First written-down piece of policy from the new NPA team. Your thoughts on the specific remedies here?
Tuesday, August 12, 2014, Vancouver BC – The Non-Partisan Association’s mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe says an NPA government would create a bylaw requiring the City to disclose information routinely, strengthen the City’s freedom of information office to ensure records are more accessible and create an Office of the Ombudsperson to represent the public as an impartial investigator of complaints about how the City is run.
LaPointe’s transparency initiative represents the first comprehensive policy proposal from the reconstituted NPA, marking a clear departure from the party’s previous approaches to municipal governance. The former CBC executive and journalist is drawing on his media background to frame transparency not just as good governance, but as essential democratic infrastructure for a city grappling with rapid growth and development pressures.
The proposed ombudsperson office would be particularly significant, as Vancouver would join only a handful of Canadian municipalities with independent oversight mechanisms. Currently, residents seeking redress for municipal grievances must navigate a complex web of departmental complaint processes, often without clear timelines or independent review. The ombudsperson would provide a direct channel for citizens to challenge everything from development approvals to service delivery failures.
LaPointe also proposes producing an independent annual report that would show how public consultations have influenced decisions the City has made in a given year. This “consultation accountability” measure directly targets what many critics see as Vision Vancouver’s weakness: extensive public engagement processes that appear to have little impact on final decisions. The annual report would force city staff and politicians to explicitly trace the connection between community input and policy outcomes.
These and other measures LaPointe pledges are designed to make City Hall more accountable to the residents it serves – something he says would restore the trust that has eroded under the current Vision Vancouver administration. The trust deficit has become particularly acute around major developments, where residents often feel blindsided by decisions that seem predetermined despite extensive consultation processes.
“The general public, community groups and even our politicians have to resort to formal legal requests for basic data,” LaPointe writes today on his blog, thevancouveriwant.ca. “This has been a pattern of arrogant, disrespectful and wasteful behaviour.” This criticism specifically targets the city’s restrictive interpretation of freedom of information laws, which has forced journalists, community groups, and even opposition councillors to file formal FOI requests for routine information.
LaPointe says an NPA government would also:
• Create a much stronger electronic forum for the public to question elected officials. • Create a new process to make genuine community consultation a priority on all City decisions and provide more information on issues so people can better participate. • Go where Vancouverites are and hold at least one-quarter of Council, Park Board or School Board meetings in affected neighbourhoods.
The neighbourhood meeting proposal addresses longstanding complaints that City Hall’s downtown location and formal procedures discourage public participation, particularly from working families and marginalized communities. By taking government directly to neighbourhoods, the NPA hopes to expand civic engagement beyond the usual suspects who regularly attend council meetings.
“Vancouver is a great city, badly run,” says LaPointe. “Lifting the veil off our government and showing voters how it works can only reduce skepticism, improve dialogue and create trust and respect.
