Years of delay, defiance, and miscalculation left council exposed and handed the province control over the community’s most important district.
No one likes being told what to do, but as West Vancouver mayor and council learned Tuesday, defiance can be costly.
The district has now lost meaningful local control over the future of its most significant area. The BC NDP government bypassed local government and ordered the immediate implementation of the Ambleside Centre Local Area Plan. It also demanded further reporting on other housing matters.
This is what happens when a local government spends years resisting housing policy, disregarding provincial directives, missing its targets, and then trying to manage its retreat on its own terms.
The mayor led council into a strategy of confrontation over completion, and the result is that West Vancouver is now living with housing policy written in Victoria rather than at Municipal Hall.
No one on council can say they were not warned. The first column I wrote about West Vancouver in 2022 argued that this outcome was entirely foreseeable.
Yet the administration appeared to believe it could rally support here and in other municipalities to push back against the province’s housing legislation and its drive for greater density.
The mayor and his council seemed to bet that David Eby’s government was too unpopular to carry the fight through, and that eventually it might be replaced by one less inclined to use a heavy hand.
The mayor raised the possibility of joining a judicial review of the legislation, despite the high bar required to overturn it. Only last week, he suggested he would soon meet the housing minister to make progress on the dispute. Yet as he was speaking of a possible peace accord, the province appears to have been putting the finishing touches on its order.
Municipalities are creatures of the province, and this council chose for too long to behave as if that basic fact could be negotiated away. After inheriting a lengthy consultation process, the governing majority tinkered with it at length and gambled that delay would not backfire. It has.
What this administration failed to grasp was that the BC NDP’s unpopularity in West Vancouver cut both ways. A government with little hope of winning support in an affluent community may also feel it has little to lose by making an example of it.
And so, rather than shape the housing the community might have accepted, West Vancouver now risks getting the housing the province prefers.
The collision had been coming.
At last week’s council meeting, a motion directing staff to draft bylaws implementing the broad effects of Bill 25 did not even receive a seconder. What did proceed was a motion to amend the Ambleside plan and hold a public hearing on proposed changes along Marine Drive. Tuesday’s provincial move wiped out both. There will be no hearing, no further council revision, and no more local debate over the plan. The earlier staff version, not council’s proposed changes, will now move ahead. It will be interesting to see the roster of owners who benefit from the dawdling.
West Vancouver did not lose local control because the province took it. We lost it because our local government failed to use it.