Captive whales and their sex lives were not on the table at the first meeting of the newly minted park board Monday night at the VanDusen Botanical Garden’s visitor centre. But rebel community centres and a seniors centre were.
A motion to ban cetacean breeding at the Vancouver Aquarium, a hot-button topic over the past several months after being proposed by outgoing Vision Vancouver commissioners Sarah Blyth and Constance Barnes, failed to pass at a last-ditch meeting Nov. 24 and is unlikely to resurface with a new seven-person park board dominated by four Non-Partisan Association commissioners.
The NPA not only now has a majority of seats but also the positions of chair and vice-chair.
Incumbent NPA commissioner John Coupar, who was first elected in 2011 after being active in the fight to save the Bloedel Conservatory at Queen Elizabeth Park, won the nomination by acclamation to replace departing Vision chair Aaron Jasper.
Coupar made a point of thanking all of the departing commissioners for their service and presented each of the rookie commissioners with a book detailing the first century of the board’s 126-year history. The book chronicles its uniqueness within Canada as the only park board that is its own separate entity from city hall.
“The first thing I would like to ask is that this is required reading,” said Coupar to appreciative laughs from the crowd, which included several former commissioners. “The two bodies, the park board and the city [council] are two separate elected bodies. It is really important, even though there sometimes is some tension between us, because out of that tension comes a much better result for the citizens of Vancouver and that is what we are all here to deliver.”
Fellow NPAer and neophyte park board commissioner Sarah Kirby-Yung, a former vice-president of marketing and communications for the Vancouver Aquarium, was named the board’s new vice-chair.
The other two newly sworn-in NPA commissioners are Casey Crawford and Erin Shum. Crawford, the chair of the board of directors for the Stroke Recovery Association of B.C. and a player agent with Little Mountain Baseball, came in eighth place in the 2011 election. Shum, a special education assistant working with students with autism, is also the owner of an organic spa in Kerrisdale and volunteers with Lotus Light Charity society.
Coupar went on to outline the immediate goals for the next four years.
“Priorities are to re-establish the independence of the park board and focus on the role it plays in facilitating Vancouver’s active lifestyle,” he said.
“We want to restore and rebuild relationships with community centre associations and complete operating agreements. We would like to fast-track the construction of the Killarney’s seniors centre and include seniors fully in a complete consultation of requirements and the needs to ensure the new facility meets the needs of that community. Another big one is that we ensure the permanent protection of our parks and green spaces.”
While Coupar is the only person who served on the last board, he is not the only one with first-hand experience with the job. The Green Party’s Stuart Mackinnon, a special education teacher at Killarney secondary school, served from 2008 to 2011 and now sits on the board of the VanDusen Botanical Garden Association. Mackinnon is joined by fellow Green Party member Michael Weibe, director of the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association and owner of a restaurant specializing in locally sourced ingredients.
The sole Vision Vancouver commissioner is Catherine Evans, a policy adviser, lawyer and former chair of the Vancouver Public Library’s board of directors. Evans earned the most votes of all park board candidates in the Nov. 15 election despite being a last-minute candidate chosen after former candidate Trish Kelly resigned.
The only other business taken care of during the meeting was to approve meeting dates for the upcoming year.
