THE ORR REPORT: Asking the hard questions, casting dissenting votes, and going for a hat trick at Council
July has been a blur of motions, hearings, and meetings at City Hall! I’ve been working hard – and this report will be my best attempt to summarize it all.
Next week is the final week before Council takes a break for August, so I’ve decided to finish up the session strong with three motions up for debate and vote. Here’s a quick summary, and if you have some time please sign up HERE to speak to Council and/or submit your comment HERE. Help me go for the hat trick!
My motions coming up July 23
1) A big focus of my campaign was a pledge to close landlord loopholes that hurt tenants. Motion #4 on the agenda of the Standing Committee of City Council meeting Wednesday, July 23 aims to close some of those loopholes. The current Tenant Relocation and Protection Policy (TRPP) is vague in situations where units were built as strata but now operated as rentals.
My motion, if passed, will allow staff to suggest changes to the TRPP. We need to pass this motion in order to clarify that any building that operates its housing units as rentals under a single landlord is “primary” rental stock and that those tenants will be eligible for compensation under the policy.
2) Next up is my motion to extend the leases on the remaining hundreds of units of modular housing in Vancouver. We sometimes forget just how recently modular housing was introduced on empty lots in the city. The program started as a collab with the NDP provincial government that first came in back in 2017. Although the prefabricated housing was named “temporary,” the modular homes were in fact built to last for decades.
As this Tyee article documented, however, much of the city’s modular housing stock has already been dismantled. My motion has a very simple ask: to extend the length of the leases on the remaining modular homes to reflect the buildings’ lifetime. Obviously, the ultimate goal is to secure funding partnerships with higher levels of government to build out permanent public housing on these sites. But there’s no excuse for prematurely losing supportive and social housing units in the meantime.
3) My third motion addresses the issue that right-wing ideologues have tried to make a third rail in politics: How can we raise more revenue for public services from those with the most capacity to pay?
As I wrote about in the last Orr Report, back in June Ken Sim and ABC signalled austerity ahead for Vancouver. They passed pre-Budget motions directing staff to look at ways to reduce property tax increases for 2026 to 2.5%, 1.5% or even 0% (excluding a 1% tax hike to cover City infrastructure spending). This was passed by ABC after staff had reported that it would require 5% or 6% property tax increases just to maintain current public service levels. It’s clear ABC is playing politics here: After record property tax hikes in previous years, in large part to cover major increases to the VPD budget, ABC knows it’s heading into an election year and is looking to run on classically fiscally conservative rhetoric. We need to turn this whole discussion on its head, and push for fully-funded public services enabled by progressive means of raising revenue. My motion, if passed, will allow staff to explore new ways to raise revenue from those with the most ability to pay. Who could argue with that?!
About last week …
Last week was another busy week with a long Council meeting, a packed standing committee meeting, and two public hearings that went long into the night. The HVAC in Council chambers was down so if you watch back we are all huddling at our desks with blankets on. I thought dishwashing was hard on the body, but sitting for 16 hours straight is another level!
First up on the docket was the 422 page Rupert-Renfrew Plan that I did my best to get through. I flagged a few concerns. First was around consultation, especially with the Kaslo Gardens and Still Creek co-ops in the area. The report said the area was 9% social housing/co-op so I asked, with a 61% increase in population and 81% increase in homes, how that ratio would change. Staff said it would actually go up to 16% based on a few big social housing projects, so that was comforting at least. Councillor Fry brought up that a lot of this might be near heavy rail and asked about the psychological and physical health impacts of this. I also brought up the fact that 27% of the population make less than 50K/year and repeated those concerns on CTV News.
At the same council meeting I flagged an innocuous seeming bill that I thought might change the workload of City-employed CUPE workers, but staff assured me this wasn’t the case. Good thing, as it would have potentially violated their collective bargaining agreement. At the public hearing later that day I was worried that NIMBYs would show up to block a 100% social housing building in Kits. While the usual suspects made an appearance, the zoning passed.
The next day we had a mammoth presentation by staff on Transportation, Public Space & Street Use. I’ve linked to it because it’s fascinating. We then voted to accept the Safer Slower Streets report which was fantastic and means 30km/hr on minor streets will become a bylaw. I raised questions around why the pilot can’t be city-wide and if the VPD needing $3 million worth of signs to enforce it was egregious or not, and I asked if automated enforcement could help pay for the signs.
I then questioned staff about CORE service grants; how they compared to last year, why out of $2 million in CORE grants requested, only a little over half a million was given out, what impact approving property tax increases as low as 0% would have on these grants, and if increasing them would make a significant difference in people’s lives. It was clear from their answers that these grants are vital to the community and they need to be fully funded.
This segued into me asking why we are spending $500,000 on a graffiti abatement grant to Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) and if that was an efficient use of money and could the city’s own graffiti removal team be more effective. They said the city doesn’t clean up graffiti on private property so I decided not to amend the report asking to divert money away from this towards core service grants. Maybe next year.
On member motions, after passing Fry’s in-sink garbage disposal motion, I flagged Klassen’s Temporary Use Pilot for Empty Storefronts in the Downtown Eastside as a potential trojan horse for gentrification and displacement. I could tell that he had tried to cover all his bases and had some feedback from the community. I think the motion is fine but probably doesn’t go far enough. I mentioned it was “all carrot and no stick,” and then a few days after it passed I started receiving emails saying similar things.
Save Chinatown YVR are calling Council to implement an empty commercial unit tax, introduce commercial rent control, create a grant or tax credit program for legacy and culturally significant businesses, give long-term assurance to the City’s Development Potential Tax Relief By-law, so it’s not a year-by-year renewal, and mandate BIAs to recruit and retain culturally appropriate businesses. I agree with all of this and look forward to working with this group to draft something up in the fall.
After all that, we passed Lucy Maloney’s Vision Zero motion after hearing dozens of stories from people injured by motor vehicles. I shared my own experiences starting from age nine up until a few years ago and that I haven’t been on my bike since being run off the road in a road rage incident.
Councillor Bligh’s Railtown motion looked to review the industrial zoning and allow for more flexibility. Unfortunately an 11th hour amendment (which Pete Fry discovered was actually written by the Mayor’s office that morning) made it so that condos will be allowed on the edge of the DTES. I was the only dissenting vote on that amendment.
I also voted no on Bligh’s motion to explore hosting the FCM. I don’t think Vancouverites are staying up at night worrying if we are going to host a party for politicians!
Punk Rock, Podcasts, and Pride
If you’ve made it all the way through that packed recap, you deserve to let your hair down and maybe take in a show. I’ll be going to see Cheap Flavour tonight at the Cobalt. I’ve heard there may be a special guest. Speaking of special guests, I appeared on an episode of surrealist talk show The James Lebuke show which should be uploaded soon. I was a guest on a podcast called habibti please, and that was a great conversation about activism, humour, music, and electoral politics.
I also volunteered at the annual UGM BBQ, made an appearance at Pints for Pace and met with many community organizations and toured lots of interesting sites. I’ve been invited to get dunked for the Mind the Bar charity at Brewery and the Beast, and to attend a drag and wrestling show called To Love and Lariat – which sounds like a great way to kick off Pride Weekend in Vancouver.
