The newly elected Vancouver School Board trustees will be going back to school. And their education will be directed by the provincial Liberal government-appointed trustee, Dianne Turner. Turner ran the joint for the past year after the old board was fired.
She now sits at the board table as a special advisor — she’s the babysitter the new NDP government has left in place to make sure all the kiddies on the board play nice together.
Beyond the usual orientation most boards are given to inform them of the issues they will face, Turner, along with special consultants, will be brought in to instruct the board on how to behave and conduct business as board members.
This is part of the fallout of two devastating independent reports that looked into allegations of harassment and bullying by board members that led to a “toxic workplace.” Both reports, one by labour lawyer Roslyn Goldner, the other by WorkSafeBC, confirmed the bad behaviour and also made it clear there was a significant level of incompetence displayed by the board when it came to carrying out its duties. Most of it could be traced to Vision trustees Patti Bacchus and Mike Lombardi, who was the chair.
In the end, it led to the board’s most senior staff — the secretary treasurer and the superintendent — quitting their jobs.
As a precautionary measure to avoid distractions, I noted, the new seating arrangement for the trustees around the board table at their inaugural meeting has been fundamentally altered.
In the past, traditionally, members of the same party were lumped together. This allowed for collective mutterings of displeasure during the proceedings or impromptu if not ultimately disruptive strategy sessions.
In the same way a school teacher would separate troublemakers in their class, at Monday’s swearing in — and given the impracticality of making misbehaving trustees stand in the corner or don a dunce cap — senior staff configured a seating arrangement where no two members of the same political party were actually next to each other.
Now, not to purposefully add to the series of speculative obituaries for the city’s ruling Vision Party, but please note only two folks were nominated for the position of chair. NPA’s newly elected Lisa Dominato and the Green Party’s, um, veteran Janet Fraser. I could only surmise Fraser had it walking away. Her two fellow Greens and the three Vision trustees would have supported her.
And, incidentally, I can say for a certainty that Turner was most pleased with the result.
But more to the point, this is not the only board where Vision’s influence has weakened and it has lost both the majority and the position of chair since the last election in 2014. The other is the park board.
In one way or another, both have come about due to bad behaviour. Vision was reduced to just one out of seven on the park board because of their bullying attempts to force community centres to sign on to a new joint agreement.
But the NPA should take no pleasure in this. While they did initially gain the park board majority and the chair following the 2014 election, one of their numbers, NPA commissioner Erin Shum, bailed on them, accusing her political colleagues of bullying her into making decisions.
The result of Shum leaving the NPA fold led to dramatic results, calamitous some might say.
Her split shifted the chair from the NPA to the Greens. But more significantly this led to another change. The position of the majority of park board commissioners had been to allow the Vancouver Aquarium to continue its recruitment and breeding program of captive cetaceans. With the shift in power, that position was almost immediately reversed.
As for city council, Vision has seen its power dwindle there, too. Following the last general election it found itself without the “super majority” to allow for the unimpeded passage of grants, so they tended to rely on the Green councillor Adriane Carr.
After the byelection win by the NPA’s Hector Bremner, simply having Carr in Vision’s corner is no longer enough.
And then, of course, there is the decision announced a few days ago. Not only has Geoff Meggs moved on but the other sharp mind in Vision’s camp, Andrea Reimer, recently announced she will not seek re-election next year.
agarr@vancourier.com
@allengarr
This story has been updated since first published.
