A B.C. Supreme Court petition filed Dec. 12 accuses Mayor Gregor Robertson and Coun. Geoff Meggs of conflict of interest and seeks their removal from office over a $102,000 campaign donation from the city’s outside workers union.
“The basis upon which CUPE Local 1004 provided substantial campaign funds to Vision (Vancouver) candidates went beyond any question of general policy and was a campaign contribution that was conditional upon a commitment by the respondents that if elected they would cause the City to negotiate on the basis that expanding contracting out would not be a subject-matter of collective bargaining,” said the petition.
The petition seeks Robertson and Meggs’ Nov. 15 election victories declared invalid under section 115 of the Vancouver Charter, which allows at least four electors to contest results within 30 days of the official declaration. Five people are named as petitioners, led by Randy Helten, a former Vision member who unsuccessfully ran for the mayoralty in 2011 on the independent, centre-left Neighbourhoods for a Sustainable Vancouver slate.
They want a judge to replace Robertson and Meggs with the candidates who received the next-highest number of votes. In Robertson’s case, that would be NPA runner-up Kirk LaPointe, who finished 9,816 votes behind Robertson. Meggs won the 10th and last available city council seat by only 512 votes over the NPA’s Ian Robertson.
If Robertson and Meggs are allowed to remain in power, the petition asks for a judge to ban them from directly or indirectly participating in negotiations with CUPE Local 1004 or voting on any proposed contract.
The city’s 1,600 streets, sanitation and parks workers are under contract until the end of 2015. The 3,400 full-time, part-time and temporary/seasonal employees of the city-owned Pacific National Exhibition accepted a new two-year contract in September.
The petition stems from the Courier’s Oct. 16 exclusive story based on audio leaked from the Oct. 14 CUPE Local 1004 membership meeting. Meggs, fellow Coun. Raymond Louie and then-Vancouver Park Board commissioners Niki Sharma and Trevor Loke spoke at the meeting. Meggs told about 40 members of the union who attended: “Gregor Robertson, our mayor, has again recommitted to not expand contracting out, to make sure that wherever we can bring in new processes, that members of ‘Ten-04’ will be there delivering those services.”
Later in the meeting, the union’s Political Action Committee endorsed all Vision Vancouver candidates and voted to donate $34,000 to Vision Vancouver, $8,000 to OneCity, and $5,000 each to COPE and Public Education Project. The donations were tripled because of matching funds from CUPE’s B.C. and national headquarters.
The recording includes an unidentified female member of CUPE 1004 saying that the donation was to “carry favour with Vision in the next round of negotiations” and that the support for Vision “is not unconditional.”
Vision and CUPE are both suing LaPointe for defamation after he alleged the donation was part of a “corrupt” cash-for-votes deal in an Oct. 20 commentary published the Province. The Vision lawsuit was filed Nov. 6, the same day the party leaked an internal poll indicating LaPointe had a chance to win the mayoralty. LaPointe’s Nov. 14 statement of defence denied the defamation allegation and accused Vision of trying to stifle his freedom of speech during an election.
The Dec. 12 petition said, however, that both Robertson and Meggs “did not dispute, contradict or clarify the statements made by the CUPE representative at the Meggs/CUPE meeting or subsequently and thereby tacitly agreed with and endorsed that Vision was receiving funds on the condition that they were not to expand contracting out and more generally would support CUPE Local 1004 in upcoming negotiations.”
Robertson and Meggs were sworn-in Dec. 8 with the rest of city council. The next scheduled civic election is in October 2018.
