This is a bit of a long one! The annual meeting of BC’s local elected officials is now complete. This past week, from September 22 to 26, local elected officials from BC’s municipalities, electoral areas and regional districts met in Victoria for the annual conference. This conference serves as both a learning opportunity and an advocacy platform. It is a packed week filled with learning sessions, ministry meetings, catching up with colleagues, and resolution sessions. It also includes addresses from provincial political leaders. And of course, there are the evening social opportunities. I also got a guided tour of the legislature (thanks for organizing, Callan), and connected over meals with municipal officials from across the province.

Read on for details.

• Conference learning sessions

• Ministry meetings plus a utility

• Resolutions

• Final notes

Conference learning sessions

I attended three sessions (two on Monday) and one on Tuesday. I missed some others that were interesting due to the timing of ministry meetings. Here is a brief overview of each presentation.

Monday morning study session
Climate Hazards and Housing - Risk, resilience and local action

Much of this session focused on flooding and climate change. It started with Margot Whittington from the Insurance Bureau of Canada, talking about the dramatic increase in insured catastrophic losses. 2024 was the most destructive year for severe weather-related losses in Canadian history.

1. Improve how and where we build

2. Invest in resilience and help communities mitigate their risks

3. Address market gaps while avoiding interventions that reduce market capacity

One thing that was noted in the Q&A portion of this session is that many homeowners don’t know what insurance they need, i.e., they may be covered for sewer backups but not overland flooding. IBC has a helpful page that explains the insurance basics, read more here: https://www.ibc.ca/insurance-basics

The next speaker was Ian Mauro from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS); he spoke about efforts underway and the need to act – action on climate change is linked to culture change. Culture and connection to place play big roles in our ability to meet the moment, and PICS offers a climate internship program to help organizations meet their climate-related goals while providing university students with an opportunity to acquire relevant work experience.

The Hon. Kelly Green, Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, spoke about mitigation, preparation, response and recovery from a provincial perspective and spoke briefly about the new legislation expected in 2027. While the July 2024 regulations require provincial government ministries to prepare hazard-specific risk assessments and emergency management plans, legislation expected in 2027 will focus on local authority emergency management.

The mayor of Merritt, Mike Goetz and Jason Lum, Councillor from the City of Chilliwack and Fraser Valley Regional District Director, both spoke about flooding. Mayor Goetz focused on the challenges experienced post-flooding and the cost of recovery and mitigation. So far $153 million has been spent on clean-up, with only $2 million from the federal government - the key message here is that you won’t get much help from the feds.

Director Lum focused on housing targets and floodplain risk (approximately 60% of the city of Chilliwack is located on the floodplain). He noted that housing legislation, such as the Small Scale Multi Unit Housing legislation, permitting a minimum of three units per lot (up to six under certain conditions) and the Transit Oriented Areas, highlight the pitfalls of blanket orders and drawing lines on a map versus other options that would provide more flexibility to meet the intent - build more housing. I should note that SSMUH legislation does allow for an exemption if four conditions are met for lands subject to hazardous conditions (section 3 (1)).

Key takeaways:

• Catastrophic losses due to severe weather are rapidly increasing.

• Hazards are inevitable; disasters are not!

• New requirements are coming! Provincial EDMA requirements are out of sync with local realities.

• Stop creating more risk - align housing with hazard maps (i.e. don’t build on floodplains) and balance housing orders with risk profiles.

• Buy down risk when possible, but the question is, who pays for this?

Monday afternoon study session
Delivering affordable housing - challenges and opportunities

Speakers included Mayor Marianne Alto, City of Victoria, Councillor Jen Ford, Resort Municipality of Whistler and a speaker from the Town of Creston (I did not write their title down). All three speakers provided insight into different perspectives and approaches that their municipalities had taken. I took fewer notes this session, but the messages that stood out were Whistler’s work to build housing for their workforce and Creston’s Housing Corporation, which was initially funded using their Growing Communities Funding to ensure stable operation in its first five years. See photos of slides below.

Wednesday afternoon
Cabinet Townhall: Strong Communities

This panel included the Minister of Health, Josie Osborne, the Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs, Christine Boyle and the Minister of Transportation and Transit, Mike Farnworth. Each minister provided a brief overview of what was happening in their ministry and answered questions. Minister Farnworth quipped that he liked requests that didn’t cost money. The audience asked questions about stable transit funding, housing regulations and links to back to infrastructure needs, and health care funding. There were no new funding announcements.

Ministry meetings plus a utility

On Monday, we met with staff at the Ministry of Infrastructure about future uses for Eagle Ridge lands. Myself, Councillor Morrison, Councillor Lurbiecki, MLA Glumac and CAO Anna Mathewson were in attendance. At first, we were all a little confused about why we were meeting with Infrastructure instead of Health, as our topic was about using the ERH campus for other health-related uses, like housing (supportive, seniors, and workforce), however, one of Infrastructure’s areas of responsibility is long-term care. I stressed that we are interested in collaboration and outside-the-box, creative solutions to solve some of our challenges. Long-term care on hospital lands would be a step in the right direction, and I look forward to discussing this in greater depth with Council, staff and ministry partners.

Tuesday, we (myself, Amy, Callan, Haven, Anna and Paul) met with the Minister of Finance’s Assistant Deputy Minister and other staff to discuss our two finance-related resolutions - one on split assessments (for purpose-built rental, related to our resolution) and, of course, gaming revenue. Ministry staff were non-committal about split assessments. On the topic of sharing gaming revenue, they acknowledged the inequity of the current system but said that any gaming revenue sharing (not casino revenue!) is unlikely, as the government requires this revenue. Sigh. Local governments also need other sources of revenue due to the many responsibilities that have been downloaded to them.

We also met with BC Hydro staff to discuss the assessment appeal on the Burrard Thermal site. The full site is approximately 180 acres, with only ~80 acres used for utility/industrial purposes. Much of it is forested with small creeks. It is currently being used for voltage stability, but will no longer be needed once upgrades at the Meridian substation are completed, plus another substation in Surrey. Long story short, we lost the appeal for 2022, 2024 and 2025, resulting in approximately $250,000 less in taxes per year being paid to the City.

Thanks to our CFO and financial team, we’ve been planning for this worst case scenario and have set aside money so there should be no impact to residents and businesses. This situation could be a whole post in itself. Eventually, the site will be decommissioned and repurposed, though details are very scarce at this point. BC Hydro is working through the decommissioning plans at this time.

Resolutions

The resolution session is one of my favourite parts of UBCM, and we never have enough time to get through them all. Two hundred and seventy resolutions were submitted by the June 15 deadline. One of the reasons I think the volume of resolutions is increasing is that municipalities are asking for help, yet we aren’t getting it. The UBCM executive proposed an extraordinary resolution to change the process to streamline (limit?) the number of resolutions. I did not quite agree with this process, but it passed, and we will see how it plays out over the next conference.

There were also five special resolutions from the UBCM executive on priority issues, including library funding (which passed). The Endorse Block contained 95 resolutions. The Not Endorse Block contained three. The remaining 122 resolutions were in the No Recommendation section – we only got to NR67 out of the 122. The UBCM 2025 resolution book can be found here.

Port Moody sent eight resolutions to UBCM:

Final notes

It was great to be able to connect with colleagues from around the province and learn more about what they are working on in their communities. Receptions provide an opportunity for social connections, including the IAFF reception (always great to chat with our firefighters).

And it was really nice to be back in Victoria and see the changes it has undergone in recent years. From bike lanes to bakeries and new restaurants, it is a fun city to be in.

Until next year!