Vancouver’s governing municipal party suffered a high-profile defection this week, in the wake of controversy over the city’s integrity commissioner.
ABC Vancouver School Board Chair Victoria Jung announced she was quitting the party this week, citing concerns about transparency.
“My values of openness and transparency I think do not align with those of the leadership of the party,” she told Global News.
“This was the line. I arrived at the line and this was something I was not willing to cross over.”
The departure came on Wednesday, one day after a contentious special council meeting Mayor Ken Sim’s party called to hear a motion on reviewing the scope of Vancouver integrity commissioner Lisa Southern’s work.
ABC councillors argued the review was necessary based on Southern’s own request for clarification on the scope of her office.
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The move would have suspended any pending or new investigations, and opposition councillors boycotted the meeting.
ABC councillors who attended ultimately voted to postpone the motion to review Southern’s work until September.
Two days before the vote, Southern released reports on a pair of complaints, both of which were dismissed, but which revealed conflict and allegations of interference between the Mayor’s office and non-ABC members of the Vancouver Park Board.
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“I think the leadership style could do with some change,” Jung said of her departure from ABC, adding that her relationship with the mayor “isn’t strong.”
She said she tried to call the mayor before announcing her departure but wasn’t able to connect with him.
Sim did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement on Wednesday, ABC Vancouver thanked Jung for her work and wished her “all the best in her future endeavours.”
“It’s definitely getting ugly,” said University of the Fraser Valley political scientist Hamish Telford.
“There have been a lot of accusations between the mayor’s staff, park board members, a lot of finger-pointing going back and forth, finger-pointing at the integrity commissioner.”
But Telford said it wasn’t surprising to see chafing between elected officials and the commissioner, whose office is just two years old.
He pointed to similar conflicts in Surrey, where the previous council also voted to freeze the city’s ethics commissioner’s work ahead of the 2022 election.
“It seems that councils have too much power over the office of integrity commissioners and they think that they can use their majority to sort of sideline ethics officers, and this is a problem,” Telford said.
“If cities can’t sort this out themselves, I think the provincial government is going to have to step in in some capacity to provide ethics commissioners more autonomy from councils.”
Jung, meanwhile, remains the chair of the Vancouver School Board, but is sitting as an independent.
She said she still has strong relationships with her fellow trustees and with members of Vancouver City Council.
“The next few weeks are going to test the values of many,” she said.
“What is important to me is openness and transparency and that should be important to others who have been put in a privileged position at city hall.”
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