Mayor Ken Sim pushed the item to the end of a long council day, while meeting chair Coun. Lenny Zhou ruthlessly cut off speakers
VANCOUVER (Dec. 13, 2024) -- The ABC majority council has shown its contempt for Vancouver residents with a biased process that rushed through a turbocharged Broadway Plan in spite of overwhelming opposition, says TEAM for a Livable Vancouver.
“City Hall continues to erode the public trust. Just when we thought it couldn't get worse, the current Council reaches new lows. Local democracy is on life support in the City of Vancouver,” said TEAM president and former City Councillor Colleen Hardwick.
Councillors approved the Plan proposal with only a few minor amendments at a quick meeting Thursday night, making only brief nods to the more than 100 speakers who spent five hours Wednesday pleading with them to pause the Plan and rethink it.
Co-organizer of the Pause the Plan movement and TEAM member Theodore Abbott expressed disappointment with the outcome. “Council has voted to make the already egregious Broadway Plan even worse,” he said. “Going forward, we’ll be working vigilantly to monitor demovictions and resident displacement. And we’ll continue to educate residents about the false narratives upon which the Broadway Plan is founded.”
The blatant manipulation of Wednesday's meeting began with Mayor Ken Sim’s early-morning switch of the agenda, with the Broadway Plan item moved to the end of the day instead of the beginning. That put Sim’s fanciful Bitcoin motion, which drew more than 30 speakers, into prime time while the 139 people who’d signed up to speak on the city-transforming Broadway Plan cooled their heels.
When the speakers' list finally opened at 6:30 p.m., many were no longer available to speak. But the more than 100 who did were overwhelmingly opposed to the Plan, and only a handful were in favour. The last speaker was at 11:25 p.m., more than 12 hours after the item was scheduled on the agenda.
Council's bias against the Plan's opponents was obvious. Coun. Lenny Zhou, who chaired the meeting, kept speakers to a strict three-minute time limit, zealously cutting them off mid-sentence when the clock ran out. Filmmaker David Fine’s video about the impact of the Plan on tenants was brutally chopped with only five seconds to run. That sharply contrasted with the lax enforcement of the time limits for speakers to the Bitcoin motion.
TEAM is the voice for all neighbourhoods. ABC is not listening.