Damning report calls for big changes to ‘unwieldy’ Metro Vancouver Regional District governance
Posted May 21, 2025 6:55 am.
Last Updated May 21, 2025 4:06 pm.
A new report is calling for big changes at the Metro Vancouver Regional District.
Analysts from accounting firm Deloitte say the Metro Vancouver board, and its three other related boards, are too big, making it difficult to effectively get things done.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO 1130 NEWSRADIO VANCOUVER LIVE!The report, to be discussed at Friday’s board meeting, comes after the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant’s budget saw a massive blowout, which skyrocketed to close to $4 billion after an initial projected cost of around $700 million.
Coming with 47 recommendations, the report says it’s time that the regional district’s governance structure is streamlined, suggesting that the municipal politicians who sit on the board struggle with advocating for their own cities, whilst also being held accountable on a regional level.
“The Board size over the four entities has become large and unwieldy, and will only continue to grow. A new Board and Committee structure is required to provide more effective governance and oversight, to introduce a balance of professional experience, and enhance decision-making and risk management,” the report’s key findings stated.
The report also notes that the four-yearly municipal election cycle creates a “high turnover of board members, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge.”
“This increases the need for better onboarding, education, and practical ways of accelerating the knowledge and extending the tenure of Board members,” the report stated.
Deloitte analysts also say that there are issues with public transparency and trust.
“Increasing tensions and political differences are creating a culture of heightened mistrust and frustration. The Board needs to find ways to improve the efficiency of Board meetings while improving the level of respect and trust within itself and between staff and other stakeholders,” it explained.
“Litigation and confidentiality around closed information is restricting the free flow and transparency of this information, resulting in further frustrations. Finding mechanisms to balance the need for confidentiality and the need for transparency will be paramount,” it added.
Analysts also found that the overall remuneration of board and committee members is “comparable with other similar organizations,” but they believe there are “immediate” opportunities to reduce the overall costs by streamlining governance structures and processes.
Restructuring Metro Vancouver like ‘putting Humpty Dumpty back together’: New Westminster councillor
New Westminster Coun. Daniel Fontaine tells 1130 NewsRadio on Wednesday that the report is a damning “testimony to the fact that Metro Vancouver is broken.”
“The fact that there are 47 recommendations for changes to the governance structure at Metro Vancouver just screams out to the fact that this should have been done years ago, and unfortunately, Metro Vancouver went into this kicking and screaming,” Fontaine said.
“They didn’t think they had a problem. And we now clearly know from the Deloitte report that there is a significant amount of work that needs to be done there to get that organization into the more modern times,” he added.
Fontaine explains that the report is complex and sectioned out into six different areas. While all are necessary, he says the one that the public will be most interested in is one of the recommendations, which suggests cutting the directors, currently 41, down to 34.
“From my perspective, that’s still unwieldy. It’s an incredibly large board. It’s still very expensive to operate that board. The other thing that they talk about is compensation. So there are some recommendations around things like streamlining the total number of committees, reducing the total number of elected officials on committees, and the total number of meetings,” he explained.
“These are all pretty basic recommendations, but they should have the net effect of reducing some of the costs and the compensation paid to elected officials,” Fontaine added.
Fontaine says restructuring Metro Vancouver’s governance is like “putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
“There’s a lot of pieces that are broken, and Metro Vancouver is over 50 years old, and it’s been kind of put together over the past five decades. There’s been little changes here, little changes there, and we’ve just seen 50 years of band aids and bubblegum kind of stitched together. So it’s not quite as easy as just saying we need one model,” he explained.
“It’s complex, as the report rightly points out, there’s actually four separate boards; the public thinks Metro Vancouver is one board, but it’s actually four legal entities,” Fontaine said.
But the New West councillor believes that what the public wants is simple.
“I think at the end of the day, the public really just wants accountability for tax dollars that are going there. The public is looking to keep things like the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant from ever happening again,” he said.
“The public wants to make sure that mayors aren’t double-dipping and collecting full-time salaries in Burnaby and then collecting another full-time salary at Metro.”
But Fontaine still has concerns about the climbing Iona Wastewater Treatment Plant construction costs, which currently sit at around $10 billion “and counting.”
“I’m still concerned about the fact that when you read the report, so many of the recommendations require legislative changes, which, as you know, changing legislation is not an easy thing. It takes years to do that, and we know that the Iona Wastewater Treatment Plant is already issuing contracts. They’re already heading out the door. So I’m actually very concerned that there are still a lot of areas where we’re exposed, as taxpayers in Metro Vancouver, to some potentially very large bills like we saw at the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant,” he explained.
Fontaine says he still wants to see changes around the board’s committee structures, including the reduction of the number of committees. He also wants to see the elimination of the chair of the board having the power to “willy-nilly” appoint people to committees.
“I think that’s a quick change and be able to provide for better governance,” he explained. “The problem is, most of these [recommendations], other than some policy and procedural recommendations, most of it requires the province of British Columbia to get involved, and they have to be engaged. And to date, to be quite frank, I haven’t seen a huge level of interest from the province of British Columbia in Metro Vancouver — they’ve taken a very hands-off approach with Metro Van.”
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