Part 1: The state of Vancouver's public engagement process

A common refrain amongst Vancouverites is to gripe (we do love a good gripe) that the city doesn’t listen to them. On matters of the nitty and gritty — a road closure here, an anachronistic bylaw there — many residents effuse on the details of urban living that could be improved, and are eager to share their opinions with anyone who will listen. But the fundamental question that’s always returned to is a perception that despite a feeling of shouting from rooftops, the folks at 12th and Cambie don’t seem to take notice. 

In this edition of Vancity Lookout’s City Hall Insider we wanted to put these perceptions to the test, to see what has or hasn’t changed with the city’s public engagement process, and hear what activists, experts, and insiders (and of course, the City of Vancouver) square the nature of these perceptions with the reality of these processes.

First up, Vancity Lookout attended a few open houses to get a sense of what members of the public are walking into at these events. We’ll dive into a few case studies of contentious consultations and recent changes to the city’s public engagement processes. Then we’ll wrap things up with a critical perspective and examples of best practices from a local community engagement expert.

Portrait of an open house

Twenty five people actually seems like a relatively good showing for an open house — this one sharing ideas for the development of the two-block campus at Vancouver’s City Hall — particularly on a beautiful, sunny Thursday evening in June. City staff from myriad departments were quick to offer their assistance or connect you with the right person to speak with you. Their guard goes up slightly on hearing they’re talking to a reporter working on a story but city staff are still happy to talk through their roles in the process and point a friendly community reporter in the right direction. 

The atmosphere is relaxed, with staff chatting amongst themselves, or in one-on-one conversations, as participants mingle around 15 to 20 presentation boards set up in a semicircle around the meeting room. No one is touching the obligatory coffee and cookies, but the water jug needs to be refilled — a testament to the heat of the day, hanging in the evening air outside, while air-conditioned cool wins out in the fluorescent-lit room.

By 7 p.m. there are very few people left at the open house, apart from groups of city staff chatting.   

It was a different story at an open house for the well-known (or notorious, depending how you feel) development planned for 1780 East Broadway — a project of three towers on the southeast corner of Commercial and Broadway. But most people know it, and call it, the Safeway site, where the grocery chain is the current and future tenant. 

• A side note — the site is owned by Crombie Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) and developed by Westbank. Crombie REIT is itself owned in part by Empire, the parent company of Sobeys, IGA, and Safeway. That connection means Safeway is locked in as the development’s anchor tenant. 

But back to the open house. The large display boards were still on hand, but now they circled half the Italian Centre’s grand ballroom like a shield wall. The main point of interest is a miniature model of the proposed buildings and surrounding amenities, being rolled out for public scrutiny for the first time. 

Even late in the event there are still a number of people eyeing up the model, asking questions, and talking amongst themselves. Paisley Woodward is one of the people at the centre of the action. Woodward is a spokesperson for No Safeway Mega Towers, a group in opposition to the current plans for development at the site. 

In advance of the open house, Woodward had told Vancity Lookout she was particularly interested to see the three dimensional model of the proposed development. 

“I'm really happy about [the model],” Woodward said. “Because the models really can show you [what’s proposed] with more accuracy than their online renderings do. The online kind of graphics that they do are terribly distorted and deceptive,” she said, particularly around the public space that’s being held up as a community amenity portion of the project.

In the Safeway site’s case, the potential for renderings and visuals of new developments to be deceptive has been shrewdly evaluated and mapped in an insightful pair of articles by Erick Villagomez. Since Villagomez’s articles were published in 2021, the site’s development team has withdrawn and resubmitted their application with updated renderings in May 2024. 

An Urban Design Panel convened by the city in July 2024 shared some of Woodward’s concerns about the public space portions of the project, saying the current garden courtyard space on level 2 (near the “Green House” sign, pictured below) “feels twisty and long, [and] appears more as circulation,” adding they should limit resident-only space and could strengthen the courtyard level with additional commercial space. 

Ultimately, the panel supported the project. They gave a handful of recommendations, including to improve some aspects of the public space and integrate it more with the “cultural context and grain of Commercial Drive.”   

Charles Campbell is also in attendance at the open house. The longtime writer, journalist, and Grandview-Woodland resident has been heavily involved in planning processes at the site for over a decade in a exercise he described as “Torture by Planning,” in a detailed and seering account of the city’s planning processes. 

“One frustration for the community is that the city’s open house process is really led by the developer. The city provides a very neutral overview of the planning background, and the developer chooses the information that works for its pitch,” Campbell wrote in The Tyee.

Zakir Suleman has been involved with community organizing surrounding the development of the Safeway site since 2014. For Suleman, the legacy of the site goes back even further, as his parents were involved in organizing against redevelopments there in the ‘90s. 

“The thing that we have to ask ourselves as people who are from, or want to make a life in this city is, how much do we want to shape the city that we live in? Because we can and we do, and the way that we do that is by coming together and pushing back,” Suleman told Vancity Lookout. 

Suleman, in his experience with community organizing and engagement, explained the basic premise for why urban planning engagement processes happen the way they currently do. He noted these are the practices taught at schools, and followed by the City of Vancouver. 

“When you want to make a substantive change to an area, unless you have an overriding planning document that covers that area, you're supposed to go and then talk to the people and do civic consultations around the changes proposed in that area. We do that because, simultaneously, there is a kind of perception of lived experience and expertise that is given from planners to the people who live in the neighbourhood. But more importantly, it's about mandate. 

What the civic engagement processes do is create a sort of pseudo-democratic process whereby urban planners, and more importantly, the city, which is a democratic organ, can say that they have engaged in democratic process with citizens around how they're going to subsequently change their area… It sort of doesn't matter whether or not we think [the Grandview Woodland Community Plan is still] relevant. The city thinks it's relevant. It should, because it's the way that it got its mandate for trying to make any changes to this neighborhood,” Suleman explained. 

Dive Deeper:Analysis of an SFU study, the findings of which are being taken seriously the city said, suggests that city-wide plans like the Vancouver Plan could perpetuate and further exacerbate gaps in the provision and equitable distribution of city resources, due to aggregations of neighbourhood level data. The city said “community plans will continue to provide detailed guidance,” but didn’t comment on the analysts’ suggestion that the city-wide plan could stifle the creation of new community plans.

Vancouver’s public engagement practices, policies, and staffing have changed significantly over the past two decades. Several observers identify 2008, the year Vision Vancouver took power at Vancouver City Hall, as a key time period, when city communications were consolidated and messaging became tightly controlled. 

Pete Fry is a two-term Vancouver city Councillor with the civic Green Party, and the son of longtime Vancouver Member of Parliament Hedy Fry. Pete spoke with Vancity Lookout over council’s summer break in a wide-ranging discussion covering the political conditions of the current council, and how the nature of civic bureaucracy, in Vancouver particularly, has shifted since the 2000’s.

“I think what's changed is that politics around local government has become far more sophisticated,” Fry told Vancity Lookout. 

“When Vision Vancouver came in [in 2008], they came in with this big, Super PAC Democrat from the United States, kind of political sophistication that hadn't really been seen in Vancouver before. [Previously] politics in Vancouver was a little bit more grassrootsy. It was, you know, local government. We had shorter terms – a term was like two years, and then three years, and now four years – it was a very different vibe. As far as political organization, it was very small potatoes,” Fry explained 

“Vision Vancouver came in with this sophisticated political machinery that changed everything,” he said. 

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