 | Friday, January 08, 2021
Reading this online? Sign up to get this delivered to your inbox every Friday. | | An exit interview with the second most powerful person at Vancouver city hall | | |  | | | On his last day as Vancouver’s city manager, Sadhu Johnston talked about not looking too much in the rearview mirror.
“[There] are things that I've put a lot of time into and care a lot about. But when I do move on, I'm going to need to recognize that things may change and council priorities and staff priorities may change,” he said.
“And so I don't want to hang on to them too much. I have to recognize that things will evolve.”
Johnston stepped down on Jan. 4, several months after announcing he would leave his post as Vancouver’s top civil servant after five years.
The job comes with a big salary (more than $350,000 in 2019), big responsibility (more than 7,000 employees report to him) and, in Vancouver, tends to come with speculation about the extent of his power.
Some of that speculation arises because of the nature of local government. Federal and provincial governments have dozens of political staff who oversee ministries and bureaucracies who come and go depending on who is in power.
In city halls, senior managers stay in their jobs and keep implementing past policies and bylaws until they’re told to do otherwise by council.
“If a new council comes in and they want to make changes, then they make the change and we implement them, but it doesn’t all happen at once,” he said.
“I found myself often times letting council know about why a policy was approved … what we’re doing to implement it, and how we can change it.”
Those past policies were implemented by Vision Vancouver politicians during their ten years holding control on council, which means they are well-entrenched and more stable than the shifting coalitions that dominate this city council. Which meant that to some more exuberant people on social media (or councillor Colleen Hardwick), those discussions between Johnston and council were signs of an entrenched bureaucracy of managers born outside Vancouver trying to implement their agenda over the will of the people.
To others, it was the push and pull between a fractured minority council that struggles to advance a cohesive agenda, and a staff trying to support eleven elected officials with very diverse views.
In other words, normal politics.
Whatever the case, Johnston leaves after more than a decade in senior city hall positions justifiably proud of the city’s advancement on a host of environmental issues and cautiously hopeful about the long-term housing situation (more on that later).
Council will choose his replacement, and this one is divided enough that an out-of-province, outside-the-box pick is unlikely. Deputy city manager Paul Mochrie has been doing the job on an interim basis, and while that line of succession could continue, some city staffers have circulated a petition asking for a person of colour to be the next manager.
Even though the Vision Vancouver era is over, what’s replaced it isn’t clear.
Which means even though Sadhu Johnston is no longer city manager, what he helped implement in Vancouver will still loom large for a while. | | |  | | | 1. Travel | With most councils out of commission over the break, the major local political stories detailed how some of those elected officials spent their holidays. Councillors from Victoria and West Vancouver were among the most prominent admitting vacation travel during a pandemic, but expect a drip drip drip of disclosures and mea culpas in the days ahead. But since there's no recall mechanism for local politicians, there may not be any consequences.
Read more | | | | |  | | | 3. Langford | The forever-quickly growing Vancouver Island municipality has been criticized for not making recordings of council meetings accessible to the public (what with the pandemic and all). But this week the mayor announced they've relented, becoming the last major municipality in B.C. not to provide a fairly basic service for 2021.
Read more in the Times Colonist | | | | | |  | | | 4. Chickens! | Okay, it's not the most important story in the world, but we do love a good animal control bylaw debate over backyard chickens, and right now we have three of them: one in Rossland, one in Sidney and one in Delta. We would say these debates in semi-urban municipalities tend to ruffle feathers, but that would beneath us.
Read more in the Delta Optimist | | | |  | | | 5. Gondolas! | A lot of attention has been put on the possible gondola between Simon Fraser University and the Millennium SkyTrain Line and the public feedback stage ended last month. But the City of Colwood on Vancouver Island is also dreaming big, with the mayor pushing a possible gondola link to a possible ferry. Never say there's no ambition in local politics.
Read more in the Saanich News | | | | | | On Sadhu, Gregor Robertson, and housing | | | | | | | | | One interesting part of our exit interview with Johnston was a discussion of Vancouver’s housing policy.
Prior to the pandemic, it dominated most of his time as city manager, as he came in right as housing prices were becoming wildly detached from local incomes. But he was also deputy city manager for six years before that, and so had a bird's-eye view of the city struggling to deal with rising home prices — and rising anger towards politicians.
When we asked former mayor Gregor Robertson several times in his exit interview if he held any responsibility, he said no. When we asked Johnston if the city held any responsibility, his answer, which we’ll provide in full, was a bit different.
“Yeah. It was a little bit of, we all saw it happening. And we were feeling the impact of it, while trying to figure out what to do about it. And if we could go back 10 years? There's probably a number of things that we would have been able to do in 2010 that would have had an impact, but I don't think we knew the extent of the problem at the time.
“I do think we have done a lot to get social housing built and to get rental housing built. And I know we're not through it yet, but I do think that in the next decade, a lot of the buildings that have been approved in the last few years will get built, and there will be a lot of relief.
“Now, you're probably going to see Amazon and lots of other companies like that continuing to want to be in Vancouver, which will continue to put pressure on the rental. So we need to really keep it up. We need to make sure that more townhouses and rental buildings are being produced to support people that are in Vancouver and that are moving to Vancouver. And ultimately, I think we've taken globally leading policies and adopted them. And yeah, there's probably more we could have done if we knew how bad it was going to get.”
Agree or not, it’s more of an admission than Vancouver residents ever got from Robertson — who has subsequently retreated as a public figure more than any former mayor in the city’s modern history. | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
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