Vancouver councillors will hold a special meeting next week to pass a bylaw to immediately suspend Integrity Commissioner Lisa Southern. The move would stop any public reports about continuing investigations by Ms. Southern until as many as three months after any review into her work is done.City of Vancouver
The first integrity commissioner for the City of Vancouver has had her work suspended and the future of her office cast into question after a vote by the majority party on city council. The office’s investigations will not resume until a third-party review into the scope of her work is complete.
Councillors are holding an unprecedented August special meeting next week to pass a bylaw to enact the suspension immediately, a move that will halt any public reports about continuing investigations by commissioner Lisa Southern until as many as three months after any review into her work is done.
Councillors with ABC, the party that dominates city hall, say the suspension is because of comments the commissioner herself made in her annual report last December, noting that the role of the office is “not always clear.”
But ABC opponents on council are skeptical, as are those who keep watch on civic governance. All say the move is highly unusual and they question whether it is an effort to muzzle impending criticism by Ms. Southern.
The issue underlines the need for British Columbia to establish a provincewide, enforceable code of conduct, says Kirk LaPointe, a former Vancouver mayoral candidate, former ombudsman at the CBC and former executive director of the Organization of News Ombudsmen, an international group. Currently, each city decides on its own system, making those systems vulnerable to political whims, he said.
“This shouldn’t be a negotiation with individual councils. The province should be creating one. Ontario has one,” says Mr. LaPointe, who has criticized Vancouver’s suspension of the commission’s work.
Ms. Southern, in response to a request from The Globe and Mail, declined to comment, including on any continuing investigations.
“I feel it best in my role to not comment regarding the motion of council,” she said.
The Union of B.C. Municipalities and the provincial government have been urging cities for years to create codes of conduct and enforcement procedures, as B.C. sees more public complaints about the behaviour of local politicians and more disputes among council members.
Some councils have declined to create a code, while others that have done so have run into controversies when some members of a council end up sitting in judgment on others who are their political opponents.
Surrey was the first city to create an ethics commission in 2019, but then-mayor Doug McCallum’s council suspended the work of that commission six months before the 2022 civic election and then later terminated it altogether. (It has since been reinstated.)
Mr. LaPointe said Vancouver’s abrupt move to suspend the commissioner’s work “raises the suspicion about what they know about the complaints that might have been filed.” He said it is not necessary or common for an ombudsman’s work to be suspended while a mandate is being reviewed, despite claims to the contrary by ABC councillors.
The decision to suspend the commissioner’s work passed last week 6-2 on a surprise motion introduced at what is normally the city’s last meeting of the summer. The motion called for a broad review of the commission’s mandate.
Council called a special meeting set for next Tuesday to pass a bylaw to enact the change. There have been no such meetings in August for decades.
ABC Councillors Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou have argued the commissioner herself had made a recommendation in her annual report last December that there be some adjustments to her office’s mandate to provide more clarity.
“When something is broken, it needs to be fixed and that’s what we’re doing,” Mr. Montague said in an interview this week.
He said that “it’s just best practice” to suspend the work of the commission until the review is finished. That will take months, since council won’t appoint a third-party reviewer until at least late September and the motion stipulates that the commission’s work doesn’t have to start again until 90 days after any review is done.
Mr. Montague brushed aside suggestions the move is meant to muzzle criticism from Ms. Southern’s office, saying he knew of no such pending report. Anyone suggesting it “is making those allegations with zero fact.”
Ms. Southern’s report last December did not suggest a broad review was needed.
Instead, she made two specific recommendations: One was to spell out that it is not the commission’s job to “scrutinize political or policy decisions” and the second was to make it clear that all communications from the commission’s advisory board members should be “respectful and do not discriminate, harass, or defame any person.”
The commissioner has issued nine decisions in her two years in office, the last three involving ABC councillors or the mayor. But she dismissed two of those complaints, saying they had not done anything wrong by allowing a Rolling Stones publicity image on City Hall or, in the case of Mr. Montague, a former police officer, wearing a “thin blue line” badge.
In her most recent decision in February, the commissioner concluded the mayor was in violation of good conduct by refusing to allow one Parks Board commissioner, a new mother, to attend a meeting by Zoom.
Special to The Globe and Mail