OCP Consultation

A comparison of Port Moody's OCP consultation with other communities

Author

Samantha Agtarap
October 06, 2025

We are now in the home stretch of the Official Community Plan (OCP) process: the first reading of the bylaw is scheduled for October 7 at 7 pm, the second reading later this fall, and the public hearing early in the new year. 

An OCP is a high-level document used by local governments to help guide future decisions regarding land use, community sustainability and development. The framework is meant to be a living document, which should lead, but not restrain, a city as municipal leaders make future decisions.  The provincial deadline for OCP adoption is December 31, 2025, though many municipalities, including Port Moody, will likely miss this deadline. After that, OCPs must be updated every five years.

Throughout this process, consultation and engagement have been recurring themes – both in council discussions and in community conversations. Before deciding whether our engagement effort is “enough”, I wanted to understand:

  • How do Port Moody’s community engagement and consultation activities compare with those of other municipalities working on their OCPs?

  • How many people participate elsewhere?

  • What approaches do they use?

What question am I trying to answer?

When people question whether engagement and consultation activities are “enough”, they may mean different things: quantity (how many participations), reach (who was engaged), influence (did the input shape decisions), or quality (how meaningful were the conversations).

For this blog, I am focusing primarily on participation numbers and on the types of activities municipalities undertook to gather input. This is because those two things are measurable and publicly reported. I converted participation to participations per 1,000 residents to make a simple apples-to-apples comparison. 

To add perspective, I looked at participation numbers and types of engagement activities across a few cities.

I’ve tried to explain how I arrived at my conclusions and based my decisions on data which is freely available online. I’ve provided references below so that you can review and draw your own conclusions. (I welcome any healthy discourse based on the data, and I am interested in hearing what you have to say.)

How I picked comparators

I used BC Statistics’ 2024 population estimates to select municipalities with populations close to Port Moody’s (38,942 in 2024), and a few larger ones for context, since larger cities often have more resources to dedicate to OCP processes.

Municipalities selected based on size:

  • Penticton - 38,665

  • Campbell River - 38,028

  • Langley (City) - 35,316

  • North Cowichan - 43,495

  • Courtenay - 32,049

  • Langford - 58,320

Municipalities chosen for comparison (larger communities sometimes have more resources):

  • Prince George - 84,905

  • Victoria - 102,856

Population estimates are available up to 2024 and are available here (downloadable .xlsx file): Municipal and sub-provincial areas population, 2011 to 2024 (XLSX). The main Population Estimates web page can be found here.

A few notes:

In the table below, I summarize the engagement activities and counts I found in each municipality’s engagement summary materials. A few important methodological notes up front:

  • “Participation” counts include every returned survey, attendance figure at in-person events, and other activity reported in engagement summaries. They do not measure unique individuals; one person could show up to multiple events or complete more than one survey and would be counted more than once.

  • Where municipalities published event-by-event counts, I used those numbers. Where only qualitative summaries were available, I recorded what was reported (for example, “over 100 comments” at a pop-up was recorded as 100 in the table). Round numbers generally indicate estimates of participation.

  • All participation numbers are the totals reported by the municipality or in their engagement reports; I did not attempt to estimate unique respondents or adjust for repeat participation.

  • This does not answer the question of who is participating, reach, quality of engagement or influence.

The numbers

The table below summarizes each city’s estimated participation based on reports. To compare fairly, I calculated participation per 1,000 residents, though total counts include multiple participations by the same person. A detailed table, which includes consultation and engagement activities, is available at the end of this blog, in the References section. I did not calculate per capita participation for Penticton and Campbell River, as they undertook minor updates with a short duration.

Summary of participation in engagement activities by selected municipality

Allowing for some double-counting, Port Moody’s engagement rate appears notably high compared to similarly sized municipalities. With approximately 112 participations per 1,000 residents, our OCP process engaged more people proportionally when compared to others, such as Victoria (43 per 1,000), Langford (41 per 1,000) or Prince George.

Limitations and caveats

I relied on engagement reports and project pages published by each municipality. Reporting styles vary: some provide event-level attendance numbers, others provide qualitative summaries (“over 100 comments,” “800 voices heard”), and some publish only the dates and types of activities without totals. Where figures were absent or ambiguous, I have noted that.

Because we can’t disaggregate for unique participants, we should treat “participations” as a measure of engagement intensity rather than community reach. This is true for all municipalities.

The provincial OCP deadline (December 31, 2025) and related legislation may have pushed municipalities to accelerate processes; uneven resourcing and different engagement strategies complicate direct comparisons.

Tentative conclusion

Participation numbers don’t capture everything; quality of input, diversity of voices, and how feedback influences decisions all matter too. But this data suggests Port Moody residents have shown significant interest and involvement in shaping the OCP.

If the central concern is how much engagement happened, Port Moody’s OCP process — in sheer participations per capita — compares favorably to many other cities of similar or larger size. 

This raises deeper questions: 

  • Did the process reach underrepresented groups? 

  • Were the engagement activities accessible and meaningful? 

  • Did it produce actionable advice that influenced land-use choices?

Those qualitative questions are also important and require targeted analysis (demographic response profiles, participant surveys on satisfaction/impact, and transparent reporting on how feedback was used), but are limited by how some engagement activities are designed and reported (e.g., an open house typically would not gather demographic data from participants, whereas an online survey could).

I have not undertaken this qualitative analysis. That is beyond the scope of this post. 

My hope is that this data provides some helpful context in future discussions on the OCP engagement efforts, and as residents consider how to participate in future opportunities, whether that is the upcoming Public Hearing or other opportunities.

ADDED Oct 7, 11 am: Based on the publicly available data, Port Moody has achieved significant participation throughout the OCP process, more than comparable cities. Thank you to our expert staff for their work both in designing and conducting consultation and engagement activities.

And a word of thanks to my editor for trying to make this more readable. Any errors or grammatical or readability issues are mine. They tried 🙂 

References

Port Moody

Penticton

Campbell River

Langford

Prince George

Victoria