Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Analysis: Will city hall get to Kirk LaPointe

NPA run could make city secrecy-and-spin an election issue
Kirk LaPointe
Kirk LaPointe. Photo Jenelle Schneider/Vancouver Sun

Veteran newsman Kirk LaPointe offered no hint that he wanted to become Vancouver’s mayor when he addressed a recent national media convention about the uphill battle to force governments to be open with citizens.

The NPA board is expected to announce any day that either LaPointe or ex-park board chair Ian Robertson is the choice to oppose the unrelated Mayor Gregor Robertson in the Nov. 15 civic election.

At his 2008 swearing-in, Vision Vancouver leader Robertson pledged: “I will not let you down on making city hall more open and accountable.”

During the 2011 campaign, NPA mayoralty loser Suzanne Anton called Robertson’s city hall a “sealed fortress.”

LaPointe is a political rookie who has watched politics throughout his 34-year career. The Self-Counsel Press publisher and University of B.C. journalism ethics and leadership teacher is a former Vancouver Sun and Hamilton Spectator editor, CTV senior vice-president, CBC Newsworld host and CBC ombudsman.

He told the Canadian Association of Journalists that governments are threatening citizens’ right to know by concealing how policy is made and using their might to manipulate the message.

“We are in great danger of having more and more sophistication around communication by government of its approaches and its intentions and what it wants you to believe,” LaPointe said May 10 in Vancouver. “Unfortunately they’re using a lot of ex-journalists to do it. But they have the money on their side, and quite honestly, they have the manpower on their side, and as a result, they are weakening the right to know.”

LaPointe offered a dim prediction, that Freedom of Information laws could be rendered useless in three-to-five-years unless citizens and the media push back against government amendments and weak regulation. He also told CAJ members that he sees no political party truly committed to transparency, accountability or even humility.  

“I haven’t met terribly many politicians over the years who really believe that admitting a mistake is a virtue,” he said. “I had to deal with it as an ombudsman; defensive cultures exist everywhere, including journalism. But in politics, the clear sense is that ‘when I do that, that is a weakness that my opponent then wishes to exploit,’ as opposed to ‘that’s a virtue, that my opponent wished he had the credibility to express’.”

If LaPointe is named the NPA candidate and makes openness a focus of his platform, he would have plenty of fodder to attack Vision Vancouver on this fundamental issue.

In 2008, the year Vision Vancouver took power from the NPA, Newspapers Canada gave Vancouver city hall a C grade in its annual national FOI audit. There was no improvement in the 2014 audit, which also gave Vancouver a C, but added an F for speed of responses.

Speed of FOI responses was also an issue for the Kerrisdale and Killarney community centre associations. City hall made them wait a year and wanted more than $10,000 each for thousands of documents. Last December, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner adjudicator Ross Alexander found city hall in violation of the FOI law’s sections about duty to assist applicants and time limits for responding.

Communications spending at city hall has more than tripled from $631,000 in 2006 to $1.94 million in 2012. City manager Penny Ballem, who was hired by Gregor Robertson, imposed new rules that forbid city staff from routinely talking to the media. Similar bans exist under the federal

Conservative and B.C. Liberal governments.

Vision Vancouver has embraced the open data trend, offering a variety of spreadsheets online from quarterly city council expenses to locations of bike racks on city property. But other cities have leapfrogged ahead of Vancouver with a variety of openness and accountability measures.

Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi publishes monthly lists of his external meetings and office expenses while Seattle mayor Ed Murray publishes visitor sign-in sheets. Surrey published its 2008-established real estate development lobbyist registry online in May. Toronto and Ottawa also have lobbyist registries, but not Vancouver.

Toronto’s bid committee holds regularly scheduled meetings and issues same-day minutes about decisions to award contracts for goods and services. Vancouver’s bid committee operates behind closed doors and releases its reports months afterward, in heavily censored form and only to those who file FOI requests.

bob@bobmackin.ca
twitter.com/bobmackin