Dunbar Lawyer Kept Vancouver Laughing

By Carol Volkart

As a city social planner, Jonathan Baker once used Gilbert & Sullivan-style verse to admonish a council member about using city stationery for fundraising.  The councillor cheerfully responded in kind.

He once told a Vancouver Sun reporter he wouldn’t run for mayor because if he won, he’d have to ask for a recount “to make sure I didn’t get in. Really, I don’t know if I could stand sitting through another zoning hearing. Even when I get paid for it I hate it.”

On another occasion, dissecting the truth of claims about the creation of affordable housing, he wrote: “It all depends on what we mean by truth. If we define ‘affordable’ as what someone could afford, then the statement has a certain truthyness but within a context of falsyness.”

Jonathan Benjamin Baker, who died June 18, was a long-time Dunbar resident and municipal lawyer. But that doesn’t begin to capture the buoyant essence of a man who cut a rollicking path through the city’s political and legal institutions, earning friends and opponents alike. Besides serving on Vancouver city council, school board, the Granville Island trust and working as a Vancouver city social planner, he was a professional-level flautist, devoted family man, raconteur and humourist who entertained the city for decades with wit as sharp as a scalpel.

Sun City Hall reporter Jeff Lee paid tribute to that wit in 2013, when Baker rejoined the Non-Partisan Association civic party, raising Lee’s hopes of a future of livelier comments. “Personally, I’d love to see Baker back in office, if only because it would be the end of boring, insipid council quotes,” he wrote.

Born in Atlantic City in 1938, Baker took a zig-zag path to his eventual spot in the Vancouver firmament. He was a talented flautist en route to a professional music career when he detoured into law, receiving his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School in 1963.

In 1964, he moved to Vancouver, where he experimented with numerous potential futures, including medical school, hotline radio host, and freelance music critic. In about 1967, he began a career at Vancouver City Hall, where he became deputy director of social planning and from 1972-75 was responsible for cultural planning.

But his future was not in the city hall bureaucracy, and he left to article with a law firm in Vancouver, and eventually launch his own political career. He was elected to the school board in 1978, ran against Mike Harcourt for mayor in 1982, and was on city council from 1986-1990. After that, he remained a player on the political scene, experimenting with various political parties along the way but never again holding office.

Plain-speaker With a ‘Wicked’ Sense of Humour

Whether he was at city hall, in a law office or in a courtroom, Baker was always notable for his humour, his strong opinions, and his imaginative use of language.

“Jonathan, I have to say, is one of the most politically connected people I know who never lets it go to his head,” The Sun’s Lee wrote in 2013. “He has a savage self-deprecating humor, and an opinion about everything.”

Jon Ellis, who worked with Baker in his roles as a city hall staff member, councillor and later Dunbar Residents’ Association board member, appreciated him as a plain-speaker with a “wicked” sense of humour.

“I quite enjoyed him. I loved working at city hall with him; we didn’t bullshit each other around. If he didn’t like something, he’d say so.”

Ellis also appreciated Baker’s love of language, recalling it wasn’t unusual to get a city hall memo from Baker in verse. “Jonathan appreciated language and the ability of language to transmit ideas.” A hint of the origins of that shone out of a home-made book displayed at Baker’s celebration of life. It contained his favourite poems, all in a young person’s handwriting, carefully indexed in categories such as “poems of mystery and terror,” “philosophy,” “cynicism,” and “romance.”

Ellis, who has a similar affinity for the language, recalled that when he wrote the minutes of a meeting in the style of Dante’s Purgatorio, matching the nine main points to the nine levels of purgatory, only two people “got it.” One was former city manager Fritz Bowers. The other was Baker, who wrote: “Lovely minutes. Dante would approve.”

Retired architect and planner Michael Geller, who had his clashes with Baker but said they became friends over the years and had “lots of fun together,” had his own examples of Baker’s wit. “He was a brilliant man and will be missed.”

He said Baker was “an intelligent and thoughtful voice on city council,” and he appreciated his position when Geller was trying to get approvals for individual boat berths at Deering Island. “Southlands resident Jennifer Maynard vociferously told council that boats should have no place on Deering Island,” Geller recalled. “Jonathan responded that she was right, but they did belong in the adjacent waters!  I eventually obtained approval for half the berths I was seeking.”

Then there was the time Geller asked Baker – as a lawyer this time – for a legal opinion on building houses on Deering Island. While it was zoned residential, the city’s planning director Ray Spaxman said it had always been used for industrial purposes, and that the residential zoning was an accident. Geller will never forget Baker’s opinion: “Zoning is like pregnancy. It is a blessed event whether accidental or not.”

Fighting for a Say for Neighbourhoods

Baker brought his strong opinions – and quips – with him when he settled in Dunbar with his wife Dominique and their two children, Gregory and Nathalie. They bought a home on West Kind Edward in 1970, and Baker did his bit for the local community by joining the Dunbar Residents’ Association board.

Long-time DRA board member Sonia Wicken said he was a valued member of the board for many years. “His knowledge of the workings and ways of dealing with the city was so helpful.”

Helen Spiegelman, who served on the DRA board with Baker when she moved to Dunbar in 1987, said he was still on city council at the time and recalled him as “a very visible presence in Vancouver’s political culture.”

She noted that Baker and Ellis, a fellow Dunbar resident and DRA board member, had worked together at city hall during the 1970s T.E.A.M. (The Electors’ Action Movement) era, which focused “insistently” on neighbourhoods. Between them, they “developed a city planning approach that elevated neighbourhoods, alongside city hall, as the locus for civic work,” she recalled.

She supported the philosophy in her own DRA work: “The best planning and ongoing management comes from the ground up, between people who share a space, take care of that space and cherish its history and particular character.”

It might seem counterintuitive, but Baker and Ellis were among a number of Dunbar residents who opposed the city’s 1990s’ Community Visions strategy, in which residents were asked to draw up plans for how they wanted their communities to develop. Baker dismissed the Community Vision workshops as “coffee klatches” that let residents talk, but excluded them from real decision-making.

It’s “simply a make-work project for lower-echelon bureaucrats in the planning department,” he scoffed in one memo about the plan. “I note that the Mayor stated that the plan is not written in stone. He is correct. It is written in Jell-O.”

Ellis said he and Baker insisted that the plan include a mechanism for local consultation. “Not necessarily control, but we wanted a say.” They understood that whatever plan was settled on at the time, “everybody is going to age and we need a neighbourhood that has a mechanism for change. We wanted to set up a mechanism whereby the change involves us.”

That aspect of the plan was watered down to the point that “it was a token,” he said, and future councils ignored it. “It was a 10-year waste of time, except that it got a lot of people involved in the community.”

Fighting Eco-density and Top-Down Planning

Baker gave Eco-density the same searing treatment. In a copy of a 2008 letter addressed to the Vancouver Courier, he said the policy was summed up by Groucho Marx’s quote that “politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, analyzing it incorrectly and applying the wrong solutions.”

At a time of great scientific uncertainty about climate change, he wrote, city hall believed it was doing its bit to save the world by replacing single-family neighbourhoods with high-density buildings. “Old buildings have to be demolished and carted off to the landfill. New construction takes lots of energy. Apartments and their common areas with elevators, lights, heat, air conditioning and other facilities demand enormous amounts of energy and generate lots of carbon dioxide.”

Nor was the proposed alternative of infill, small houses in yards, any better. It will happen, he wrote, “at the expense of trees and vegetation which of course photosynthesize CO2 to produce oxygen. How good is that?”

A 2008 Thunderbird story records his contempt for a pilot project for laneway houses, which he called reminiscent of the “bad old days of 1968” when top-down planning from city hall was the norm. Instead of asking what kind of laneway housing citizens want, council should be asking neighbourhoods whether they want it at all, he said.

Vision Vancouver also got the Baker treatment for that same top-down planning and what he saw as its dismissal of neighbourhoods. Vancouverites were ready to “toss the bastards out,” he told the Georgia Straight in 2013.“Vision is engaging people by enraging people.”

He said that when voters’ only options were Vision and NPA, “two parties of the same persuasion and no choice, no real alternative, that’s an antidemocratic abomination.”

Saying Goodbye to Dunbar

Baker was equally blunt about the last phase of his Dunbar life – selling his home in 2015 for $3 million and buying a $1.5-million seaside home in Sechelt.

“[T]he city has become a commodity,” he said in a March 2016 Bloomberg News story. “One group like myself has bought early, we were lucky. But we no longer knew our neighbours. It’s empty.”

Also, he didn’t want to risk missing out if offshore demand dropped. “All these prices are crazy – it really is crazy,” he said. “I can’t imagine this thing continuing.”

The Bloomberg story, about the phenomenon of city dwellers selling out for large sums and settling in smaller communities, noted that the Bakers’ five-bedroom house had been flipped several times to other buyers, and at that point stood empty. But, said Baker: “You can’t be too critical when you’ve benefited from it.”

A Devoted Father, a Man of Integrity

Another side of Baker – as a sometimes goofy but affectionate friend, family man and father – was highlighted at a Sept. 7 celebration of his life, held at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Haig Farris, a now-retired lawyer who was a law-school friend of Baker’s, began his speech with “Zut alors!” in honour of a phrase Baker liked to use in court whenever things got confusing. Baker’s marriage to a Frenchwoman had given him a smattering of French, so he could answer a French CBC reporter’s questions if they were simple enough. Once, when the questions got beyond him, Baker began replying in English with a fake French accent: “Well, you zzeee, eet is like this!”

As his children Nathalie and Gregory Baker recalled, their Dunbar home reverberated with the recordings he’d bring home from Ward Music, with rowdy games he’d always be ready to play, and when birthdays came around, the kids could expect unusual cards full of extravagantly written promises or advice from their father.

“Because of his interests, he was many things to many people, but to me, he was my wonderful dad, a devoted father who always put us first,” said Nathalie. When she was growing up, “even after a long day in court, at the office or at a council meeting, my dad would come home and happily play with us, play a game of Marco Polo with us, chase us round the living room with a blindfold on, he would let me do crazy hairstyles with the little hair he had left and he let us paint his toenails. I don’t recall ever feeling like he didn’t have time for me or that I was in the way. We always came first.”

Nathalie, who went on to work with her father when she became a lawyer herself, treasures memories of talking over his cases with him when she was young. “I have such vivid recollections of the discussions we had as we sat on the couch in our living room. He genuinely cared what I had to say and he valued my opinion.”

Nathalie also revealed a little more about the man behind the familiar public persona.

“As many of you know, my dad had a great sense of humour and he loved to laugh. He was known for his sharp, sometimes cutting wit; he was also genuine and refused to do or say anything he didn’t agree with or believe in. This probably didn’t serve him very well in politics, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t do it any other way. He refused to be anyone other than himself and I always admire him for that.”

She said her father was “a man of exacting principles, integrity and honour,” always ready to help and defend the underdog — and not just in his legal practice. She recalled an incident when she was about five years old when her father spotted a woman lying crumpled on the sidewalk on West 41^st. He stopped the car, got out to check on her, and saw she had a black eye. A man came out of a building nearby and told her father to mind his own business, but Baker wasn’t fazed. He helped the woman up and told the man off. “Many other people would have ignored it and driven past, but not my dad, and I was so proud,” Nathalie said.

Circling Back to Music

Although he chose law over music as a career, disappointing the virtuoso U.S. flautist William Kincaid, who had taken him on as student when he was still in high school, music remained important to Baker throughout his life. When he retired and moved to Sechelt, he took up his flute again and joined the Sunshine Coast Community Orchestra.

“From 1970 on, I’d pick it up occasionally,” Baker told the Coast Reporter’s Rik Jesperson in 2019. “But when I got up here, [my interest in playing] was basically reborn.”

And that’s where his old DRA board colleague Helen Spiegelman was surprised to see him during a trip to the Sunshine Coast long after both had left Dunbar.

As she wrote in a remembrance of Baker for the fall edition of the Dunbar Residents’ Association Newsletter, “In a curious twist of fate, our paths crossed again in an encounter that I still remember with awe. We were on the Sunshine Coast visiting our own kids who had settled there. We were in the audience listening to a performance of the Sunshine Coast Community Orchestra when I looked up and saw Jonathan Baker, of all people, making exquisite music on a flute.

“His poise and precision were familiar from the person I remembered on the DRA board, but the soul of a musician was something I’d never have guessed was there.

“He seems to have lived happily and gracefully ever after.”