The Vancouver mayoral candidate who promised to get rid of the city’s independent parks board now says he’d like to keep it.
“Vancouver residents deserve well-managed parks now. We can’t wait three to four years to make an administrative change,” said Better City (ABC) mayoral candidate Ken Sim, who announced his party’s park candidates and platform on Thursday morning.
The candidates are Brennan Bastiovansky, Laura Christensen, Angela Haer, Scott Jensen, Marie-Claire Howard and Jas Virdee.
They will work on a platform to repair aging infrastructure, conduct a financial audit of the park board, improve the Stanley Park bike lane and make the drinking-in-parks pilot permanent, expand it to all major parks and launch a separate pilot beach drinking project.
It’s a reversal of Sim’s first major campaign promise, where he promised to lobby the provincial government to put the park board’s responsibilities under the council’s direct management.
Any bid to remove the park board would require provincial approval because it would require a change to Vancouver’s Charter.
“I don’t think we’re going to get the immediate time and attention we need to make legislative change in Victoria,” Sim said, alluding to the NDP leadership race underway.
“So what we’re going to do is we’re going to put out a bunch of strong candidates to win a majority on the elected park board, people with incredible life experiences who have the skills to fix our parks.”
Better City mayoral candidate Ken Sim says his party will make Stanley Park’s temporary bike lane permanent and improve it, including increasing access to parking for motorists. (Murray Titus/CBC News)
A unique role
In the same way that Vancouver is distinguished by municipal government in Canada in that it has several political parties and elects councilors citywide instead of in neighborhoods, it is different when it comes to how it manages parks.
In the rest of Canada, the mayor and council directly control the park board and its budget, much like the engineering or finance departments.
Vancouver is the only municipality in the country with a separately elected park board and senior staff. While the council is responsible for setting their budget and approving the capital plan, oversight of the city’s more than 240 parks and dozens of recreation facilities falls to the seven elected commissioners and a separate management of the park board.
The concept is somewhat divisive. Some argued the park board ensured the council could not develop green space, while others applauded the park board’s decision not to quickly evict tent camps at Oppenheimer and Strathcona parks over the past four years.
At the same time, support for abolishing the board appears to have increased in recent years as the number of issues dividing the park board and council has grown. In a June 2022 online poll conducted by Research Co., 52 percent of likely voters said they agreed with removing the park sign, compared to 25 percent who wanted to keep it.
“ABC Vancouver Government will not base our decisions on polls,” Sim said.
“Our parks are in a lot of trouble right now. There is much work to be done. And we can’t wait three to four years.”
With Sim’s announcement, all 10 political parties running in October’s local elections support keeping the park board. Other parties who have launched their parks platforms include Colleen Hardwick TEAM Vancouver and VOTE Socialists.
Link to Research Co. survey. here. Likely voters have been pre-screened by the company. Just for comparison purposes, the margin of error for a random sample of the same size would be +/-4.9 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
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