Skip to content

LAUTENS: The West Van B-Line brouhaha continues...

More B-Line brouhaha: bus terminus at Irwin Park?

The West Vancouver B-Line may be stalled for now, but the issue has legs. If developments don’t outrun me by my deadline, the latest:

A new, very big objection this week: The 24th Street bus turnaround bay would be squarely alongside Irwin Park Elementary. Did TransLink’s geniuses consider the usual idling, smoky, noisy buses, steps from kids in class? Can you say parental revolt?

B-Line rebel strategist Nigel Malkin said: “The language that some people were using to describe the Irwin Park terminus was astounding. And the foul language was from West Vancouver housewives.”

But there’s more. Agent D6p8a claims workers this week were marking off a nearby washroom site for bus drivers. Why not? Smug TransLink officials claimed early on that the B-Line project is a done deal, and town hall knows it. If they’re right, council’s deliberations are mere window-dressing.

Council and school board representatives met Monday. As usual, right from town hall top, no results released to the public. (I truly pity town hall’s communications apparatus.) But about 10 consultations will be held, details not to be released, before council’s decision – some time – in March. Clear?

My wild guess: No public protest for decades has unnerved council like this one. Town hall is counting on protesters’ fatigue. The bureaucracy smugly gets paid staffing them. Citizens, for and against B-Line, have to plan work, meals, and family around those meetings.

But enough musing. There were two West Vancouver council meetings on Jan. 14. They occurred, puzzlingly you may think, simultaneously.

One was apparent: items on the agenda. (Though, more puzzlement, the big item – the contentious matter of TransLink’s B-Line – wasn’t on the agenda. Read on.) The underlying meeting, in the shadows of the “real” one, was a proxy meeting on democracy in West Vancouver.

First, an all-too-simplified background. TransLink proposes to increase bus traffic (via the B-Line) on WV’s main business stem and limit private through traffic to one lane in each direction – and, even there, buses pulling away from their stops have legal priority.

This has rubbed some citizens the wrong way. Some claim 99 per cent. Nigel Malkin, a small businessman of no previous political profile, has marshalled the protest. And not of career cranks and grumblers but of what are commonly called solid citizens: actual voters, stake-holders, business people. Not of the ignorable classes.

Jump to the Jan. 14 meeting. Malkin predicted hundreds would show up at a B-Line meeting. Confusion. Nope, not on the published agenda – never on the agenda. Mayor Mary-Ann Booth put it there after the meeting was called to order, as noted by veteran council-watcher Carolanne Reynolds. Malkin later called it “a political ploy to reduce the attendance at the meeting, and it worked.” Still, to an eye-count, B-Line opponents who did show up dominated the public gallery.

Booth urged respect. No clapping. Called it “rude and intimidating.” Speeches began. Clapping. A man, at a sub-shout level, invoked this strange doctrine of “freedom of speech.” No clapping, Booth repeated – several times. (Her insistence was itself clapped.)

Interjection. Ever attended the B.C. or any legislature? Parliament? Been watching the mother of Parliaments lately over Brexit?

First-time attendees are astonished: Shouts, boos, mockery, hijinks, hisses – respect, dignity and all that good stuff in short supply. Not like as demanded by this mayor – or predecessor Smith, who silenced a disbelieving murmur that might have been the seeds of revolution.

Back to Jan. 14. Booth banged the gavel. The crowd, maybe 75 in the overflow room – I was there – was deemed especially disrespectful. Wordlessly, a factotum appeared. And shut the doors. A rude affront to all, for or against, an insult to democratic participation.

I went into the chambers. I asked the said factotum by whose authority he had shut the doors. “I have the authority,” said he.

Booth asked for those doors to be closed – apparently unaware they already had been. She then ordered a 10-minute recess. Unprecedented, as far as anyone I asked knew.

What would she have done if the (lingering) clapping continued? Call in the cops?

Mary-Ann Booth rightly discerned disrespect and intimidation at that meeting. And they were generated by Mary-Ann Booth.

• • •

But note well: Last Sept. 10 West Vancouver’s previous council (including then-councillor Booth) unanimously approved, without discussion, a bylaw framed by a staff report – author, WV chief administrative officer Nina Leemhius – allowing staff to expel “unruly” residents from municipal facilities for one year.

Unruly? Definition? Whatever staff says it is? Any due process? Any appeal? And could Mayor Booth evoke this bylaw to justify her over-the-top council moves concerning what Carolanne Reynolds called “the B-fuddled Line”?

• • •

Mark Ballard, with deep North Shore family roots (including Ballard Power Systems, now in Burnaby), was being hotly pursued in recent days for the federal Conservative nomination in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country, held by Liberal Pamela Goldsmith-Jones. Coincidence that Goldsmith-Jones, not much heard from these days, held an open house Thursday?

rtlautens@gmail.com

What are your thoughts? Send us a letter via email by clicking here or post a comment below.