinely use these terms without considering that this framing is anti-democratic. That is because politicians are elected by citizens, not just taxpayers. The word “taxpayer” is not in the constitution; the word “citizen” is.

All citizens are equal. Taxpayers are not.

It is self-evident that you can contribute to the economy and society without paying taxes. Many citizens don’t pay income taxes, notably children, the working poor and a few millionaires and billionaires. Charities, churches and places of faith are all tax-exempt.

Defining taxpayers as the only people who matter has real and serious consequences for policy. It is not a politically neutral position: it is a radical right-wing ideology that drives inequality by making the rich richer while neglecting the poor.

That is why the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s real membership of five people matters, as does its ideology. We don’t have to care what they think, but we should be clear on just where they are coming from.

So the next time you hear British Columbia’s new wicked witch of the west, CTF spokesperson Kris Sims, blathering on your TV about how your “taxpayer dollars” are being wasted, remember: Kris Sims and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation could give a damn about you as a citizen of the province of British Columbia, and could care even less about what our provincial government is doing to alleviate child poverty, build urgent care centres to serve the 780,000 British Columbians without a family doctor, build truly affordable housing for seniors and working people across the vast expanse of our province, create affordable $10-a-day child care for working families, while funding our public safety and justice, education, transportation and infrastructure, agriculture and fisheries, climate action and environment, social development and poverty reduction, indigenous relations and reconciliation, and jobs, training, trade and technology ministries of government to better serve your interests, and the interests of your family, your neighbours, your co-workers, and your friends.

And while you’re at it, ignore Kris Sims when you see her next on your TV!