A long-sought plea for an independent inquiry was dismissed as a waste of time
West Vancouver Mayor Mark Sager isn’t a fan of a truly independent inquiry into the astonishing cost overruns at the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant. He prefers the current in-house review by Metro Vancouver.
So when West Vancouver councillor Linda Watt managed Monday to persuade council to join other municipalities in calling for a more robust inquiry by the province’s Inspector of Municipalities, the mayor was not amused. He dismissed the motion as fruitless, even though that isn’t a foregone conclusion, and erred in his judgment of the seriousness of the issue in the community.
Watt and Coun. Peter Lambur put a last-minute motion on the agenda invoking Section 765 of the Local Government Act to permit the Inspector of Municipalities to investigate what went wrong with a much more public, serious and extensive examination to find the answers of how a project grew from $700 million to $3.86 billion.
Watt had been working for more than a year to gain council support, to no avail. But Monday, at the last council meeting before the election campaign is in full swing, council joined the neighbouring municipalities of the District and City of North Vancouver, and the City of New Westminster, in demanding the Inspector’s intervention.
All along, the West Vancouver mayor has been working a much less rugged trail, belatedly supporting a review defined by the very institution it is supposed to investigate. Very clearly, the intent is to lay the blame with the fired original contractor, with inflation, with the supply chain, with anything that doesn’t look in the mirror or within the regional government.
When the motion came to the floor Monday, the mayor quickly tried to school the council.
“I specifically asked the premier if the province would get involved, and he said no,” Mark Sager said.
But the picture isn’t as clear as the mayor portrays it. The Inspector can act independently, without cabinet approval, on matters affecting “the fundamental viability of a local government or have serious consequences for the local government system.” It would be unusual, for certain, but there are now four municipalities, including the three most affected, calling for her intervention.
If the province believes an independent inquiry is warranted, it has the legislative tools to make that happen. If it chooses not to, that is a political decision for which it can be held accountable.
Sager later lectured the council on his efforts on streamlining regional government, the path to Metro Vancouver’s reforms, and he noted he never realized how much time this issue would consume.
I spoke at the Monday meeting, unaware until later that Watt had been pressing for more than a year to get this motion through. (The motion passed, but it was not clear in the end how the mayor voted. Typically he exercises a vote only when it breaks a three-three tie.)
Here are my remarks:
“For years, West Vancouver taxpayers have watched the cost of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant spiral from hundreds of millions of dollars to four billion, not including the decommissioning of the existing plant. Throughout that time, residents have asked a simple question: Who is going to find out what happened?
Now, at the eleventh hour of this council’s term, we’re brought forward a motion supporting a stronger inquiry under Section 765 of the Local Government Act. We’ve seen a lot of late attempts to repair mistakes as part of a general movement of make-goods, clawbacks and repentance we often see as an election beckons, so it fits the cliché.
The question isn’t whether a more vigilant inquiry is the right idea. It is. The question is: Why has the motion only come now?
If a Section 765 inquiry is necessary today, it was necessary long ago. There have not been substantial changes on this issue. If the facts justified an independent provincial investigation now, they justified one when the costs first exploded, when the independent review was halted, when litigation was settled, and when taxpayers were pleading for answers. Our community did not hear sufficiently from this council. Nor, because it was added to new business tonight, the public was not provided adequate notice to participate in a discussion on this.
Leadership isn’t measured by the motions you pass on your way into a campaign. It’s measured by the actions you take when they are difficult, when they are unpopular, when your back is not to the wall, and when they matter most.
This council had repeated opportunities to insist on a truly independent investigation. Instead, West Vancouver often followed rather than led. It accepted assurances when it should have demanded evidence. It waited when it should have acted. It told us to move on, to accept that the more important thing was not to understand what occurred.
I welcome any genuine effort to achieve accountability. The taxpayers deserve nothing less. But accountability delayed is accountability diminished.
The people of West Vancouver aren’t looking for a symbolic resolution in the final days of a council term. They were looking for leadership that asked hard questions at the right time—not simply when the political winds intersect with the timing of an election.
Our community has paid dearly for this project and will for three decades. It deserves more than a late conversion to transparency. It deserves elected officials who make accountability a principle from the beginning, not a resolution at the end.”