Mayor and council add to a long list of make-good gestures on delays, mistakes, boxes to tick
Monday’s meeting of West Vancouver council, the last before the election campaign, witnessed a mayor and council trying to improve their report card before voters grade them. In one evening:
- A scheduled motion to ban campaign signs on public property: suddenly withdrawn before it endured a really rough ride.
- An unscheduled motion calling for a stronger wastewater plant inquiry: added as new business just as the meeting started and passed unanimously, even as the mayor predicted it would lead nowhere.
- A plan to create a pension for mayor and councillors: still moving forward, just not now.
- A staff presentation to create bylaws for housing legislation: received and praised, even though weeks earlier a councillor couldn’t get a seconder for basically the same report.
- A move to approve some utility fees: passed, even though July is about four months earlier than usual.
- A long-delayed project for pickleball courts: passed, too.
We’ve seen in recent council meetings a lot of late attempts to repair mistakes (on pay parking, on seniors’ housing, on a bizarre $2.7 million lease purchase for a boathouse) as part of a general movement of make-goods, clawbacks and repentance we often see as an election beckons, so it fits the cliché.
Individually, each item can be defended. Collectively, they tell a different story of drift, even if they offer a last-minute political benefit: incumbents can now campaign on actions that were postponed until the eve of the election. The larger question: why has all of this only come now?
The reality is that the top issue everywhere in Canada is affordability, yet this mayor and council have passed property taxes of 19.1% in their four years and that next year’s is scheduled to be 6.89%. It introduced a pay parking scheme that alienated business. It dithered on moving forward with housing until the province spanked the community on it.
Another top issue is the wastewater plant costs. Had council pressed earlier for an independent inquiry under Section 765 of the Local Government Act, taxpayers might already know why a project once expected to cost about $700 million ballooned to roughly $3.86 billion.
Campaigns are built on promises. Records are built on timing. And Monday’s meeting raised a question voters should ask: if these decisions were so important, why did they have to wait until the final meeting before the election campaign moves into gear?
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A postscript: The most poignant moment in Monday’s council meeting came at the end, when a man recounted how he was arrested Sunday by West Vancouver Police in front of his family after taking three rocks from the river to put around a small tree his young son had planted. His wife was shaken and had to miss work Monday.
Turns out it’s illegal to take rocks from rivers. But it’s hardly well known. The man said that perhaps some education of him would have worked better than an arrest. I don’t think he was wrong about that.
It was an unexpectedly fitting ending. Throughout the evening, council showed urgency where it had long shown delay—and elsewhere, government displayed a rigidity that left common sense behind.