Dear Mayor Robertson and Members of Council,

Re: Motion on Notice – Improving Transparency and Public Access to Council Voting Records

I am writing on behalf of the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN) to offer our support for the aforementioned motion.

If passed, the motion would direct City staff to provide a better recording of the various votes that take place in Regular Council meetings, Standing Committee meetings and Public Hearings – in particular “specifying which members voted in favour, voted in opposition, or were recused, on leave, or absent/out of chamber.”

We feel that this would mark a modest but useful improvement in how minutes of the various Council meetings are recorded. The additional clarity around the ‘yeas and nays’ will assist in supporting the readability and transparency of Council decisions.

We also support, in principle, the idea of this data being made available through the City’s Open Data portal, as proposed in the second part the Motion. However, we do note a concern around the potential format of records that may be made available for download.

Simplified tables of voting data could, inadvertently, provide fodder for overly simple analyses of voting decisions. Voting records alone, only tell part of the story in any Council debate.

Should the motion pass, we hope, at the very least, that there will be enough contextual information in the data tables (including links back to the individual sets of minutes and meeting notes, the wording of the various items being voted on), to enable the data to be used in the richest fashion possible.

None of the concerns we raise are intended to detract from an otherwise useful motion. We do, however, feel they’re important to raise. We offer them in the spirit of constructive feedback.

Thank you for this opportunity to provide input on this motion. If I can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me at your convenience.

Yours truly,

Adam Vasilevich
Chair,
Vancouver Public Space Network