By Carol Volkart
Dunbar residents who recall the surveys, the workshops, the meetings, that went into creating a plan for our community in the late 1990s may be surprised to learn who’ll be deciding the future of neighbourhoods like ours in the future.
Under Bills 13 and 15, both expected to be passed this month, the provincial government would gain control over virtually every aspect of municipal planning if the legislation goes through unchanged.
Bill 13 gives the province power over zoning, building permits, affordable housing, sign bylaws and even landscaping requirements. It changes the Vancouver Charter, once the signifier of the city’s autonomy, so any local rule “has no effect” if it doesn’t align with provincial rules.
Bill 15 gives the province control over “provincially significant” infrastructure projects, including transit-oriented developments (TODs), which cover much of Vancouver. As a result, the province will have near-total planning authority in our city.
Premier David Eby says the bills are needed to fast-track housing, infrastructure and other projects in the face of a housing crisis and threats from the U.S.
Critics, including the Union of B.C. Municipalities, many B.C. mayors, and advocates for community planning, say they are an anti-democratic over-reach of provincial powers that remove municipal authority and silence the public.
“In British Columbia, democracy is being redefined—not through elections or referendums, but through legislation with quiet names and sweeping consequences,” Erick Villagomez of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning says in an article in the Vancouver Sun and Spacing Vancouver. The new bills “replace negotiation with command,” giving the province “unprecedented authority to override local planning, ignore zoning bylaws, and silence public consultation.”
The new approach is sharply different from what Dunbar residents experienced nearly three decades ago, when they spent a year and a half working with the city to create the Dunbar Community Vision, approved by council in 1998. It was part of the CityPlan process, in which the city set overall directions, then supported residents as they planned how to move their community toward them.
Remarkably for today’s times, the city stipulated the changes were to be done “in a way and at a scale and pace that suits the community.”
Plus, it was meticulous about ensuring the resulting plans truly represented what the majority wanted. After a general survey sent to every Dunbar household and business, there was a second, random one to ensure the initial one accurately reflected public opinion.
Since then, the importance of citizens’ input has been downgraded to the point that the 1990s’ exercise seems unthinkable. Over the years, councils have cut citizens’ speaking times, encouraged them to comment by phone or write instead of in person, relied more and more on online information meetings and surveys, and prioritized “stakeholder” groups over the public in developing plans. In 2023, it repealed more than 70 volunteer-created community plans and visions like Dunbar’s, on the grounds they were no longer relevant given the ongoing development of a new Vancouver Plan.
But now, city councils themselves are being downgraded as they lose their authority to the provincial government.
And many are not happy.
“Transferring power to the province will not lead to better decisions,” Union of B.C. Municipalities president Trish Mandewo told the Northern Beat online news site. “Over the past couple of years, we have seen the province changing the priorities in how they approach legislation, and in some cases, ideas that are developed at a political level have been rushed into law without appropriate and meaningful consultation with stakeholders.”
Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie called Bill 15 “a dangerous piece of legislation” that enables the province to override “just about any regulation or anything that the municipal government has set in place to safeguard the interests of the city and the residents.”
In the same article, Sparwood Mayor David Wilks told the provincial government: “If you want to run the District of Sparwood, just tell me you want to run the District of Sparwood and don’t have a mayor and council.”
Vancouver City Council has not spoken out against the new legislation. That follows its pattern of embracing – and even going beyond – earlier provincial legislation imposing new urban densities provincewide, while other municipalities pushed back.
Villagomez said citizens might be a lot more vocal if they had more information. But he said the legislation has been drafted in such “dense, technical, and opaque” terms that it’s hard for both the public and opposition politicians to understand. “Few outside of legal or planning circles fully understand their implications, which, perhaps, is part of the point.
“If the public knew what was at stake, the response might look very different. If the opposition had the full picture, their questions might grow sharper.
“Everyone deserves to know how profoundly these changes reshape the way decisions are made in our cities. Until then, the transformation continues—quietly, but radically.”
As for the practical impacts of such legislation, it means city rules don’t count if provincial ones say otherwise. For example, if a neighbourhood plan limits a development to six storeys, a developer could propose 20 if the province allows it. “The City must process the application, even if it violates its own plans,” said Villagomez. “This isn’t just a change in scale. It’s a change in who gets to decide what cities look like.”
In many cases, he said, the decisions will be made by people who don’t even live in the communities they’re reshaping. “They are detached from the everyday realities of the neighbourhoods their policies transform—from the local parks, corner stores, transit stops, and civic rhythms that give a place its character and needs its nuance.”
When speed is king, everything that makes urban planning worth doing – “public trust, community vision, and the legitimacy that comes from dialogue rather than decree” – is lost. “When local planning becomes provincial command, cities stop being self-governing communities. They become construction sites with a script.”
But most important may be the message the new legislation sends to citizens.
Three decades after the city took pains to ensure that Dunbar residents were carefully consulted about the future of their neighbourhood, the concerns of those same residents aren’t part of the picture. Their voices don’t count. Nor do those of the city council members they elected to represent them.
The damage may not only be to livability, says Vancouver Sun columnist Doug Todd, “but also to democracy, and especially to the public’s already wavering trust in its elected leaders.”
(The legislature is currently on a break, and will sit again May 26 to 29. Those who wish to express an opinion on this issue still have time to contact Premier David Eby and local MLA Dallas Brodie.)
Thank you for documenting, elaborating and spelling out the implications of this change.
Thanks, Katarina. Just trying to spread the word!
Excellent, thank you for reporting!! Great commentary
Douglas Todd so right on on many issues
Thanks for reading, Ute!
Excellent article, Carol. Thank you for outlining all the implications of these Bills. History shows us that society becomes much more vulnerable to dissent and even possibly violence if the voices of the citizens are ignored. In the end, the very few profit over the needs of the many. I really appreciated the comment by the mayor of Sparwood. Will it end up that we don’t need mayors and councils?
Thanks for the comment, Carmen. It’s so important that people know what’s happening so they can even express their dissent — or agreement. But for all our new communication devices, it seems we know less and less about what governments of all levels are really doing. I’d be interested to know how many Dunbar residents were aware of these bills.