NPA park board commissioner Erin Shum made what she admitted was a “shocking” and “bold” move when she broke with her caucus to nominate a Green Party candidate for chairman.
Shum, a first-term commissioner and small-business owner, said she did not discuss the nomination before the Dec. 12 meeting with anyone, including the person she nominated, Michael Wiebe.
“It really came down to that afternoon,” Shum said Tuesday in an interview with the Courier. She said she did not plan the move with Wiebe and did not discuss it with anyone else. She said no one from the NPA contacted her in the 24 hours following the board meeting and surprise vote.
She said the two did previously talk about the possibility. "A year ago we did talk about it. Wouldn't it be great if us millennials were chair and vice-chair," she said. "I knew at the time it wasn’t going to happen. We would definitely make change now. It's refreshing."
Going against her own party’s majority hold on the seven-member park board felt like breaking free from a “toxic” and “abusive relationship” in which she said she was bullied and silenced.
“I had to do something for myself, in a way, because I could no longer bear being in a relationship with the caucus that was very toxic,” she said, adding that she felt expected to toe the party line without asking questions.
“You follow us, we tell you what to do,” is what Shum said was expected of her. She said she was particularly aggrieved she was not recognized publicly or internally for the work she did on issues that mattered to her, notably in helping secure funding to expand senior services in the Killarney and Sunset neighbourhoods.
“If I brought something forward, it wasn’t acknowledged, even something as simple as bringing research forward about the senior centre at Sunset. I was told many times that this was not my project even if I prepared documents and motions that went before [park board] I had to let somebody else be the mover or seconder. I said, ‘Why? I did the work.’ I sat on that [board], I made the connections and I did all the research… I put that forward and you’re telling me I can’t be the leader in my own motion?”
On these initiatives, Shum gave two examples, one involving NPA commissioner and out-going chairwoman Sarah Kirby-Yung and another involving past chairman and two-term commissioner John Coupar, also of the NPA.
She said she felt “stonewalled” and “lied to.”
“At the end of the day, I want to work with a team and be the politician that I believe in and practise good governance,” said Shum. “I would say they undermined and ignored me. They don’t take me seriously. I get it, it’s politics, but why am I taking this?”
In a third example, Shum said she wanted to send a letter to the NPA membership about the board’s approval of autism spectrum disorder training for staff, a motion she strongly supported as an educator in the Burnaby school district who works with students with autism. She said the communication wasn’t allowed, and she identified this as a snub that was ultimately a significant tipping point for her.
“They refuse to let me release an information letter to our NPA membership. But I said, the media supported [the motion], the party supported it, all commissioners voted in favour of it. Why won’t you let me do it? I couldn’t figure out for the longest time why they wouldn’t allow me that. It couldn’t figure out why.
“It was just one thing on top of another, and finally I said, would you ever even consider me as a teammate and not just a vote? And I realized that it wasn’t going to change.
“I tried to be very cordial publically with them an finally I said, I’ve had it. There are two years left, and sometimes you have to make a change to show you can’t keep taking the bullying and the passive aggressiveness.
"I feel very free right now, like I've broken free."
Shum, 33, did not think her age alone was a reason she felt dismissed but did believe there was a generation gap between her and the other NPA commissioners. One main sticking point was fees, which Shum did not want to support because she said her peers cannot afford more cost increases.
Shum said she remains a member of the NPA but will vote independently on the park board.
“When you say non-partisan, you really hope it is non-partisan,” she said. “A majority of the time, I agree with all the NPA values, I really do. That is why I ran and campaigned with the NPA team."
She said her nomination of Wiebe should have come as no surprise to the NPA caucus since she had been pushing for recognition and independence. Kirby-Yung nominated NPA commissioner Casey Crawford.
Shum was re-elected as vice-chairwoman of the board. Shum, who also runs a salon in Kerrisdale, said she nominated Wiebe because “he gets it.”
She said she admires his history as a small-business owner and sustainability consultant, for his commitment to transgender communities and his work in the Downtown Eastside.
“I nominated him because I see him as being very fair. I saw that he has the same values as I did,” she said. “We know now that we are in the position that we can find better methods and strategies of finding efficiencies without reducing service and quality.”
Wiebe is the first Green Party representative to hold the leadership position on the Vancouver park board. Although the vote is confidential, he would have needed the support of commissioners from three different political parties to win a majority. If Shum split the NPA vote, it’s most likely Wiebe garnered the vote of Vision's Evans as well as the two Green Party votes from himself and commissioner Stuart Mackinnon.
