A former B.C. cabinet minister running for Vancouver city council has endorsed a proposal to incorporate the university neighbourhoods and UBC’s Point Grey campus into the City of Vancouver.
Moira Stilwell, who served under premiers Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, has thrown her hat in the ring for a seat on council in the upcoming municipal elections which are scheduled for October later this year. She is running under the banner of the Vancouver Liberals.
Campus and the surrounding University Endowment Lands are currently not part of the City of Vancouver and are governed by the province, but the Vancouver Liberals civic party wants to change that.
During an interview in late March with the Vancouver Sun, Stilwell said bringing campus into the city is critical for growing the economy as UBC is known as a research university. “It makes sense,” Stilwell told the newspaper. “Thriving cities understand that the brainy people create jobs for the rest of us.”
The Campus Resident spoke to UBC political science lecturer and UNA resident Stewart Prest about the potential consequences of bringing campus under the city’s governance. He said that in order to understand Stilwell’s proposal, people need to understand that campus residents currently do not have political representation in the way other Vancouverites have.
“There are gaps in terms of representation in the neighbourhoods that could be addressed,” he said.
Residents cannot vote for the mayor or any council members, “because they’re governed through this parallel structure,” Prest said in reference to the UNA, which is a non-profit society with its own bylaws and its own Board of Directors. The society is meant to serve a similar purpose to Vancouver’s city council.
He said that this unique structure is the reason why the UNA is just a little bit different than the rest of Vancouver.
“It is something you do not even notice until you start to look at, let’s say street signs, and notice they look slightly different than and the rest of Vancouver, or you notice the RCMP is hanging around only here and nowhere else in the city,” he said.
Stilwell’s proposal would change all of that, and Prest said he isn’t convinced that a change would result in better service delivery for campus residents.
“I do think that the chief divide is that in terms of representation, we have this part of the Lower Mainland (UBC’s Point Grey campus) that in many ways is governed by the City of Vancouver, but is not formally part of the decision-making process,” he said.
“And so in that sense, you can make a case about governance without representation, but given there’s a lack of groundswell of calling for that kind of change, I do think that members of the UNA also have some benefits in terms of their ability to govern local affairs more closely on their own terms.”
“There are trade-offs, and this in some ways feels like a solution in search of a problem where it’s different than the rest of the Lower Mainland, but it is not obviously worse.”
Stilwell also claimed her proposal could expedite the Broadway SkyTrain expansion to campus by attracting further support from senior levels of government, but Prest said the project already has widespread support amongst politicians at all levels.
He said expanding the jurisdiction of Vancouver would not make the Millennium Line extension more likely, especially since all stakeholders are already on-board and the majority of Metro Vancouver residents appear to be as well.
A recent UBC poll found that an overwhelming majority of respondents said the SkyTrain extension would reduce road congestion and commuting times, boost economic growth, and increase the supply of affordable housing.
The Campus Resident has reached out to Stilwell and Vancouver Liberals for comment.
JAN SCHUERMANN HAS LIVED IN GERMANY, POLAND, AND THE U.S. BEFORE MOVING TO CANADA. HIS CAREER EVOLVED FROM WRITING FINANCIAL NEWS IN FRANKFURT TO COVERING BREAKING NEWS IN VANCOUVER FOR CITYNEWS AND THE CAMPUS RESIDENT. HE IS PASSIONATE ABOUT FINDING THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES.