Burnaby mayor elected as the new chair of Metro Vancouver

Mike Hurley/Facebook

The new chair of Metro Vancouver Regional District is now Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley.

The appointment was made following an election amongst the regional district’s board of directors.

This follows the removal of Delta Mayor George Harvie as the regional district’s chair. It was triggered by a May 2024 decision by a majority of Delta City Council to not have Harvie represent the municipal government within the regional district, which involves removing him from the position of chair.

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The reason for Harvie’s removal was unclear, but it was alleged that Harvie had abused his authority and inappropriately made decisions without the consent of his elected colleagues.

The chair is the head of all four legal entities of the regional district, and has duties such as providing leadership to the organization, acting as the organization’s chief spokesperson, presiding at board meetings, providing leadership on regional district business and affairs, establishing standing committees and appointing people to those committees, and ensuring overall good governance.

With Hurley as the new chair of the regional district, this now means both of the Metro Vancouver region’s key governance bodies are led by mayors who won the 2022 civic election by acclamation — by default, without any opposition candidates. Hurley and Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West, who is the chair of TransLink’s Mayors’ Council, ran unopposed and were declared re-elected more than a month before that year’s civic election.

Hurley, who was previously the assistant fire chief for the City of Burnaby, was first elected as the mayor of Burnaby in 2018.

John McEwen, the mayor of the Village of Anmore, will remain in the position of vice chair of the regional district.

The regional district’s board of directors is comprised of 41 individuals made up of elected officials from the municipal governments of Metro Vancouver. They govern the regional district’s planning and strategies for operating, maintaining, and expanding water supply, sewage treatment, and solid waste management infrastructure, as well as regional urban planning, regional parks, and regional housing strategies.

Recently, the regional district’s staff and board of directors have been in the hot seat for the escalating and significant costs for its forthcoming infrastructure projects, including the $10 billion new Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant near Vancouver International Airport, and the $3.9 billion North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant. The partly-built North Shore plant is significantly delayed and far over its budget — up from its $700 million budget when major construction work first began in 2018.

Last week, a day after Premier David Eby suggested an audit should be conducted, Harvie, under his authority as the chair, announced the regional district would conduct an independent review on the North Shore plant project.

City of North Vancouver Mayor Linda Buchanan, a member of the regional district’s board of directors, suggested the need for more parameters of an independent review. She urged for the suspension of all major capital projects to enable a more thorough review of the organization, which effectively acts as a regional government.

“Simply put, this project is a mess, years in the making, and has been driven by a complete lack of financial discipline and transparency. Yesterday the organization released a statement announcing that they would be initiating an independent review. This statement, however, is vague and falls short in committing to doing the hard but necessary work of examining the systemic issues within the organization that has brought us to this moment,” said Buchanan in a statement earlier this month.

“Any review or audit of Metro Vancouver must be independent, and report directly to the Board of Directors and be fully removed from any direction and influence of the organization… Our priority is to restore public trust and ensure every taxpayer is seeing good value for their dollar. I am confident that members of this Board, the public, and the many stakeholders who rely on us can come together and advance the systemic change we need to see in this organization. The time is now to shake up the status quo and begin a new chapter.”

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