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On Wednesday, May 20, a highly anticipated motion was set to come to Vancouver City Council. Mayor Ken Sim sought to pull back parts of the Energize Vancouver bylaw in order to seek housing affordability.
Or so he said. Critics of the motion, including opposition councillors, said it was designed to curry favour to developers and was a huge environmental step back.
Former city councillor and minister of housing and municipal affairs Christine Boyle wrote a letter to council, imploring it to delay changes to building code and climate policy.
So yeah, it was controversial. And, since there were so many speakers, the vote had to be moved to the next day.
But while that motion made headlines, there was another motion on the same day that revealed more about how city council operates these days.
That would be Green Party councillor Pete Fry’s motion, Understanding and Prioritizing Sex Worker Safety Policies and Resources. It sought to restore the staffing of the city’s sex work social planner position to two people instead of the one that it was reduced to earlier this year in the wake of budget cuts.
At City Hall, council heard from a litany of speakers, the vast majority of whom were in favour of the motion, and many that spoke from experience working with or as sex workers. To be frank, it was harrowing to hear their stories from the frontlines and a bit horrifying as they, person to person, detailed how they and the community at large have been affected by the loss of the additional staff member.
After the many speakers finished, councillors Fry and Sean Orr spoke about how hard it was to hear their accounts. Fry recalled a recent conversation with former B.C. attorney general Wally Oppal, who authored Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry and who criticized the City for getting rid of the second worker.
Then, ABC councillor Lisa Dominato put forward an amendment to the motion. To say it watered the original motion down would be an understatement. It drowned the thing. There was no commitment to rehiring the worker. There were platitudes about presence in the community and few to no actionable items.
Of course it makes sense that the ruling party wasn’t going to commit to rehiring a worker it cut as a result of the “Zero Means Zero” budget that it approved. But ABC also wasn’t going to outright reject a motion that would help sex workers, because then the case could be made that the party voted against a motion that would help sex workers. Which… it did. It just did it with an amendment in a way that makes it less cut and dried.
It’s not a new tact by ABC. As councillor Orr noted, it’s something that the party has taken to of late. ABC continued that tradition on Wednesday. The next two motions, by Orr and OneCity councillor Lucy Maloney, were also amended by ABC to varying degrees.
(The opposition councillors still voted for Orr’s modified bill but they didn’t vote for Maloney’s earthquake preparedness bill, which had been amended to look completely different by councillor Mike Klassen, who seems to have both the emotional range and the freedom of thought of a Stormtrooper.)
Back to the bill at hand. Maloney was the first councillor to speak after the amendment introduced by Dominato, and she understandably struggled to remain composed.
“I’m extremely disappointed with the amendment,” she said through tears. “We just sat through some incredibly moving stories. I can’t believe I’m crying again in council, but here we go.”
Then, ABC councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung, doing her best impression of an antagonist from The Handmaid’s Tale, spoke. She said that she was “not convinced that growing city bureaucracy is the way to go” and that she doesn’t want to have “folks that are pushing paper around.”
That obviously irritated the opposition councillors, as they had just heard from people on the ground about how important these workers are.
“I’m super disappointed by this,” said Orr. “The characterization that this role is bureaucratic and a paper pusher is wrong; we heard the exact opposite… It’s a toothless motion; there’s no way I can support it. There’s this pattern of amending certain councillors’ motions so that we have the impossible decision to vote no against our own motions. I really don’t get it.”
Orr was correct, and his assertion was proven even more correct by the two aforementioned motions that followed.
The trend of ABC not voting against things per se but instead watering down the motions with amendments will likely continue as we get closer to October’s municipal election and the party can claim that it didn’t vote against things like lifeguards and sex worker safety.
Where was mayor Ken Sim in all of this, one might ask? Well, he didn’t say much and was voting virtually from what seemed to be a different part of City Hall. He did speak up to ask for vote assistance to vote for the amendment. Brave leadership on display.