John Jensen

I got this in just under the wire this week. My full submission is available here, but the summary is as below.

• We have a important level of government that is relatively unmonitored by senior governments, has no Auditor-General supervision, poor external policy support, weak press and citizen monitoring, and a poorly-enforced elections process suffering from declining voter turnout, that is almost wholly funded by candidates themselves or those most likely to financially gain from local government decisions.
• The Task Force should look to Manitoba's recently-enacted Municipal Conflict of Interest and Campaign Financing Act. It requires municipalities to set total election campaign expense limits, outlaws donations from non-individuals or from those outside the province (ie unions, corporations, and foreigners), and sets maximum donation limits of $750-$1500 per individual.
• Elections should be managed by the provincial Chief Electoral Officer, and should be held every four years, between the (now scheduled) provincial elections.
• Corporations should not have the right to vote.  Corporations are legal entities created by government, while government itself is a creation of people freely assembled.

I thought I would post a quick note about the proposal for coach / laneway houses in the City. The public consultation process is drawing to a close, with the final public hearing scheduled for tomorrow. I would feel much better about it, however, if the process were to be implemented in a similar way as the City of Vancouver in terms of mandatory reporting and followup. That is, staff to report to Council every 6 months or when 100 laneway houses have been built, whichever comes first. The March 2010 report is available at the City of Vancouver's website. It notes that while activity is increasing, only 33 permits have been issued since July 2009 with another 34 in process. 73% of them are 1.5 stories in height and are on average 550 square feet. Laneway housing, if widely implemented, will be a significant change to the City's single-family neighbourhoods, and while consensus seems to be forming around something similar to the current proposal, it is still very controversial. There is a chance here that development could go in ways that are unintended -- if no one applies to build one, or if 90% of homeowners do, there is probably something wrong with the policy. I would therefore recommend that council institute a similar monitoring policy as Vancouver. Vancouver has about 14 times the number of single-family homes than the City of North Vancouver, so I would suggest an update once per year and a full report after 10 permits are issued.

The BC Local Government Election Task Force has received a lot of bad press lately.  Kennedy Stewart roundly denounced its management in a blog post this week and other organizations have criticized its initial decision to not publish received submissions. The Task Force, however, since March 30th, has made all submissions public on its website.  Those from individuals have been anonymized, but all the rest are identified and appear to be provided in full. Knowing that, I was a bit surprised to see this item on the agenda for Monday's North Vancouver City Council meeting:

WHEREAS all submissions to the B.C. Local Government Elections Task Force have been deemed “private” by the Minister responsible and will not be released to the public; and WHEREAS such secrecy is contrary to past practice of Task Forces dealing with important public policy issues generally and especially in regard to the matter of electoral procedure; NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of North Vancouver call upon the government of British Columbia to publish all submissions to the Task Force and the names of all those who have submitted comments to the Task Force; RESOLVED THAT failing this, the City of North Vancouver call upon the Union of British Columbia Municipalities to cease its involvement in the Task Force until such time as this degree of openness is established; and RESOLVED THAT this resolution be forwarded to the Premier, the Minister responsible, the Union of British Columbia Municipalities, all Union of British Columbia Municipalities member municipalities and all North Shore MLA’s.