There’s a fight going on right now between developers and local governments over a private member’s bill, M216, making its way through the British Columbia legislature.
Drawn up by NDP MLA George Anderson, it would allow housing development plans that have been approved by certified engineers or architects to be approved without being reviewed by staff at city halls.
That would be a huge change for how local government works in B.C.
Especially here in Vancouver’s fast-growing suburbs, overseeing new housing development (and renovations and secondary suites) is a major component of municipal work.
But Bill M216 asks the obvious question: if all these construction plans are drawn up by registered, qualified professionals, why have all their work checked over twice by local bureaucrats?
The conflict here is between getting more housing built cheaply and quickly, and the fear of fly-by-night unscrupulous developers cutting corners if no one at city hall is checking their work.
But beyond that, B.C.’s city halls are up in arms about having one of their key responsibilities not just taken away, but erased.
This should just remind us that cities in Canada are a phantom level of government. “The cities are children of the provinces,” is the old political adage.
If any provincial legislature wanted to, they could scrap them entirely. They could appoint regional mayors. They can (and have) merged or separated cities.
If the province wanted to, it could put the responsibility for filling potholes, building and planning new roads, sidewalks, and crosswalks in the hands of the Ministry of Transportation. It could let the Ministry of Housing determine rezonings. The Ministry of the Environment could take over handing out recycling bins.
It’s the horrifying scale of the workload that is holding back the provincial governments. Cities put local knowledge to use and entrench another level of democracy, as a bonus.
But with bills like M216, we see how radically Victoria can re-vamp what cities have the power to do. In the name of housing reform, Victoria has set housing goals, overridden single-family zoning for most of B.C., and boosted density around transit hubs, in ways that will change our cities for generations to come.
That power is both alarming and potentially transformative.
Until recently, premiers have been reluctant to meddle in civic affairs. But in the face of seemingly insoluble problems – housing supply, disaster respone, climate change – we can expect more interventions in the municipal sphere, not fewer.
A recent poll found that people in Metro Vancouver were evenly split on turning the region into a megacity. The real question in the near future is not where we draw the boundaries of our cities, but where we draw the boundary between provincial and local power.