Now hear this: Keep your mouths shut.
Following the province’s move to prohibit public hearings for residential redevelopment projects that comply with official community plans, the City of North Vancouver council will go one further, no longer allowing residents to address them verbally on those developments during council’s weekly public input sessions. On those issues, residents may only write to council.
According to a legal opinion sought by city staff, if residents are permitted to address council about a development, it may open the municipality up to a legal challenge from those who accuse them of holding a de facto public hearing.
This is a stretch.
The theoretical risk faced by the city should not outweigh the very real and broad stifling of freedom of expression, which is guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
While we agree that municipal development processes were too slow and in need of change – and public hearings themselves often produced more harm than good – this interpretation of the law swings the pendulum too far in the other direction. As it is, the city reserves a meagre 10 minutes per meeting for the public to come and speak their minds. If other municipalities are going this route, we have not seen it yet.
If this is indeed the spirit of the provincial law, then the law is an ass, as Dickens put it, and it needs to be amended immediately.
And until then, councils across B.C. should err on the side of openness and accountability, which always seem to be in dwindling supply.
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