ABC Party found to have breached Vancouver council open meeting rules

This week, the city’s Integrity Commissioner Lisa Southern finally released a long-awaited report on the conduct of elected officials at City Hall, specifically surrounding a complaint that the ABC party was holding private meetings with six or more council members where they moved city business forward. 

The Vancouver Charter, the legally binding provincial legislation that governs the city’s municipal government, requires council meetings to be open to the public, unless the meeting topic falls within certain limited exceptions, like real estate transactions or HR matters. 

Southern found the entire ABC party caucus, including councillors Sarah Kirby Yung, Brian Montague, Lisa Dominato, Mike Klassen, Lenny Zhou, and Peter Meiszner, as well as former ABC councillor Rebecca Bligh, breached the city’s code of conduct on two occasions. Mayor Ken Sim was also found to have breached the code on one of those occasions. 

Democracy is undermined when the open meeting principle is breached, Southern wrote, because it limits public involvement and oversight in how government decisions are made, while undermining the legitimacy of those decisions.  

The Mayor’s Office provided Vancity Lookout with a statement from Sim, who strongly disagreed with elements of the report. 

“Caucusing is a normal and accepted practice at every level of Canadian democracy. Elected officials are expected to talk with one another, share ideas, and work through complex issues. That is how thoughtful and effective decisions are made. It is not misconduct,” Sim said. 

In the report, Southern addressed and dismissed the argument that caucusing, the meeting of members of a political party, absolved ABC’s members of their obligations under the Vancouver Charter to hold open meetings. 

“It is the nature of the group and the nature of the discussion that are the key factors in determining if a gathering is a ‘meeting,’ and not the label given to the meeting or the political affiliation of the attendees,” Southern wrote.

ABC has previously said that its members would continue to meet in private, despite Southern’s findings that the practice has violated provincial open meeting laws. Responding in February to a related investigation at the park board level, ABC president Stephen Molnar said the party would continue to caucus, according to the Vancouver Sun.

The province’s government watchdog, BC’s Ombudsperson Jay Chalke, called Molnar’s comments a “disturbing repudiation of the rule of law,” in a formal letter to the province in March.

“It's not for [Sim and ABC] to suggest, oh, we don't have to go by those rules because we think differently… Mayor Sim and ABC feel that they’re above the law, which they are not,” Green party Councillor Pete Fry, who brought the complaint, told Vancity Lookout.

“If we're going to be governors and lawmakers in our own right, we need to [adhere to]... the legislative construct that allows us to be in that governance role,” Fry said, referring to the Vancouver Charter.

Fry said he’d been suspicious of how supposed last-minute amendments “would come forward with fully cooked new directions” and be unanimously approved by ABC councillors, making him suspect it was a result of backroom conversations. 

However, it wasn’t until Fry received information from former ABC park board commissioner Laura Christensen about ABC’s internal voting rules that Fry felt he had enough information to make a formal complaint, which he submitted in August 2024. 

Those voting rules included required, or whipped, votes on budget items and motion brought forward by Mayor Sim, advanced notice if ABC members can’t support their colleagues’ motions, and group decisions made through discussion when deciding whether or not to support motions brought by non-ABC councillors. Southern dismissed this part of the complaint, finding that, despite being written prescriptively, the evidence showed the rules were treated as a guideline and weren’t strictly adhered to. 

Fry’s complaint also included six instances where he believed the ABC caucus had held private meetings that improperly moved city business forward. Of those six circumstances, Southern ruled that two breached the city’s code of conduct.

In these instances, city councillors and the mayor “are depriving the public of participation in the policy development and decision-making processes that serve to build public trust and confidence in local government,” according to Southern’s report. 

In both cases, the emails “showed a progression and evolution of draft amendments through communications with a quorum of Council Members present that ultimately came before Council in the form of last-minute amendments. What came before Council in these instances had clear origins and were substantively connected with the discussions and drafting that took place in the email chains,” Southern said. 

In February 2023, political staff in the Mayor’s Office emailed all seven ABC councillors to propose amendments to an upcoming council report. In the email thread, the councillors discussed the wording of the amendments. Feedback from that discussion was then incorporated into the amendments as they were presented and unanimously passed by ABC councillors at the public meeting.

When Coun. Meiszner was asked by Southern why the discourse did not happen in a public meeting, he said doing amendments “on the fly in chambers is messy,” according to the report. 

Coun. Lisa Dominato told Southern the email chain could be violating the open meeting requirement, but also pointed to the “complexity of working within the open meeting requirement and a political party system,” according to the report.  

In a July 2023 email thread, ABC councillors and Mayor’s Office staff shared and discussed amendments to funding recommendations for recreation facilities at Moberly and Ross parks in South Vancouver. 

At one point in the thread, Coun. Montague requested clarification, asking “are we voting” for or against one of the staff recommendations. When shown this correspondence by Southern, Montague said he could not reconcile this with his testimony that councillors did not make decisions before council meetings. 

Montague then refused to answer further questions, saying “he felt the outcome was predetermined, he had lost confidence in the [investigation], and did not think it was fair,” according to the report. Montague did not respond to Vancity Lookout’s request for an interview or comment about the report. 

When asked by Southern about Montague's question in the email thread, three of the ABC councillors said they didn’t know what Montague meant. Mayor Ken Sim said Montague appeared to be “sharing his opinion,” while Coun. Lisa Dominato interpreted it as “seeking alignment or consensus.” 

Coun. Rebecca Bligh told Southern that the voting comment “crossed a line and raised concerns,” according to the report. It’s interesting to note that Bligh had interviews with Southern both before and after being removed from ABC. Bligh declined to comment for this story, telling Vancity Lookout she was “still digesting” the lengthy report.

In the year that passed between when the complaint was filed and the report was issued, there have been other instances of decisions being improperly made behind closed doors, Fry alleged, including the lack of transparency about a $5 million decision to fund Task Force Barrage in February. 

Fry described one situation, which happened after the complaint was made and so was not captured in the report, where a motion about the Railtown industrial area was “radically changed” with a last-minute amendment, which had been written eight hours before by staff in the Mayor’s Office, Fry said. 

“It did a huge injustice to the business people and the stakeholders in the Railtown area who waited for hours to speak, and spoke very passionately and eloquently about their perspective on the motion that was on the deck. Then to disrespect them to that extent by changing the motion radically, denying them an opportunity to even comment,” Fry said. 

It’s fine and fair for there to be amendments in the moment, Fry said, but he feels it disrespects the process when “big, radical amendments that fundamentally change the entire intention” of a motion are introduced that way.

While ABC is not above the law, the current code of conduct rules mean there will be no punishment or sanctions for Sim or ABC councillors in this case. That’s because city council, not the integrity commissioner or the province, is responsible for deciding whether to sanction its members, and cannot act when a majority of its members are the ones who would be sanctioned.

“It should not be the case that sanctions become impossible to impose if the impugned conduct is carried out by a majority of members,” Ombudsperson Chalke wrote in March, when the same situation occurred at the park board level. 

It’s a problem that needs a solution, according to Fry, OneCity Councillor Lucy Maloney, and COPE Councillor Sean Orr. The opposition councillors have announced they plan to bring a motion this fall “to enhance the Code of Conduct, and add appropriate recourse to violations under the Code, or ask the province to step in,” according to a press release. 

That recourse could include giving the integrity commissioner the power to impose sanctions without a council vote, and the ability to compel evidence during investigations, Fry told Vancity Lookout. 

But for now, the lack of punishment and ABC’s position that they aren’t doing anything wrong means it will likely be “more of the same,” Fry said, when it comes to last-minute amendments discussed beforehand by ABC officials. 

In providing Sim’s statement about the report to Vancity Lookout, Taylor Verrall, the mayor’s press secretary, included “additional context” that Fry’s complaint “will ultimately cost taxpayers around $200,000.” 

But what Verrall didn’t mention was that having taxpayers foot the bill for costs like legal fees for councillors and the mayor is a choice that will be up to those individuals to make. Based on the Vancouver Charter and a city by-law, councillors can get their legal fees paid by the city with a 2/3rds vote of council at an in-camera meeting. 

While there are strict confidentiality rules about these meetings, Verrall confirmed that a portion of the $200,000 estimate is related to covering the mayor and council’s legal fees, suggesting ABC members will attempt to have taxpayers cover these costs during a sanctioned private meeting. 

The estimate also includes wages and billable hours for city staff and the integrity commissioner, Verrall said in response to follow-up questions. Paying a councillor’s legal fees is standard practice for the city, Fry said, adding he expects the actual cost of the investigation to be higher than $200,000.

The irony of the situation is that, due to in-camera confidentiality, taxpayers will never know how much they may or may not have been charged for an investigation into improper secret meetings.