Letter to the Editor

Lions Bay needs accountability before it can heal

To the Editor,

When my family moved to Lions Bay, it felt like a dream come true. Then COVID arrived. I wanted to give something back, so I served on the Beach Park committee and revived the Bear Smart committee. I later stepped away when it became a lightning rod for village anger.

The 2022 mayoral campaign was built on accusations of overspending. I saw accusations, but no proof, so I did my own research. The campaign compared Lions Bay's staffing costs to Anmore's, yet the two villages don't provide the same services. Lions Bay treats its own water, runs a sewer utility and runs its own fire rescue. Anmore buys treated water from Port Moody, leaves sewage mostly to private septic systems, and shares a fire department supported by Metro Vancouver. It was a false mathematical comparison. When I raised it at the time with one of the candidates making it, the facts were not welcome.

After the election, senior staff were let go or resigned within two months, and a councillor stepped down.

I'm not writing on behalf of any candidate. I'm completing a Master of Public Policy, with a thesis on how disinformation and influence campaigns undermine democracy. This letter applies the same qualitative and quantitative analysis to Lions Bay's public record, because misinformation is one of the greatest threats to our democracy, even in a village this size.

A recent letter titled "Correcting the Record" that has been circulating in the community asks residents to give its facts serious consideration. I did, and the record tells a different story.

The provincial advisor reported that a major cause of the delayed audit was the current Council's inability to agree on the record of its own December 2022 closed meetings. The auditor's 2022 report to Council went further. It is a draft, but it is the version the Village itself posted on its website in 2024, and I could find no final or corrected version published since. It found no significant control weaknesses through most of 2022, and said controls deteriorated from November 2022, driven by a lack of support from Mayor and Council.

The letter says the CFO "departed" in January 2023. It doesn't mention that about a month after the new Council took office, the CAO was terminated without cause, and the CFO resigned soon after.

The letter attributed legal costs to workplace matters and old bylaws. Payments to the Village's law firm rose from $31,639 in 2022 to $225,854 in 2025. The letter blamed the previous Council for lost interest on Village funds, yet the Village held no investments at the end of 2023 or 2024. And the letter's author sat on the Finance Committee it credits with better oversight.

The letter also calls the completion of the beach park "on time." This Council halted the grant-funded plan after the 2022 election, aimed to open the park by summer 2024, and broke ground in November 2025.

There is real progress to acknowledge: stable senior staff, clean audits and growing reserves. But a community cannot heal around a story that isn't true. Lions Bay deserves leaders who will give an honest account of the last four years, and release what can be released: legal spending by year and type, and how each councillor voted on the decisions that drove it.

On Saturday, voters can make transparency and accountability the question that decides the election.

Mandy Clark,

Former Lions Bay resident

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