Bob Mackin
After the hotel workers union UNITE HERE Local 40 enlisted Californians to call-in to a city council meeting on July 22, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC majority complained of foreign interference in the proposed Villages Plan.
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver candidate for mayor Colleen Hardwick. (TEAM/YouTube)
TEAM for a Livable Vancouver mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick said that misses the point.
“The vulnerability isn’t foreign participation. The vulnerability is unverified participation,” said Hardwick, a city councillor from 2018 to 2022. “Because a democratic process can be manipulated from California. It can be manipulated from Toronto. It can be manipulated from Burnaby. And it can be manipulated right here in Vancouver.”
In a commentary on her Facebook account, Hardwick pointed to bots, trolls, mass-generated emails, organized campaigns and public hearings “stacked with speakers to manufacture the appearance of overwhelming support or opposition. They can be effectively filibustered.”
Hardwick founded the PlaceSpeak.com civic engagement company before running for office. She tabled a solution in 2020, just before the pandemic, a motion called “Strengthening Representative Democratic Practices in the City of Vancouver.” It proposed privacy-by-design checks and balances to ensure genuine Vancouverites’ voices would be heard. At the time, city council was facing an onslaught of campaigns from environmental lobby groups and the pro-development Abundant Housing Vancouver.
Vancouver City Hall. (Mackin)
“I wanted council to know who was speaking, where they came from, what relationship they had to the issue — and that they were real. This was never about preventing anyone from speaking.”
Facing opposition, the motion was watered-down. The result is the chair simply asks a speaker to state their name and whether they are a Vancouver resident. Which is all that ABC Coun. Mike Klassen did in that role. (Sim was absent for “personal reasons” after returning from an apparent trip to the FIFA World Cup final in New Jersey.)
Hardwick’s thinking was simple. In order for councillors to make an informed decision, they need to know how many letters and speakers are in support or opposition to an issue, whether they are residents of the city, whether they live in a neighbourhood affected by a decision and whether they are individuals, advocacy group members or have a commercial interest in the outcome.
Remote participation should not be shut down, but authenticated, according to Hardwick. Public hearings are not opinion polls, but residents exercising the democratic right to speak to the people they elected.
“Protect privacy. Establish provenance. Distinguish residents from non-residents and organized interests,” she wrote. “Listen broadly — but prioritize the people you were elected to represent. Because the fundamental question remains: Who do we represent — and how do we know?”
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