Vancouver city council has decided to halt the work of its integrity commissioner while it launches an independent review of her mandate.
ABC party councillors pushed through an extraordinary measure at the end of its meeting Wednesday, freezing commissioner Lisa Southern’s power to report to the public on complaints. They did so “in light of the possibility that some current work by the Integrity Commissioner may be out of scope” when the review is eventually completed.
It was a deft manoeuvre.
And a bad, bad look.
Under the guise of launching a review to improve the mandate, it froze the commissioner’s existing public complaints for an indeterminate period – a move that shields council from any criticism by the independent commissioner’s findings for the time being.
Rather than permit the commissioner to continue her work while a review is under way, then changing her mandate, the ABC councillors voted to stop her work now and resume it only after it approves a new mandate. No one knows how long that will take; council won’t even identify possible third-party firms or individuals to review the mandate until late September.
In some cases, an integrity commissioner’s office will cease to report on complaints in the final few months before an election to avoid any appearance of a partisan abuse of the public complaint process. But a Vancouver election is more than two years away in late 2026.
Southern can still receive complaints. She just can’t investigate and report her findings to the public on them.
It’s a bizarre way of dealing with a concern Southern herself raised in her last annual report – that the scope and mandate of her office was broad and open to interpretation. The ABC councillors used that against her Wednesday to effectively shut down her work.
ABC Coun. Lenny Zhou amended a motion by fellow ABC Coun. Brian Montague that was merely identifying the need for a review, not a suffocation of the office’s public statements.
Mayor Ken Sim and fellow ABC Coun. Rebecca Bligh were absent from the meeting, as was Green Coun. Pete Fry.
ABC councillors Montague, Zhou, Lisa Dominato, Sarah Kirby-Yung, Peter Meiszner and Mike Klassen supported the amendment.
Zhou was ready with the amendment and read from a lengthy script, saying that pausing the office’s work while a mandate review is conducted reflects a “very common practice” in governance.
In my experience, that’s not the case. When I was the CBC ombudsman a decade ago, for instance, a mandate review of the office’s scope was conducted. My work, and that of the French-language ombud, continued as usual until the review was completed by an independent panel and only after the CBC board approved the changes. At the time, I was told that was the common approach, and it made sense then as it does now.
I tried but couldn’t find examples online of offices ceasing their work when a review is launched, so I turned to my new research colleague, GPT-4o.
I asked: “Is it common in governance to stop the work of an integrity commissioner's office when it is determined that a review of the mandate is necessary?”
The answer: “Stopping the work of an integrity commissioner's office due to a review of its mandate is not a common practice in governance. Typically, reviews of mandates and functions are conducted while the office continues its operations.”
The AI resource continued to explain that it is common to let the work proceed to ensure continuity, prevent disruption, ensure independence, avoid public skepticism about the motivation behind the decision, and to ensure the legitimacy and authority of the office’s work is maintained.
Sometimes, you just have to love the robots.
Now, a couple of asterisks on this: a bylaw has to be changed before the commissioner’s office truly ceases its work, but that’s coming next. And Southern remains the Park Board’s integrity commissioner; council doesn’t yet have that power, although it on a path to eliminate the board.
Green Coun. Adriane Carr said there were too many unknowns to support the move to cease the office’s work: no idea how much time a review will take, how many investigations are under way, or what they’re about.
Southern herself wasn’t commenting Thursday. She released a statement on the need to “preserve confidentiality of investigations and with respect to all matters that come into my knowledge in the course of any investigation or complaint except as required by law. Given these obligations, I cannot provide any background or details of the nature of complaints my office is investigating.”
What this decision points to is the need for a provincial standard on municipal codes of conduct, not individually tailored ones by each council. That’s the case in Ontario and there’s no reason for it not to happen here, except the stodginess of particular councils.
We may not agree on terribly many things, but on this matter, I leave the last words to One City Coun. Christine Boyle: “I hope that nothing is being swept under the rug here.”
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
