Vancouver’s mayor has deferred a vote on a motion to review the work of the city’s integrity commissioner, which, if passed, would have temporarily suspended the ethics watchdog’s ongoing work.
Mayor Ken Sim moved to defer Tuesday morning’s special meeting until September, blaming an email he says was sent to all council members and senior city staff by Coun. Pete Fry.
Sim said the Green Party councillor’s email on Monday stated that Fry had filed a complaint with the integrity commissioner against several councillors. This action, Sim said, violated the guidelines that require complaints to remain confidential.
“I have no choice but to recommend a recess for this meeting out of an abundance of caution until this break from established protocol is dealt with,” Sim said at the meeting Tuesday.
Five opposition councillors, including Fry, did not attend the special meeting, saying there’s no justification for Sim and his ABC Party councillors to rush into suspending integrity commissioner Lisa Southern’s work.
“We don’t want to make it easier for the mayor to pass his agenda,” Fry said in an interview with CBC’s The Early Edition before Tuesday’s meeting.
Critics have claimed the suspension of the commissioner’s work would have a chilling effect on democracy in B.C.’s biggest city, and temporarily remove an avenue for public oversight of elected officials.
Councillors from the ruling ABC Party, including Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou, have said a third-party review would clarify the powers of Southern’s office in dealing with complaints against elected officials.
Proponents claim the review follows from the commissioner’s own request in her annual report from 2023 to modify the scope of the office’s work through a bylaw amendment.
The report says council’s intention behind establishing the integrity commissioner’s office in 2021 was to scrutinize the ethical conduct of elected officials, and not to scrutinize political or policy decisions.
It recommends that council amend bylaws to ensure that intention was clear.
“[The integrity commissioner] didn’t fully comprehend or recognize what the scope of the office was,” ABC Coun. Brian Montague told Stephen Quinn, host of CBC’s The Early Edition, on Monday.
“I thought that was a fairly major issue that was raised by them, one that wasn’t easily addressed by a simple amendment … I thought that the best way to do that was through a third-party review,” Montague added, saying the freeze on the commissioner’s work would last two months, at most.
Vancouver Coun. Brian Montague defends his decision to initiate a motion to review the mandate of the city’s Integrity Commissioner and freeze her ability to address public complaints. He says he wants to ensure the commissioner is not performing work she’s not authorized to do.
But Fry said Monday he disagrees with ABC’s suggestion that the integrity commissioner is unaware of the scope of their work.
He says the commissioner’s intention with the report was to make the office’s role clearer to the public — and the apparent urgency of Tuesday’s motion, in the last council meeting before summer break, raises questions about why ABC councillors are moving quickly to freeze the watchdog’s work.
“To suspend ongoing investigations, I think that’s a whole other level that nobody had anticipated,” Fry said.
Earlier this week, the ruling ABC Party on Vancouver city council voted to review the mandate of the city’s integrity commissioner, potentially diluting the office’s role in the process. The Vancouver Green Party’s Pete Fry says the potential for less oversight could weaken the city’s democratic processes.
2 complaints revealed in recent days
The vote comes after two code-of-conduct complaints heard by the commissioner were released in the last week, both of which involved Park Board Commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky.
The first alleged that Mayor Ken Sim had exerted undue influence and lobbied other park board commissioners to remove Bastyovanszky as vice-chair of the elected body.
In that case, Southern found Sim was not acting in his capacity as mayor when the alleged incidents occurred, and dismissed Bastyovanszky’s complaint.
But Bastyovanszky alleges the investigation shows a “pattern of harassment and intimidation” from the mayor’s office toward him and attempts to gain control of park board decisions.
The second involved Sim’s chief of staff Trevor Ford and senior adviser David Grewal, who allege that Bastyovanszky and fellow commissioner Scott Jensen had contravened the city’s code of conduct.
Ford and Grewal claimed Jensen surreptitiously recorded two phone calls, one of which involved Ford and Grewal telling him to support the mayor’s choice for park board chair.
Jensen then shared the recordings with Bastyovanszky. Ford and Grewal alleged this contravened bylaws relating to a respectful workplace.
Southern also dismissed this complaint, saying Ford and Grewal could not have had an expectation of privacy during the calls.
Ford says the fact he was involved in both complaints — the first as a witness — shows there is a loophole in the integrity commissioner’s work, which should primarily concern elected officials.
He says he supports the motion for a third-party review of the watchdog’s work.
“If there’s a problem with airplane jets, you know, they typically ground the fleet to review before they keep flying,” he said.
But Bastyovanszky — who was an ABC party member before he was removed after disagreeing with Sim’s decision to dissolve the park board — says the move to review the integrity commissioner’s work, and the consequent suspension of that work, shows Sim and his council are mostly concerned with politicking and not with running the city.
“I think that it would undermine public confidence if that was shut down,” he said. “I think that the councillors that voted and supported it will end up losing the trust of the public as a result.”
Brennan Bastyovanszky, a member of the mayor’s ABC Vancouver party, said at a news conference in Queen Elizabeth Park that the city would be worse off if governance of parks was brought under city council’s control.