 | Saturday, February 19, 2022
Reading this online? Sign up to get this delivered to your inbox every Friday. | | Can a locally elected official be legally removed by the rest of the board? We could soon find out | | |  | | | Normally this newsletter doesn’t focus on British Columbia’s elected school boards.
But the controversy around the Victoria School Board is worth following, because it highlights a lot of the trends around local political disputes these days.
Last week, the school board announced two of its trustees, Diane McNally and Rob Paynter, had been suspended until the end of their terms in October after being accused by staff of harassment and bullying.
The decision raised eyebrows because in local B.C. politics, motions of censure are common, but there’s no precedent for a majority of school trustees to remove other people they were elected with.
“This board has gone where no board has ever gone before,” said longtime former Vancouver School Board chair Patti Bacchus on CBC’s On The Island.
Bacchus was removed from office the only way school trustees had previously been booted in the middle of their term — by the provincial government as part of the removal of the entire board, not just one or two individuals.
“It's chilling to me that they could be treated in this way. And for those who voted for them and [now] don't have that representation, I don’t think a board has that right. Those are voters’ decisions.”
Speaking on CBC’s All Points West, board chair Ryan Painter said there was an independent investigation of the allegations, with all proper procedures followed, and that the board is committed to creating a safe environment.
“There's a lot of challenges going on, and we are focused on making sure that the educational learning space that we have in the district of Greater Victoria is a safe one for everybody: for students, for staff, for education partners,” he said.
It’s certainly the school board's right. But there’s nothing in the provincial Schools Act that explicitly talks about indefinitely suspending elected trustees.
It’s part of the reason the Greater Victoria Teachers' Association has decided to boycott meetings going forward. And it could result in a legal challenge, which could hinge on whether a school board has the right to determine its own procedures (similar to a board of directors in the non-political world), or are stuck with the same procedures as other directly elected political groups.
Conduct towards staff, removal of politicians, a majority on an elected board silencing those who run afoul of conduct rules — they’re all topics of conversation on the rise in B.C.
Which means how Victoria’s controversy gets resolved will bear watching. | | |  | | | 1. Vancouver | | | Five years after shutting the building down, Vancouver has now decided to demolish the notorious Balmoral Hotel, with the timeline for replacing it (and details of what type of housing it will be) still to be determined. Elsewhere, the mayor faced controversy over a campaign-style ad out of his office, and new data showed the rental market got — you guessed it! — worse.
Read more | | |  | | | 2. Disaster recovery | When a disaster strikes a city, are higher levels of government providing help fast enough? The answer, according to B.C. politicians from towns in the middle of such situations, increasingly appears to be “no”: the mayors of Lytton, Princeton and Merritt all spoke out on the topic this week, and had similar messages about the effects on their communities.
Read more in the Globe and Mail | | | |  | | | 3. Social media | Goodbye, Dry January. Hello, Facebook-free February. Two mayors in B.C.’s Interior challenged each other to get off social media after concluding they were spending too much time reading angry comments that weren't helping them do their job. What happened next may surprise you — or maybe not, if you study the effects of social media on the brain. Read more | | | | | |  | | | 5. Street names | One long-running discussion over a street name was resolved in Victoria this week, as city council approved changing the name of Trutch Street to a local Indigenous word meaning "truth." But another one might begin in Port Moody next week, as a councilor is hoping to start a process to change the name of Dewdney Trunk Road. Read more in the Tri-City News | | | | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
forwarded to you. | | | | That's it for this week! In the meantime, check out the latest headlines at cbc.ca/bc and follow our municipal affairs reporter Justin McElroy on Twitter. And if you have any questions you might want answered in a future mailbag, drop Justin a line at metromatters@cbc.ca. | | | |
