A secret plan and closed-door meetings mark controversial week for ABC party ahead of supportive housing vote

What happened: The Globe and Mail's Frances Bula obtained ABC’s secret plan for the Downtown Eastside (DTES), which was circulated among ABC councillors in fall 2024 as a confidential memo. 

The details: The leaked memo, written by Mayor Ken Sim’s chief of staff, Trevor Ford, called for quick, individual rezonings of DTES sites for private development, a comprehensive review of non-profit services in the neighbourhood, and a plan to help return DTES residents, specifically referring to Indigenous people, to their “home Nations,” if they want to move. 

• An updated version of the memo from January 2025, provided by the city to the Globe and Mail and CBC News, softened its criticism of the existing DTES area plan and removed the reference to Indigenous residents, referring rather to people disconnected from their previous support networks.   

The memo also suggested the “disproportionate” provision of mental health and substance-use services in the DTES has worsened the two crises in the neighbourhood. 

ABC response: In a statement to The Globe and Mail and CBC, Ford said the memo is an "internal working document meant to inform discussions and explore ideas."

"It has not been presented publicly because it is not a finalized strategy," Ford said in a statement. "Any actions taken from this document would be presented publicly as a motion through the standard processes."

Plan in action: The leaked memo also includes the policy to halt net new supportive housing investments – which Sim is attempting to pass later today at council – and some of the measures recently announced in the Vancouver Police Department’s “Task Force Barrage,” which would expand police presence and target organized crime in the DTES. 

• Coun. Rebecca Bligh – who was removed from the ABC caucus earlier in the month for not being a “core value fit,” according to the party – said she believes it was her concerns about ABC’s internal DTES plan that led to her expulsion from the party, according to the Globe and Mail.

Broken promises: ABC has broken its promise to develop plans for the DTES with non-profit sector experts and community leaders, according to a coalition of DTES organizations and individuals that participate in the Coordinated Community Response Network (CCRN). 

“The CCRN was deeply disappointed to learn that ABC elected officials and the Mayor’s Office staff chose to operate behind closed doors, failing to consult the very people they had committed to working with before and after the election,” they said in a statement. 

“The recently leaked Mayor’s Office ‘secret plan’ is unimaginative, predictable, and ultimately a recycling of previous failed approaches to city building… Its apparent objective is to systematically dismantle the DTES. There is nothing new in this ABC plan, its intention will only hurt the most vulnerable while opening the doors to unfettered gentrification,” the CCRN stated.  

• An open letter, signed by over 50 DTES non-profit and advocacy organizations that participate in CCRN, said the mayor’s recent framing of their work as part of a “poverty industrial complex” in the DTES is harmful and damages relationships with the community and its supporters while eroding public trust in the non-profit sector. 

“We agree that there is significant work to be done in the Downtown Eastside. However, lasting solutions must be developed in true partnership… The path forward cannot rely on division but must focus on tackling the root causes of these challenges,” the open letter argued. 

• At 1 pm today, the housing advocacy coalition Our Homes Can’t Wait is organizing a rally outside city hall to protest the mayor’s plans for the DTES. 

The open meeting requirement: The two non-ABC councillors at city hall – Bligh and the Green Party’s Pete Fry – echoed the criticism that ABC is governing behind closed doors, according to the Globe and Mail and CBC.

That alleged practice by ABC appears to go beyond this plan for the DTES. Earlier this week, Lisa Southern, the city’s integrity commissioner, found six park board commissioners breached the Park Board’s Code of Conduct policy, undermining public confidence in the park board by not complying with the open meeting requirement.  

• Local governments in British Columbia and across Canada are required, with some exceptions, to hold open meetings and govern in a transparent way. 

Southern found Commissioners Laura Christensen, Scott Jensen, Brennan Bastyovanszky, Angela Haer, Marie-Claire Howard, and Jas Virdi – all of whom were elected officials with the ABC party at the time – breached their obligations to hold meetings in public on four occasions in 2023 when they held informal private in-person meetings and group chat conversations about park board business relating to the removal of the Stanley Park bike lane and turf fields at Moberly Park. 

• An ABC party requirement – revealed in Southern’s report – for commissioners to vote together or face “appropriate disciplinary action,” from the party “appears to have played a role in the [comissioners’] failure to comply with the Vancouver Charter’s open meeting requirement,” Southern said. 

Responding to the decision, ABC’s president Stephen Molnar said the party disagrees with Southern’s interpretation and elected members will continue caucusing in private “to develop policy ideas and maintain alignment,” according to the Vancouver Sun. However, governance experts quoted in the piece said continuing this approach would likely open the city to litigation. 

• Dive deeper: Our look at Coun. Rebecca Bligh’s removal from ABC last week examines how the party disciplines dissent in their ranks. 

Supportive housing storm: Looking ahead to Mayor Sim’s motion today to halt supportive housing, there’s sure to be a lot of talk about spreading housing supports across the region. 

Since 2017, the city has committed land to “enable the creation” of approximately 1,400 supportive housing units, according to a staff report presented on Tuesday. Staff said the Metro Vancouver region will need approximately 2,900 net new supportive housing units over the next five years based on provincial housing targets, with about 75 per cent of those being placed outside Vancouver. 

• However, they noted mandatory provincial housing targets don’t include targets for supportive housing. 

The report also said there’s “a large proportional surplus” of supportive housing in Vancouver compared to the Metro Vancouver region. As noted in Sim’s motion, staff reiterated that 77 per cent of the region’s existing supportive housing units are in Vancouver, while the city has 25 per cent of the region’s total population.

Thought bubble: While the numbers support the need for other areas to build supportive housing as well, it’s worth questioning how a halt to net new supportive housing in Vancouver will encourage those projects to be advanced in other municipalities. 

How temporary will the proposed pause be if Vancouver’s support for new supportive housing projects is tied to “meaningful progress” in increasing this type of housing across the region? “Progress” and “meaningful progress” in the region are leaned on as the criteria to resume the program but aren’t defined in Sim’s motion.  

 Based on the current lack of supportive housing across the region, and the continuing struggle to approve it, the people in need of this sort of housing – and the medical and social support it also offers – will be the ones left waiting for help as the need increases over the next five years.