r/BCpolitics

B.C.'s wildfires and fossil fuels: We need to connect the dots

You can disagree with a politician without demonizing a religious community or its symbols. Throwing around the word “terrorism”
Absolutely done with this woman, what has she done for our wild fires?

Another poster recently asked about how the “Metro Vancouver Accountability Charter” is funded. Good question, but I hope the mods will permit me to take a deeper dive into the Charter’s contents. 

It’s important to consider how the Charter is funded, but I’m more interested in what it does. The Charter is clearly a campaign piece, as evidenced by the New West Progressive party’s authorization. But does it hold up as a blueprint for fiscally responsible governance reform in Metro Vancouver and its member municipalities?   

Let’s take a look:

1. The Charter and website make little or no effort to show that it addresses a proven need, has potential to solve a problem, or will save taxpayer’s money:

• Want to learn about Metro Vancouver? Looking for evidence about the problem that this Charter aims to solve? The Charter offers nothing. 
• Curious about the history and future of the Auditor General for Local Gov’t? Wondering what the problem is that requires BC municipalities to be reviewed by a higher level of government? Nothing.
• Want to know how much money these pledges would save, and how? Again, nothing.

It is difficult to take seriously a proposal for improving municipal governance when it takes no effort to justify itself, to demonstrate a need, or to provide a basis for its recommended interventions.

2. More effort has gone into promoting this as a campaign talking point than to crafting a sensible policy in the first place:

According to a quick Google search, the Charter has been promoted by the New West Progressives, Mr. Fontaine, and other signatories in news coverage and on social media at least 150 times. Yet, the Charter offers almost no justification for itself. Imagine if all that marketing labour had been directed toward creating a detailed and well thought-out plan – it might not have been so full of obvious omissions and contradictions, as I’ll show next. 

3. The “charter” itself, as a 5-point pledge, at best offers almost nothing, and contradicts the basic values of its authors:

• “Ethical Compensation” – There is nothing particularly ethical about forgoing compensation when the gesture itself functions as a campaign tactic. A genuinely ethical approach would begin with a careful review of whether the current practice is transparent, just, equitable, fiscally responsible, etc. That said, prioritizing a symbolic gesture regarding something so fiscally trivial (mayoral compensation makes up one ten-thousandth of Metro Vancouver’s budget) suggests that the Charter and its authors may be more concerned with virtue signalling than with meaningful budget reform.
• “Transparency” – as others have already pointed out, an independent review of the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant is already ongoing, and it appears to be fairly robust. Why does the Charter continue to call for an independent review when an independent review is already underway? How have Daniel Fontaine, Kash Heed, Ken Sim, Linda Annis, Colleen Hardwick, Kirk LaPoint, Dylan Kruger, and Mike Starchuk all managed to overlook this?
• “Smart Governance” – A smaller board might be advisable for the sake of efficiency, but this is a perverse strategy from the would-be Mayor of a relatively small Metro Van municipality, which could diminish the ability of smaller municipalities like New Westminster to participate in regional governance and oversight. Perhaps more importantly, it’s fiscally irresponsible: the cost of a direct election of a Metro Van “Regional Leadership Council of Mayors” would be enormous (for example, in today’s dollars, the 2015 Translink referendum cost over $8 million).
• “Independent Oversight” – We had an Auditor General for Local Government from 2012 to 2021, which cost $2-3 million per year. Despite the cost, there is little or no evidence that it saved municipalities or taxpayers any money. Mr. Fontaine’s municipality, New Westminster, was reviewed by the AGLG in 2016 with regard to “Managing Police Agreements and Police Budget Oversight”. The AGLG’s 46-page report broadly endorsed the City’s existing practices, and made just three organizational recommendations, none of which indicated savings for the municipality. Yet, the cost of researching and producing this report would have been significant. This is an example of the UBCM’s reasoning for opposing the AGLG: it costs taxpayers without providing demonstrable benefits.
• “Critical Services Review Within 90 days of election, launch an independent core service review” – This proposal is neither new nor especially innovative, fiscally or electorally. In New Westminster, this has been a hobby horse of the right for 15 years: for example, in 2011, Mayoral Candidate James Crosty campaigned on: “a core service review for cost saving opportunities, to identify duplicate services, redundant programs, and reduce red tape”. The problem is, city staff already do this, audits already do this, and as noted above, even a provincial AGLG failed to achieve savings in this lane. Yet, this recommendation suggests expanding Council’s role from governance into micromanagement. What costs are Mr. Fontaine and the other signatories proposing, and what for? This is especially pertinent given that City Council’s already perform this role twice or more each month, every time City Staff field questions from Council, and answer them publicly.

 

Bottom line: The Charter simply doesn’t serve the goals or live up to the standards it demands. Three of the five items entail significant new expenditures that will likely exceed $10 million. Where is the evidence these initiatives will save more than they cost?

The cost of AGLG’s budget, the cost of a direct election, and the cost of a core services review will easily total more than 10 million, yet the only clearly identifiable savings amount to roughly $500,000 (the approximate value of mayoral remuneration in 2024, should this promise be kept). This deficit is inconsistent with the authors’ claimed commitment to fiscal responsibility.

Accountability, transparency, and fiscal responsibility are important. But accountability reforms should meet the same standards they impose on others.

Fontaine and Heed have had months, if not years, to explain why existing oversight mechanisms are insufficient and provide evidence regarding the costs and expected benefits of their proposals. To date, they have provided little evidence about any of these questions.

We should hold our elected officials to higher standards than those demonstrated here. The Metro Vancouver Accountability Charter looks less like a serious reform package and more like a collection of politically appealing slogans still searching for supporting evidence.