Vancouver city councillors will vote on a motion Tuesday to begin a review of the city’s integrity commissioner, which will result in a temporary suspension of the commissioner’s ongoing work.
Councillors from the ruling ABC Party, including Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou, have said the third-party review will clarify powers of Lisa Southern’s office in dealing with complaints against councillors and elected officials.
But critics have claimed the suspension of the ethics watchdog’s work will have a chilling effect on democracy in B.C.’s biggest city, and temporarily remove an avenue for public oversight of elected officials.
The meeting will be council’s last one before a scheduled summer break, with council set to return in September.
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.
“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 opposition Green Party Coun. Pete Fry says 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 told Gloria Macarenko, host of CBC’s On The Coast, last week.
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.
“By releasing the reports effectively the last working day [before summer break], before mayor and council were able to effectively shut [the commissioner] down … basically, the mayor has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Bastyovanszky told CBC News.
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 suspend the integrity commissioner’s 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 of the Tuesday motion.
“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.