BREAKING NEWS: Could 2025 byelection give Vancouver voters a chance to weigh in on the park board’s fate?
Dan Fumano: ABC Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim unveiled a proposal in December 2023 to dissolve the park board, a plan that caught the city by surprise.
With Vancouver voters expected to head to the polls soon, it could be a chance for them to weigh in on a contentious municipal debate: the future of the city’s elected park board.
City hall could use next year’s byelection to seek the public’s input on ABC Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s proposal to dissolve the park board, a plan that caught the city by surprise when unveiled in December 2023 and has yet to be realized.
This might not happen. There doesn’t seem to be much support in local political circles for the idea of including a plebiscite or referendum question in the byelection.
Sim declined to comment. And opponents of the mayor’s plan say they believe the park board’s future should be put to the public — but in the next municipal election in 2026, and not in a relatively low-information, low turnout byelection.
Vancouver needs to hold a byelection to fill the council seat vacated by OneCity Coun. Christine Boyle, who was elected last month as a B.C. NDP MLA for Vancouver-Little Mountain. Boyle is currently on unpaid leave from the city, and will officially resign in December, which means the byelection will likely take place in the first quarter of 2025.
The Vancouver Charter gives city council the authority to use that byelection to “pose a referendum question to the public on a matter they wish to seek public input on,” said the Municipal Affairs Ministry in an emailed statement. “Local governments in B.C. operate with a high level of autonomy; they are accountable to their constituents and have the legal authority and responsibility to make decisions on their behalf.
Whether to pose a binding referendum or non-binding plebiscite question, and the wording of it, would be the purview of Vancouver city council, which is currently made up, following Boyle’s departure, of eight ABC members and two Greens.
Green Coun. Adriane Carr believes doing away with the elected park board is “wrong-headed,” and supports putting the question to voters in a referendum in the 2026 civic election.
“My problem with putting it to voters in the upcoming byelection is that the last Vancouver byelection in 2017 had an 11 per cent voter turnout. It could result in the board being disbanded before their elected term is up, decided by a tiny minority of the electorate,” Carr said.
Park board commissioner Laura Christensen, one of three ex-ABC commissioners who left the party last December after Sim announced his plan to abolish the board, also doesn’t think the byelection is a good time to weigh such an important question.
Christensen believes it’s unlikely that Sim and the ABC council majority would want a referendum question in the byelection, when they could have more to lose than gain with such a move. While byelections generally have a low turnout, she said, “I would say the people who are supportive of the park board are the more likely people to turn out in a byelection.
Jerry Fast, spokesman for the Save Our Park Board coalition, a group made up of community centre associations and others opposing the mayor’s plan, said: “It would be dreadful to make a decision as to whether we should eliminate a level of democratic decision-making in our community based on the views of 10 or 11 per cent of the population.”
“We’re very concerned about having a referendum or a plebiscite when we don’t have a full election, because we know from experience that turnout is extremely low, and it would be very difficult to educate the public fully and appropriately on the issues around whether there should be an elected park board or not. It’s a complicated question,” said Fast, who is president of the Kitsilano Community Centre Association. “What we’ve said all along as a coalition is that if the mayor wants to do this, he needs to come out during a municipal election and make it an issue with the voters.”
OneCity party co-chairwoman Cara Ng said she hadn’t previously considered a plebiscite, and didn’t have an immediate answer.
ABC and OneCity have both said they plan to run byelection candidates to fill Boyle’s council seat.
For now, it’s unclear what might happen next with the park board. When Sim announced his plan last December, he said he expected it would take about six months to dissolve the board. Four months later, in March of this year, B.C. Premier David Eby said it wouldn’t happen before the October provincial election, but he was committed to granting the city’s request to dissolve the board in the next legislative session after that, if his party formed government.
But more recently, the premier has suggested the province may not be in a rush to make anything happen before 2026 anyway. Shortly before the election, at an all candidate’s meeting in Eby’s Vancouver-Point Grey riding, the moderator asked whether the three candidates and their parties would remove the elected park board or allow them to complete their term. The Green and Conservative candidates both expressed support for the elected board.
Eby replied that the province had received council’s request to abolish the park board, and had “sent the city back with a list of homework.”
The city had “a lot of work ahead of them,” Eby said. “It’s very unlikely this would be a priority for the province before the next municipal election.”
