Remembering Bob Williams: BC urban planning and political giant passes away at 91

Bob Williams, a stalwart figure in British Columbia’s political landscape, has passed away at the age of 91, leaving behind a legacy marked by decades of dedicated service and deeply influential contributions to the province.

He profoundly shaped urban planning and development, transportation, and the modern economy of BC over his decades-long career as an urban planner and in both municipal and provincial politics.

Those close to Williams told Daily Hive Urbanized on Sunday of his passing.

Additionally, a statement on his Facebook page on Sunday notes that a public memorial service will be held in about 60 days.

“Concluding a famously bold and vigorous public life, Bob’s departure was entirely peaceful,” reads the statement.

“Bob lived a remarkable life and was responsible for many important works. he was to the end grateful for your collaboration and support, collegiality, and friendship.”

In the years leading up to the 2022 release of his memoir, “Using Power Well: Bob Williams and the Making of British Columbia,” I had the privilege of engaging in extensive conversations with Williams on numerous occasions, delving deeply into his rich experiences and his wealth of knowledge about how the province got to where it is today.

Even in disagreement, his profound care for BC and his genuine intentions were unmistakable. He knew how to effectively achieve tangible results.

Municipal politics

After a brief stint working for the City of Vancouver, starting as an assistant in the sewer department, Williams became trained as an economist and urban planner at the University of British Columbia in the 1950s.

He was the District of Delta’s (now known as City of Delta) first director of urban planning, a role marked by controversy due to his refusal to approve low-density sprawling residential neighbourhoods on agricultural land. Williams also expressed a strong desire to expand Delta’s protected parklands.

Between 1964 and 1966, he served a term as Vancouver City Alderman (now a role known as a City Councillor).

At the time, in order for an individual to run for civic office in Vancouver, they had to be a property owner, which was a requirement that bothered Williams enormously. He pursued the provincial government to amend the Vancouver Charter to remove this barrier to democratic participation.

“Playing the aldermanic role was fun. It was serious. It was theatre. It was substance. I savoured all the parts. The best part of the experience was learning how to build coalitions with unlikely players,” he wrote in his memoir.

The old apartment buildings that exist today in Kitsilano are a direct result of his push to catalyze the redevelopment of an area that was previously dominated by substandard rooming houses. He was also an early advocate for the cleanup and transformation of False Creek from its previous heavy industrial uses into a mix of residential and parkland uses on valuable waterfront properties.

Williams staunchly opposed City of Vancouver planners who, at the time, were planning a new east-west freeway between Highway 1 and downtown Vancouver, which would cut through Strathcona and Chinatown. One concept even proposed impacting Robson Street as part of a larger new regional freeway across Burrard Inlet at the First Narrows through Stanley Park.

Created BC’s Agricultural Land Reserve

“Our first government led by Dave Barrett got so much done in such a short time,” recalled Williams, describing his accomplishments during the BC NDP’s first term as the governing provincial party between 1972 and 1975.

Political analysts commonly note today that this short period was one of the most transformative in BC’s history.

By the start of this eventful term, Williams had already been an MLA for six years, having been first elected in 1966 in the riding of Vancouver East.

Soon after initially taking power as the governing party, the BC NDP — under Williams’ influence — created the Environmental and Land Use Act as a temporary moratorium on any further development of agricultural lands.

This enabled the planning and enactment of legislation to create the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) to protect farmlands, such as within the Okanagan and in northern BC. However, the ALR is perhaps best associated with curbing urban sprawl in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.

“The first initiative we tackled using the extraordinary powers of the Environment and Land Use Act is the agricultural land freeze. I had faced the problem of urban sprawl into farmland during my earlier work as a planner in the Lower Mainland, first as a summer student with the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board (LMRPB) and then as the first director of planning in Delta.

“Recognizing the need to preserve agricultural land for the potential day California wasn’t going to be able to produce enough food supply, we had toyed with some controls on development at the LMPRB and in Delta. Once we were in government in 1972, we started asking, ‘What can we do province-wide to preserve agricultural land?’”

Whistler, provincial parks, Vancity Credit Union, and Railway Club

Williams wore numerous hats during the BC NDP’s first term as the governing party in the 1970s, including the Minister of Lands, Forests, and Water Resources, and the Minister of Recreation and Conservation. Under his direction, the land area in BC classified as provincial parklands doubled in size to over 12,000 sq km.

Seeing the potential the area had to become a world-class ski destination, Williams had a big hand in saving Blackcomb Mountain from logging and establishing Whistler Village and the governing jurisdiction of the Resort Municipality of Whistler.

It began in the early 1970s when Al Raine, a former Canadian national ski team coach, and his Olympian wife Nancy Greene sent him a letter pleading government action to stop the imminent logging of Blackcomb Mountain’s slopes. Raine would also later have an instrumental role in designing and structuring the emergence of Whistler Village.

“We brought the logging to a halt, we saved Blackcomb, and we built a team with Al to create a new municipality and he was the representative on the City Council from us,” Williams told Daily Hive Urbanized in a previous interview.

“He was nothing short of brilliant. He studied all of the ski towns of Europe, and when we started Whistler, he was the brainiest guy there when we had designed the town centre.”

Whistler as a ski resort municipal jurisdiction was to be an experiment for the provincial government, and if successful, the model could be replicated elsewhere in BC to create more tourism hubs.

The creation of Whistler was also grounded in its ambitions to host the Winter Olympics. Although it was unsuccessful in its bid to the International Olympic Committee to host the 1976 Games, the Olympic dream would, of course, be later realized in 2010.

Outside of government, Williams also had a profound influence on the business community, especially with his leadership in transforming Vancity Credit Union as its director, chair, and advisor from 1983 to 2016.

When he first joined the credit union in the 1980s, he recalled it being dysfunctional and on the edge of bankruptcy. After bringing the credit union back on the right steering course, Williams pushed for immense community engagement and social investment programs — initiatives that define the financial institution today.

“It was nearly flat broke when I walked in the door,” Williams told Daily Hive Urbanized. “It was the management that had invested and backed a lot of stuff in Delta prematurely and Surrey, so it’s kind of moose pasture without any cash flow.”

Williams was also a small business owner and investor, operating the Barnet Motor Inn in Port Coquitam, Sisto’s Pub in Mission, and the Railway Club in downtown Vancouver, with the involvement of KD Lang.

Public transit: BC Hydro, SeaBus, and West Coast Express

Just over a decade after the nationalization of BC Electric Railway Company into provincial Crown corporation BC Hydro, Barrett and Williams removed the province’s public transit bus system from the electric utility’s portfolio of hefty responsibilities.

This was largely driven by a desire to drastically improve public transit services, particularly in the Lower Mainland.

“There was no bus service through most of the Lower Mainland! The BC Hydro bureaucrats viewed this increasingly critical public service as a losing appendage to their core operations of energy generation and distribution,” wrote Williams in his memoir.

“So we moved the transit assets outside BC Hydro and into Jims Lorimer’s Municipal Affairs Ministry. I remember sitting next to Jim in the House designing the whole fare structure for the greatly expanded Lower Mainland system.”

Concurrently, Williams began planning for a new passenger-only public transit ferry service across Burrard Inlet between downtown Vancouver and North Vancouver as the alternative to building a third road bridge. This would later be known as SeaBus, which first launched in 1977.

The BC NDP at the time hired local naval architect Jim Hart to design SeaBus’ catamaran vessel, a model that continues to be used for newer vessels to this day and began scouting for suitable locations for a ferry terminal on the North Vancouver waterfront.

“Public Works staff reported to me saying, ‘We’re negotiating for the site for the ferry, and it also impacts Ocean Cement and a whole other five hundred feet of waterfrontage.’ I said, ‘Buy it all! Buy it all!’ We ended up owning all of that incredible waterfrontage and the opportunities that has enabled,” wrote Williams.

He was re-elected in a by-election in 1984, but he decided to cut his career as an elected politician short in 1991, shortly after threats were made to out him as a gay man.

As a deputy minister in the 1990s, Williams was also instrumental in creating the West Coast Express commuter rail line between downtown Vancouver and Mission. This involved significant negotiations with Canadian Pacific to enable the leased use of their privately owned and operated freight railway for passenger rail service.

Created ICBC and catalyzed Surrey City Centre and SFU Surrey

A year after initially forming government, in 1973, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) was created almost overnight as a provincial Crown corporation to oversee BC’s automobile insurance needs as a monopoly.

That same year, Williams pitched a proposal for the provincial government to acquire Rolls-Royce, a British engine and luxury car manufacturer that was highly undervalued globally at the time. This strategic move would have generated revenue for the government and potentially helped revitalize major manufacturing industries in BC, but the idea did not gain traction with his colleagues.

Decades later, Williams applied this same line of free-enterprise socialist thinking to use ICBC’s vast cash reserves to catalyze economic development and urban growth in Surrey City Centre.

In 1998, BC NDP Premier Glen Clark appointed Williams as the new chair of ICBC. After receiving ICBC’s board approval, Williams quickly leveraged ICBC’s $6 billion in reserves to acquire what was then a struggling shopping centre known as Surrey Place Mall.

With a $250 million investment, the mall was redesigned for a new university to serve the South of Fraser, and a galleria and office tower were added for the new ICBC headquarters. Bing Thom was brought in as the architect of the award-winning project, renamed Central City.

“Everyone thought I was nuts when we went into North Surrey. I was keen about it because North Surrey was a problem area with some of the poorest people in the region,” Williams told Daily Hive Urbanized in a previous interview.

“It was also where the youngest kids were coming for the next generation or two. I saw it as an opportunity, I’m from the Eastside and the Eastside is historically always ignored in this town. So I was determined that North Surrey should not be ignored, and we should do something transformational. It’s that Eastside background that led me to see Whalley as the new Eastside.”

The government of the day was considering building a new university in the Surrey area of Cloverdale. But Williams and Thom were able to convince the BC Minister of Advanced Education that the university should be in Whalley to help jump-start the creation of Surrey City Centre.

Williams was deeply attached to the idea that Metro Vancouver is a bi-nodal region, with downtown Vancouver being the anchor for the North of Fraser and the emerging Surrey City Centre area — replacing New Westminster — as the anchor for the South of Fraser. This is also reflected in Metro Vancouver Regional District’s regional growth plans.

In his memoir, Williams wrote, “… any new university should be right at the main SkyTrain station in the new town centre of Surrey to renovate what was a commercial slum. Bob Strachan, the founder of ICBC, had convinced me that using the reserves in insurance companies was an enormous opportunity for rebuilding British Columbia itself, rather than just investing in paper in Toronto or New York.”

But then, at the turn of the century, the BC NDP lost its grip on power. After Williams left ICBC in 2001, the BC Liberals (now BC United) sold Central City, and ICBC remained at its North Vancouver headquarters. This re-direction of the provincial Crown corporation also cancelled the City of Surrey’s plans to provide ICBC with the option to 17 acres in the immediate area for further redevelopment.

Williams subsequently wielded his influence for an alternative post-secondary institution strategy, and was able to convince Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) leadership to open the university’s initial satellite campus at Central City, now known as SFU Surrey.

Surrey City Centre’s recently completed tower projects and the area’s enormous development pipeline over the next 15-year horizon can be directly attributed to Williams’ transformative project of Central City.

The phone call that created Robson Square

The Vancouver Law Courts and Robson Square in the core of the downtown Vancouver peninsula were also a spur-of-the-moment imagining.

Williams recalls walking past the city blocks owned by the provincial government next to the heritage courthouse building (now the Vancouver Art Gallery) and phoning architect Arthur Erickson from a phone booth on the site.

“When WAC Bennett wanted to build a building like Bank of America in San Francisco on that site… I said, ‘no, come on, we can do something better than that.’ So I ended up phoning Arthur [Erickson] and saying we should trash the ‘Bank of America’ plans,” Williams told Daily Hive Urbanized, describing the 52-storey tower proposal by architect Ned Pratt at the time.

Erickson was commissioned to create a new design, and he did so with the help of Thom, one of his most renowned students, who was working in Singapore at the time.

Instead of a tall, bulky tower, they envisioned a tower “placed on its side” — stretching two city blocks between Nelson and Robson streets — complete with landscaping and extensive water features, including a lesser-known rooftop reflecting pool that spans half a block long.

“We embarked on the adventure to create Robson Square. I felt like Clark Kent in that phone booth! It was about then that I felt the only real limitation in British Columbia had been the lack of imagination,” he wrote in his memoir.

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