Tag Archives: vancouver city hall

Bill McCreery: The Architect Who Helped Build Vancouver’s Soul

#VanElxn 2026, #VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Park Board, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2026, , , , , , , ,

Bill McCreery, architect, planner, housing advocate and civic reformer working to build Vancouver

Few individuals have left their fingerprints on Vancouver as indelibly as Bill McCreery. Over more than half a century, Bill McCreery has helped shape not only the city’s skyline but also its philosophy of urban living.

Architect, planner, housing advocate, civic reformer, and former Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, he belongs to a remarkable generation that transformed Vancouver from an inward-looking west coast port into one of the world’s most admired livable cities.

His buildings are important. His planning work is even more significant.

While many architects can point to individual towers or neighbourhoods, Bill McCreery’s influence extends across entire communities.

Bill McCreery was among the generation of designers and planners responsible for the creation of North False Creek and South False Creek — projects that fundamentally altered how North America thought about urban housing.

Throughout British Columbia, Alberta and the United Kingdom, Bill’s work contributed to thousands of units of market, public and social housing, always emphasizing the relationship between architecture, people and public space.

Yet, Bill McCreery’s greatest contribution may not be measured in concrete or glass. It lies instead in an enduring belief that cities belong first to their citizens.

Born into an era when Vancouver was still emerging from its provincial adolescence, Bill McCreery entered architecture at a time when modernism promised endless possibilities. The post-war decades were filled with confidence. Governments were building. Universities were expanding. New ideas about planning were replacing nineteenth-century assumptions about cities.

Unlike many architects who concentrated solely on buildings, Bill McCreery quickly became fascinated by the broader civic questions.

How should neighbourhoods function?

  • Who gets to decide what is built?
  • What responsibilities do governments have toward affordable housing?
  • How can density improve rather than diminish community life?

Those questions would define much of Bill’s professional career.

Working on major housing developments in the United Kingdom, and throughout British Columbia and Alberta, Bill McCreery became known as an architect who understood that successful communities required more than attractive buildings.

Streets, parks, schools, public spaces and neighbourhood identity mattered just as much as architectural form. Housing, in his view, was never simply about construction; it was about creating places where families could flourish.

Photo of False Creek, circa 1980, showing False Creek & Ondine’s restaurant, designed by Bill McCreery. The bottom part of the photo shows south False Creek, including the Heather Street marina.

That philosophy reached perhaps its fullest expression in False Creek.

False Creek transformed from an industrial wasteland into a livable, diverse waterfront neighbourhood

Today, North and South False Creek are celebrated internationally.

Mid-rise buildings front generous parks. Walkways connect neighbourhoods to the waterfront. Families, seniors and young professionals share communities that balance density with human scale.

In the early 1970s, however, these ideas were revolutionary.

At a time when many North American cities were demolishing neighbourhoods for expressways and high-rise towers, Vancouver chose another path.

Mixed-income housing, accessible waterfronts, pedestrian-friendly streets and integrated parks became the guiding principles.

Bill McCreery was among the architects and planners who made that vision real.

The result became one of the defining planning achievements of twentieth-century Vancouver, influencing urban design far beyond British Columbia.

His public service unfolded alongside a consequential political transformation.

The Long Watch: Bill McCreery’s Five Decades in Vancouver’s Civic Life

There’s a particular kind of Vancouverite who never quite leaves City Hall, even after the votes are counted and the title expires.

Bill McCreery is one of them.

An architect by training and a civic conscience by temperament, Bill McCreery’s public life stretches from the reformist fever of the early 1970s to the housing fights still playing out in Council chambers today — more than fifty years of showing up, in one capacity or another, to argue about how Vancouver should be built and who should get to decide.

Bill McCreery served as a Vancouver Park Board Commissioner during one of the most remarkable periods in the city’s history.

Bill McCreery’s entry into Vancouver municipal politics first occurred in 1970, when Bill became involved in the freeway debate — a proposal to build a freeway, an extension of Highway 1, through downtown Vancouver, including through the Strathcona and Chinatown neighbourhoods.

Meeting in Bill’s apartment on Beach Avenue, a block away from the Park Board offices, this working group of planning and marine architectural professionals together developed two alternatives to the freeway plan, that included rapid transit and Seabus solutions that would better serve the interests of Vancouverites, while preserving the livability of the city for all citizens.

Elected as part of the reform movement associated with TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement), he joined an extraordinary collection of civic leaders determined to modernize how Vancouver governed itself. Early in his term, Bill was appointed as the Park Board representative on the False Creek Planning Committee of Council.

That appointment was unique, in that Bill was the only non-Council person in the history of Vancouver who had a vote on a Council committee.

TEAM emerged in opposition to the old Non-Partisan Association establishment that had dominated city politics for decades.

Rather than treating municipal government as merely administrative, TEAM believed City Hall should actively shape the quality of urban life.

Its leaders included Mayor Art Phillips, whose vision of participatory government redefined civic politics, and Dr. Walter Hardwick, the geographer and planner whose intellectual influence remains visible across the city.

Bill McCreery fit naturally within that movement.

A TEAM (The Electors’ Action Movement ) Player

Bill McCreery’s entry into civic office came at Vancouver’s most consequential political inflection point. In 1972, TEAM – The Electors’ Action Movement, a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives, reform-minded professionals and New Democrats — swept the long-governing Non-Partisan Association from power, carrying Art Phillips into the Mayor’s chair, alongside eight TEAM Councillors.

TEAM – The Electors’ Action Movement re-imagining Vancouver as a livable urban paradise

The new administration set about dismantling decades of NPA-era governance almost immediately, firing the city’s powerful commissioner, opening up public hearings, and killing the freeway plan that would have gutted Chinatown and Strathcona. It was, by every account, one of the more sweeping reinventions of municipal government in a Canadian city’s history — anchored by Phillips and by Walter Hardwick, the UBC geography professor who served as TEAM’s intellectual architect and the driving force behind transforming the industrial wasteland of South False Creek into mixed-income housing.

Bill McCreery joined that movement’s governing apparatus as a TEAM-affiliated Vancouver Park Board Commissioner, serving from 1973 to 1974. It was a smaller stage than Council, but not a trivial one — the Park Board has run as its own elected body since the 1880s, with real authority over the city’s parks and recreation system, answerable directly to voters rather than to council or the mayor.

To sit on it during the TEAM years was to be inside the machinery of a government self-consciously remaking how Vancouver made decisions, at the moment the city was deciding whether development or livability would set its priorities.

Bill’s experience as an architect made him aware decisions about parks, neighbourhoods and public land could not be separated from broader planning policy.

The Vancouver Park Board during that era became much more than an agency responsible for lawns and playgrounds.

It became one of the principal guardians of Vancouver’s emerging philosophy that public space should serve everyone.

Together, Art Phillips, Dr. Walter Hardwick, Bill McCreery and their TEAM colleagues fundamentally altered Vancouver’s civic governance.

Their greatest achievement was changing who participated in decision-making.

Prior to TEAM’s arrival, planning decisions often occurred behind closed doors with relatively little public involvement. Developers, bureaucracies and political insiders largely determined the city’s future.

TEAM insisted on something radically different.

  • Neighbourhood consultation became an expectation rather than an exception;
  • Community planning gained legitimacy;
  • Citizen advisory committees became influential;
  • Public hearings assumed greater importance.

The planning process itself became more transparent.

This transformation permanently altered the relationship between City Hall and Vancouver residents.

Instead of viewing citizens as obstacles to development, the new governance model treated them as partners in shaping neighbourhoods.

Bill McCreery: The Architect’s Eye

Bill McCreery, the architect, circa 2006 | Photo credit, Malcolm Parry, the Vancouver Sun.

Bill McCreery brought a working architect’s credentials to that civic role — he held professional registration with both the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) and the Alberta Association of Architects (AAA).

During the course of his career, Bill McCreery has been credited with helping create North and South False Creek and with contributing to thousands of units of developer, public, and social housing across British Columbia, Alberta, and the United Kingdom, alongside several Vancouver residential projects of his own.

Southeast False Creek, once the waterfront particulate smoke spewing ‘heart’ of Vancouver, circa 1950

False Creek South is a body of work that placed him, professionally, inside the same era-defining project — the reclamation of False Creek’s derelict industrial shoreline into one of the templates North American cities would study for a generation — that his political colleagues were shaping through policy.

That philosophy eventually evolved into Vancouver’s celebrated “CityPlan” consultation model and neighbourhood planning processes that attracted international attention decades later.

Mid-rise buildings and parks front the walkways connecting southeast False Creek to the waterfront

Bill McCreery has remained one of the strongest defenders of those principles, arguing public consultation remains essential to successful urban planning.

Bill McCreery’s advocacy has continued long after leaving elected office.

Even in retirement from architectural practice, Bill McCreery has remained one of Vancouver’s most thoughtful voices on housing and urban development.

Bill has frequently argued that planning must balance density with neighbourhood character, insisting that growth should occur through genuine collaboration rather than imposed solutions.

Writing and speaking publicly, he has warned against abandoning the community-based planning traditions established during the 1970s.

In his view, Vancouver’s international reputation rests not simply on beautiful buildings but on decades of patient civic engagement that gave residents a meaningful voice in shaping their communities.

His critiques have never been nostalgic.

Rather, they reflect a conviction formed over decades of professional practice: cities function best when architects, planners, politicians and citizens work together instead of competing for influence.

That belief explains why Bill McCreery has continued participating in debates surrounding housing policy, planning reform and neighbourhood development well into the twenty-first century. He has joined fellow architects, planners and urban thinkers in advocating for approaches that combine increased housing supply with careful urban design and democratic accountability.

Architecture often celebrates individual genius.

Bill McCreery’s career tells a different story.

His work reminds us that cities are collaborative achievements.

Successful neighbourhoods reflect countless conversations between architects, elected officials, planners, engineers, community organizations and residents.

Collaboration became a Vancouver hallmark during its most innovative decades.

Today, visitors admire False Creek, the city’s waterfront neighbourhoods, its network of parks, and its human-scaled urban design without always knowing the names of those responsible.

Bill McCreery is one of those names.

Life After Bill McCreery’s Tenure on The Vancouver Park Board

Bill McCreery’s civic instincts didn’t retire when his term did.

Bill McCreery running for civic office in the 2011 Vancouver municipal election under the NPA banner

Decades later, he re-emerged as a candidate for City Council under the NPA banner — the party TEAM had unseated in 1972, a small irony that says something about how thoroughly the city’s political alignments had scrambled by the 2010s.

Running for Council gave him a public platform to argue “city hall democracy” had suffered under the Vision Vancouver administrations then in power.

Drawing on his own memory of the job — the stack of reports, sometimes a foot high, that landed on a Commissioner’s desk each Friday for study before Monday’s meeting — he made the case that transparency and direct access between citizens, reporters, and city staff had eroded, and that the public was worse informed for it.

That advocacy has continued well past his own campaigns.

Bill McCreery has stood among the coalition of former Park Board commissioners publicly opposing efforts to dissolve Vancouver’s elected park board — a fight rooted in the same principle that shaped his TEAM years: decision-making over civic institutions belongs in the hands of people directly accountable to voters, not folded into the broader authority of City Council or the Mayor’s office.

As recently as February of this year, he was among the signatories of an open letter to Mayor Ken Sim and Council challenging the city’s housing “Villages Plan,” identifying himself in that document as a former registered architect who helped build False Creek — still, after half a century, making his case in writing rather than letting the record speak for itself.

Bill McCreery: A Consistent Thread in Bill’s Civic Life

What runs through Bill McCreery’s public life isn’t a single ideology so much as a recurring instinct: a belief that how a city governs itself — who gets consulted, which bodies hold power, how transparently decisions get made — matters as much as what gets built.

Bill arrived in civic office on the wave of a movement built on that premise, spent a career as an architect inside one of that movement’s landmark projects, and spent the decades since defending the governance structures TEAM left behind.

Few figures in Vancouver’s civic history have stayed at that post for quite so long

Bill belongs to a generation that refused to accept that cities must choose between growth and livability, density and beauty, or development and democracy.

Instead, he helped demonstrate that thoughtful architecture and enlightened governance could reinforce one another.

His buildings continue to house thousands.

His planning principles continue to influence generations of architects.

Bill’s work on the Park Board and alongside Art Phillips, Walter Hardwick and the TEAM reformers helped reshape Vancouver’s civic institutions, embedding public participation into the city’s political culture in ways that continue to define municipal government today.

Few architects can claim to have transformed both a city’s physical landscape and its democratic institutions.

Bill McCreery is one of them.

#VanPoli | The Villages Plan | An Open Letter to Vancouver City Council

#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, City Development Planning, Housing, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Development, Vancouver Votes 2026, , , , , , , , , , ,

Open letter to Vancouver City Council on the “Villages Plan”
Patrick Condon, Professor Emeritus, University of British Columbia
UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Subject: Serious Concerns with Vancouver’s Villages Plan

Dear Mayor and Council,

I write to challenge key elements of Vancouver’s Villages Plan Programme.

Together with the recently approved Official Development Plan and Broadway Plan, the City is now granting private owners of more than 80,000 parcels the right to build roughly 700,000 new housing units.

This represents enough capacity to house an extra 1.4 million people — more than double Vancouver’s current population of 670,000.

At today’s 1% annual population growth rate, this single decision delivers over 100 years of future housing supply. Yet even the projects already in the approval pipeline (roughly 78,000 units) would satisfy 30 years of trend growth.

Contrary to this city’s long standing policies for new density approvals, this massive landowner entitlement is being provided free of charge, with no expectation of payment for these new land rights.

These land rights are worth many billions of dollars.

The City is giving them away for free in the hope that this will somehow make housing more affordable.

This is an odd notion for our planners to hold. If adding hundreds of thousands of new units to existing neighbourhoods truly lowered prices, Vancouver would have North America’s cheapest housing.

It has North America’s most expensive housing. (charts below)

It defies logic to expect an “unleashing of the housing market” — the primary justification provided for the Villages Plan — to produce affordable housing when we have spent decades trying to do just that. Vancouver has tripled its housing stock since the 1960s, all within a city where virtually every private parcel was in urban use. This is a higher percentage increase of infill development than that of any other North American centre city. If adding housing to existing city districts was the sure fire path to affordability we would have seen positive results by now.

Based on this evidence, it is clear: if affordability is the main justification for this plan, it obviously fails the test.

Massively over-zoning a city above reasonable expectations for population growth serves little purpose. The only purpose it serves is to support the false narrative that only “restrictive zoning” stands in the way of affordable housing. It doesn’t. It never has. It can’t.

The claim is false.

On the contrary, if any city proves that it is possible to use zoning as a positive public policy tool, it is the City of Vancouver. We tripled housing units city-wide. No other centre city did that — an unheard-of achievement.

While this sadly did not make the city more affordable, as we had hoped, it did make the city better. Much better.

How was this 200 percent growth accomplished? By working with residents, not against them. Community planning with local communities was the means to this achievement. Planning with communities was not an impediment, as some now claim. It was the democratic path to a better city.

But sadly it is now obvious that our decades-long effort to encourage the housing market, in the hope that housing would stay affordable, has failed us. Given this evidence, it seems foolish to upzone so aggressively, hoping against hope that, in 30 or 40 years, housing will be more affordable.

Achieving durable affordability much sooner than this requires a major change in direction. We don’t lack housing; we lack affordable housing. Given this fact, we should follow a path that other similar cities have charted — one where the bulk of new housing built is affordable to average wage earners. This can be done by reviving the Vancouver tradition of building non-market housing at scale, largely financed through “land lift” taxes as applied in Yaletown.

Our own internationally famous False Creek South serves as a storied precedent. Service workers to business owners have found homes in that lovely, self-sustaining community.

The pattern is obvious. Reuse it.

Unfortunately, the Villages Plan moves us in exactly the wrong direction. It virtually rules out any form of land value capture tax, based on the mistaken fear that it would raise home prices. It won’t — and it can’t.

A properly designed land-lift tax simply reduces the inflated “land price residual” that now funnels unearned speculative windfalls into private pockets. A properly designed “land lift” tax channels those gains into public benefit — without increasing the price buyers ultimately pay.

I urge you to revise these plans by deeply involving residents from every corner of the city in a highly collaborative, bottom-up, neighbourhood-focused planning process. One that might arrive at much stronger inclusionary zoning requirements.

The people of Vancouver would rally behind such plans — plans that ensure that their sons and daughters, and the workers who keep this city running, can afford to live in the very neighbourhoods they serve and call home.

Do not pass this plan.

Let us turn instead to plans that are sustainable in scale, equitable in outcome, and shaped not for the market alone, but for the people who live and work here.

Yours truly,

Professor Emeritus Patrick M. Condon
University of British Columbia

More voices weigh in on ABC Vancouver’s Villages Plan development proposal

Steve Jedreicich — principal of Vancouver’s SJ Development Ltd., brings over 30 years of local urban planning and real estate consulting experience to the housing discussion —  weighs in on ABC Vancouver’s contentious Villages Plan proposal.

WBN News Vancouver publisher Karalee Greer’s published article on the impact of the Villages Plan development proposal currently before Vancouver City Council, in particular its impact on Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood. At present, well more than 1000 speakers are set to address the controversial Villages Plan proposal, in meetings that thus far have lasted well into the night at Council.

Randy Helten and Steve Bohus, the good, hard working, dedicated folks behind the informative CityHallWatch website offer a backgrounder on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal, suggesting the plan “was born in the USA.” CityHallWatch offers six more Villages Plan articles the site published in the months of June and July. Click on the multi-coloured links below to access the articles.

Yes, there are even more Villages Plan articles available to you.

As is his wont — and thank goodness for that — The Daily Hive’s well-respected, incredibly hard working urban affairs reporter Kenneth Chan, early in July, published a thorough and well-researched article on Vancouver’s Villages Plan proposal.

Well worth a read.

Kareem Allam Launches Campaign to Be Mayor of the City of Vancouver

#VanElxn 2026, canadian politics, Politics, Vancouver Votes 2026, , ,


Video provided courtesy of Bob Mackin / The Breaker News.

The information below is excerpted from an article by Nathan Caddell — son of Ian, one of VanRamblings’ best friends dating back to 1970, through until Ian’s untimely passing in 2012 at 63 years of age, far, far too young for him to leave the planet — the article published in 2023 in BC Business.

Kareem Allam was born in Vancouver to immigrants from Cairo in 1979. He spent a few years back and forth between Canada and Egypt before his family permanently moved to Richmond. After high school, he studied history at Simon Fraser University, where he found himself thrown into the political fray as a young man.

In 2005, Kareem played a pivotal role in helping Dianne Watts get elected as Mayor of Surrey, a popular and populist Mayor, and perhaps Surrey’s best Mayor ever. After that mayoral election win in 2005, Kareem worked for a number of organizations, including Terasen Gas (now FortisBC), the Vancouver Board of Trade and Fraser Health.

In 2011, Kareem took on the task of serving as Kevin Falcon’s deputy campaign manager for a BC Liberal leadership campaign in which Falcon narrowly lost to Christy Clark. “That was a bit gutting,” he recalls, noting that it was his first big loss.

About 10 years later — after Allam had spent some more years working at the aforementioned organizations as well as some time in Indigenous relations, Falcon called again. Andrew Wilkinson had just stepped down as leader of the BC Liberals after the party was trounced by the BC NDP.

“I think the party really didn’t do as well with Andrew as the leader — there was definitely a lot of intellectual capacity there, Andrew is brilliant,” says Allam. “But that ability to sort of connect was lost, which people in the party took for granted. That was what Christy [Clark] was really good at — one-on-one, she’ll make you feel like the most important person in the world.”

There was also what Allam refers to as a policy drift within the party, and he was worried that the caucus didn’t look or act like the rest of the province.

“The discussions I had with Kevin went right up the start of the race,” he remembers. “I’m like, Okay, if you run, we’ll put together a good team, we’ll win. The question is what’s going to happen next. Are you prepared for that with your family and everything?”

So, very quickly, I reached out and built the most diverse team I had ever been part of.

We wanted to signal where the party wanted to go. If you watch his campaign videos, he’s walking across rainbow crosswalks, talking about how his values haven’t changed, but his perspective has.

“It was the remaking of the image. I think it appealed to the party — let’s become younger, more urban, more progressive. It resonated in the Chinese and South Asian communities, too.”

Many Vancouverites only first heard of Kareem Allam’s name in the aftermath of the 2022 Vancouver municipal election, but current City of Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim had actually tried to recruit him for his first shot at the mayor’s chair in 2018.

“Ken asked me to run his campaign three times, I said no three times,” says Allam. “I was at a point in my career where I just wasn’t ready to take it on.” He also had his worries about the NPA: “The party had drifted to the right, and that’s just not where I or Vancouver voters were and will never be.”

In 2022, with three of the former NPA councillors joining Sim under a new party banner ABC, or A Better City — some of Sim’s closest friends, who had helped on the Falcon campaign, started calling Allam. “I was like, No guys, I’m really burnt out,” he says with what can only be described as a perpetually exhausted laugh.

Living downtown, the “sense of urban decay” encouraged Allam to eventually take on the job.

“Just starting to see people in mental health distress on the street,” says Allam. “A lot more needles, excrement, windows being shattered, all signs of a mental health crisis. Because of my time at Fraser Health, I recognized immediately what the solution was: Car 87, a mental health programme run by Coastal Health and the Vancouver Police Department that partners police officers with mental health nurses. These programmes work, there’s no doubt they work. So I went, Okay, I’m going to take this campaign on and this is what I’m going to bring to the city—100 cops, 100 mental health nurses.”

There were also key promises around housing permitting and child care.

“We played it dead centre in terms of ideology,” says Allam. “At least that’s what we tried to do. We acknowledged immediately that nine of the 11 Vancouver ridings are NDP ridings. If we didn’t get people who voted for John Horgan, no way were we going to win the election … We won almost the entire city, we won Oppenheimer Park, which nobody predicted.”

Asked whether there’s one thing that binds his campaigns together, Allam cites his status as a perceived outsider.

“This is a space that’s dominated by rich white people from the west side,” he says. “When I started in politics in the early 2000s, Arabs weren’t the most popular people. When some of the bigger campaigns were getting pulled together, they’d go, What are we going to do with Kareem, oh, you can manage the ethnics. I made the decision early on that, okay, I will do that. I built great relationships with the South Asian and Chinese communities… You want me to be in charge of the ethnics, okay great, now the ethnics are in charge of you.”

Vancouver Liberals Mayoral candidate Kareem Allam in his own words.

The Job of a Journalist, to Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable

#VanElxn 2026, #VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, canadian politics, Essay, Media, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2026, VanRamblings, , , , ,

For journalists covering politics, and this very much includes VanRamblings, few tasks are more fraught than writing critically about political figures they have come to know well, respect, or even like.

In recent days, VanRamblings has been critical of Mayor Ken Sim, who we know and — to be perfectly frank, we — like (in the days to come, we will publish a supportive story of Mayor Sim). VanRamblings take no great pleasure in writing critically, or negatively, about a political figure, be it Mayor Sim, or Premier David Eby.

The above said, we acknowledge that the craft of political journalism demands objectivity, independence, and an unwavering commitment to the public interest.

Yet, the human element of this work cannot be denied. Political reporters often spend years in the company of the same politicians — interviewing them in hallways and offices, sharing off-the-record conversations, and at times even developing bonds of mutual trust. Against this backdrop, when a journalist is faced with reporting something unflattering, or deeply critical about a politician with whom they have built a rapport, the weight of the responsibility can feel crushing.

The essence of the journalist’s dilemma is a tension between personal loyalty and professional duty. On one hand, the journalist is human, and to knowingly cause another person pain — especially a hard working public figure who has chosen a career in public office — can feel cruel. On the other hand, journalism’s higher calling is to serve democracy by ensuring that those in power are held accountable.

As Finley Peter Dunne memorably wrote in his 1902 book Observations by Mr. Dooley, the role of the press is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That phrase has endured because it distills the moral purpose of journalism: to give voice to the powerless while scrutinizing the powerful. Political figures, by definition, fall into the category of the comfortable.

This mission often collides with the personal relationships that naturally develop between journalists and politicians. When a journalist covers a politician for years, the proximity can foster understanding and even admiration. A journalist may see the long hours, the sacrifices of family life, and the sincere desire by the political figure to substantively improve the lives of constituents who placed them in office.

Such observations humanize politicians, stripping away the caricatures often presented in the media. In turn, politicians may confide in journalists, trusting them with context, nuance, and moments of vulnerability that rarely make it into print, or onto your screen. Out of this closeness, empathy grows. And empathy, while essential in making reporting fair and textured, can also — from time to time — soften a journalist’s willingness to strike hard when the facts demand it.

To manage this tension, ethical journalists rely on principles that act as guardrails.

The first is the unwavering primacy of the public interest. However difficult, the journalist (and that includes VanRamblings) must remember that their ultimate loyalty is not to politicians, but to readers, viewers, and the democratic system itself. The second is transparency: by disclosing potential conflicts of interest and being open about their methods, journalists reinforce their credibility. The third is fairness. Criticism need not be cruel; it must be grounded in facts, and contextualized with nuance. In this way, the journalist can both honour their human empathy and fulfill their professional obligation.

Still, even within ethical frameworks, the emotional toll for the journalist is real.

Journalists who publish critical stories about politicians they respect may face strained relationships, loss of access, or even feelings of guilt. Yet this hardship is part of the profession. Indeed, it is in navigating these very difficulties that journalism earns its claim to being a cornerstone of democracy. If members of the press flinch from their duty, those in power would operate with impunity, and the public would be left in the dark.

The adage attributed to Dunne — “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” — serves as a guiding light precisely because it acknowledges the discomfort inherent in journalism. It is easier to flatter than to confront, easier to protect relationships than to risk them. But journalism is not meant to be easy. It is meant to be honest, courageous, and unyielding in the face of power.

For the journalist who must write critically about a political figure they admire, the pain is real, but the obligation is greater. In choosing to afflict the comfortable, even when it means hurting someone they know and admire, the journalist ultimately fulfills the noblest promise of their profession.