Opinion: The double standard of political secrecy in B.C. | Daily Hive

Makeup of Vancouver City Council after the April 2025 by-election. (City of Vancouver)

The City of Vancouver’s integrity commissioner recently ruled that Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Vancouver city councillors broke the rules by coordinating votes in private.

The finding was clear: when a quorum of Vancouver City Council meets behind closed doors and advances City business, it violates the Vancouver Charter — the B.C. government’s legislation regulating the City of Vancouver — which requires Vancouver City Council meetings to be open to the public except in narrow circumstances.

In the instances deemed to be problematic, ABC Vancouver city councillors and the mayor had already lined up their positions before the public meeting, making the official debate look like little more than performative. The integrity commissioner took issue with how the governing party steered the decisions over the City’s Climate Justice Charter and Moberly Park’s turf field in advance.

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The integrity commissioner accurately warned that on a legal basis, “democracy is undermined” by shutting residents out of seeing how decisions are actually made.

Still, that conclusion feels complicated — especially when compared to how politics normally works at the provincial and federal levels.

In both the B.C. Legislature in Victoria and Parliament in Ottawa, caucusing in private is not just tolerated but central to how the system functions.

Party caucuses are closed-door sessions where provincial MLAs or federal MPs argue, negotiate, and ultimately agree on strategy and votes. Once that internal debate is settled, the “party whip” enforces discipline, ensuring members vote together when the time comes.

The party whip is, quite literally, an individual elected official of the party — an MP or MLA.

This whip makes sure members attend votes, follow the agreed-upon line, and face consequences if they do not. In practice, this means that once a caucus has decided its position behind closed doors, the whip ensures it is carried through on the floor. Defying the whip can lead to punishments ranging from loss of committee assignments to expulsion from caucus altogether. This system is why open debates in Ottawa and Victoria rarely change outcomes: the real decisions have already been made, and the whip’s job is to guarantee the votes line up as planned. The debates in these chambers are often pure theatre.

Kingston and the Islands MP Mark Gerretsen is the Chief Government Whip for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal Liberal government, while Grande Prairie-Mackenzie MP Chris Warkentin is the Conservative Party of Canada’s Chief Opposition Whip. There are even deputy whips for both the governing and opposition parties in the House of Commons, and whips for both parties in the Senate.

On the provincial level, Burnaby North MLA Janet Routledge is currently the BC NDP’s caucus whip, while Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman is the Conservative Party of BC’s whip.

Cabinet ministers are also generally bound by cabinet solidarity, meaning that once a decision is taken, every minister must defend it in public. The reality is that by the time legislation reaches the floor in Victoria or Ottawa, the outcome is usually already locked in — debate is more about optics and accountability than changing minds.

So why does the same behaviour that is routine in Victoria and Ottawa trigger an integrity investigation in Vancouver? The answer lies in structure.

Within political circles, municipalities in Canada are often described to be “creatures of the Province” — they only exist because of provincial legislation. The Vancouver Charter spells out strict transparency rules for City Council, while provincial and federal legislatures operate under the Westminster model, which enshrines private caucus discussions and whipped votes as part of parliamentary privilege.

But that legal distinction does not erase the awkward optics or the sense of hypocrisy. It comes across as a double standard: municipal politicians are reprimanded for coordinating votes, even as provincial and federal politicians do the very same thing as a matter of course.

Elected officials in municipal governments are expected to deliberate openly, while provincial and federal legislatures rely on party discipline behind closed doors.

If transparency is essential for democracy — and it certainly is, including for the local level — we should at least question why secrecy is accepted higher up the chain. Otherwise, we are left with the impression that the rules are written to keep them out when it conveniently suits those in power.

However, what particularly stands out is that municipal political parties are actually generally quite uncommon in Canada.

The Vancouver Charter and the B.C. Local Government Act — which is the separate provincial legislation that regulates all municipal governments in B.C., except for the City of Vancouver — provide the ability to officially form “electoral organizations” on the municipal level, also more commonly known as municipal political parties. The only other provincial jurisdiction that legally allows municipal political parties is Quebec, and for this reason municipal political parties are similarly common in Montreal.

In all other jurisdictions in the country, mayors and city councillors are generally independents.

Like B.C., every other province in the country requires municipally-elected bodies to conduct their business in the open. Transparency is the rule, not the exception.

But under B.C. law, municipal elector organizations can act much like political parties during campaigns: they may endorse candidates and have their name appear on the ballot, receive donations, incur election expenses, and even run campaign activities on candidates’ behalf under formal financing arrangements. These branded entities also help voters identify a slate with a common platform.

However, after these municipal candidates are elected, the political party they formed has weaker legal standing inside City Hall. Unlike Victoria and Ottawa, there is no official role for a municipal political party whip, no guaranteed party caucus rights, and almost no recognition in the rules of procedure that political parties even exist. The mayor and each city councillor is, in law, an independent elected official who is supposed to exercise their judgment only in an official open meeting.

If enough of these officials meet privately to plan and prepare to move City business forward ahead of the formal debate and vote, regardless of political party affiliation, it can break the rules that decisions have to be made in public, which is the conclusion of the integrity commissioner’s investigation. On rare occasions, City Councils may officially debate and vote behind closed doors — in what is called an “in camera” meeting — but this is generally limited to confidential and/or sensitive matters.

In other words, political parties in B.C.’s municipal politics are powerful during the election campaign, but technically largely neutered inside the City Council chamber.

In her report, the integrity commissioner stressed that caucus meetings themselves are not the issue, but what happens in them. “No one (including me) is saying that the ABC Council Members cannot meet as a caucus. They can meet. They can meet with quorum, with an agenda, at City Hall. They can discuss all sorts of things,” she wrote.

The problem arises when those private gatherings cross into the territory of advancing City Council business. She cautioned that city councillors cannot escape their legal obligations simply by calling themselves a party caucus instead of City Council, nor by insisting they did not formally vote or kept an “open mind.”

“What matters is the nature of the meeting and what is discussed. What the meeting is called, what they call themselves, or who calls the meeting is not determinative,” she added.

If city councillors meet in quorum outside of an open meeting, discuss City business, and materially move it toward a decision, the integrity commissioner concluded, they are shutting the public out of the democratic process and “depriving the public of participation in the policy development and decision-making processes that serve to build public trust and confidence in local government.”

Throughout much of his term, Mayor Sim has pointed to ABC Vancouver’s landslide victory in the 2022 civic election as a clear mandate, though he has leaned on that message less since the party’s poor showing in this year’s City Council by-election, which arguably muddied that original mandate. To date, their governing style has largely been rooted in their interpretation of the super-majority they won in 2022, and the resulting democratic accountability they have to their voters.

But if municipal political parties with a majority are so restricted that they cannot fully function like real political parties once their members are elected, then what is the point of having them at all? Should they even exist at the local level? Should municipal political parties in B.C. be banned?

By separating campaign activities from governing to such an extreme degree, the law undermines the very universal concept of what a political party is supposed to be. The law seeks to control ordinary political gravitations.

In that sense, it may be B.C.’s own legislation that is to blame — permitting the birth and continuous renewal of municipal political parties, while at the same time imposing unnatural constraints that prevent them from functioning the way political parties do at the provincial and federal levels and elsewhere in the world.

Traditionally, municipal governments in practice are merely the local service providers of the provincial government. The provincial governments of this country fill their service gaps by creating municipal governments and delegating this lower level of government with responsibilities.

Perhaps the prevailing view in the provinces where municipal political parties are not permitted is that municipal governments should stay focused on the basics — roads, sewers, utilities, garbage, fire/police/public safety, community/recreational services, and zoning — rather than enable political structures that foster broader ideological debates, which can quickly lead to scope creep. In essence, a focus on practical, community-driven decision-making.

But within the City of Vancouver, there has been a clear departure from this approach since nearly two decades ago.

It is super ironic that one of the most common public complaints about the last makeup of Vancouver City Council, from 2018 to 2022, was how chaotic and disorganized it seemed — a mayor who was an independent for most of the term and struggled to push his agenda forward, presiding over city councillors split among a handful of parties. As a result, debates dragged on endlessly, with a disjointed overall direction for the City and no clear sense of where decisions might land until the very last remarks and votes, and in the end, relatively little of substance was accomplished over the four-year term amid the worst global health and economic crisis in 100 years and an escalating local housing affordability crisis. Recognizing the challenges of being an independent, toward the end of his term, ahead of the 2022 civic election, the previous mayor created his own political party and fielded his own slate of candidates.

Fast-forward to today, and the critique has flipped: the ABC Vancouver-led City Council is now seen as almost too efficient, with decisions coordinated so tightly behind the scenes that it has raised concerns by some both in and out of office.

For a decade, from 2008 to 2018, the Vision Vancouver party also previously operated in much the same way, and that approach went largely unchallenged. The decision to create an integrity commissioner was made by the last makeup of City Council, with the office implemented and the role filled in early 2022.

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