Vancouver’s mayor says he’s frustrated the province has yet to make legal changes that would permit the abolition of the city’s elected park board.
Ken Sim asked the provincial government to amend the Vancouver Charter in December 2023, a critical step in his plan to dissolve the Vancouver Park Board.
The following spring, Premier David Eby signalled the government was “committed” to making the changes after the 2024 provincial election, should he be re-elected.
Those changes haven’t happened fast enough, Sim said Wednesday.
“We are frustrated right now, I just want to be very clear, we have done everything the province has asked of us,” he said.
“We have support from all three First Nations … when (the province) asked for a financial plan, we came back with it, the unions are on board.”
Eby, meanwhile, said he recognized the issue was a priority for the mayor and had been working with the city “to ensure all the ducks are in a row.”
However, he pinned the lack of action on the file on slow progress on the provincial legislative agenda.
“There are a lot of new MLAs, they are finding their feet, they are asking questions they need to ask, but it has resulted in a reduced legislative schedule, and the park board, unfortunately, was a casualty of that,” Eby said.
Abolishing the park board has proven controversial.
Sim campaigned on keeping and fixing the elected body in the 2022 municipal election, but months later, reversed course, saying it was too broken to repair.
Sim argues that cutting the body would eliminate red tape and redundancies, while saving the city about $7 million a year.
Critics — including four sitting park board commissioners, three who initially ran under Sim’s ABC Slate — say it fulfils an important democratic role, and that Sim doesn’t have the mandate to eliminate it.
Community centre associations and the opposition BC Conservatives have also come out against scrapping the park board.
As the process drags on, the prospect of the park board’s future becoming a campaign issue in the 2026 municipal election grows.
That’s something former park board chair Aaron Jasper says he’d prefer to see.
“If he feels that strongly about it, then he should make this a key part of his platform and run on it in the next election,” Jasper said.
“Focus on the important stuff. We have a mental health crisis, we have an opioid crisis, we have a housing crisis. There are so many more important things.”