How a Livestream F-Bomb Turned Our Eyes Back to City Hall

With the provincial election now mostly behind us, apart from the part where we find out who won, and a federal election in the offing, you’d have to drop an F-bomb on the livestream of a city council meeting to get anyone to focus on Vancouver’s local politics.

That’s precisely what happened at Wednesday’s daylong meeting of the standing committee on policy and strategic priorities, where ABC Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung blew up at her ABC colleague Mike Klassen, who chaired the committee.

“If we could not dispense with procedure, and councillors could follow that out of respect for their colleagues... I would appreciate that,” said a heated Kirby-Yung. “This is not the Wild West of fucking procedure.”

The expletive stunned fellow ABC Coun. Rebecca Bligh, who quickly called a point of order, describing the moment as “highly inappropriate.”

As the councillors bickered and Mayor Ken Sim wandered behind the two women, his hands in his pockets, a 10-minute recess was called.

A clip of the moment, uploaded to X, has already racked up more than 80,000 views.

There’s much to discuss here, but it bears mentioning the ABC councillors were discussing a motion on when to break for dinner.

One wonders if this outburst could have been avoided if the councillors prioritized snacks, like Mayor Ken Sim, seen pacing about in an unbuttoned dress shirt while thoroughly chewing his food.

With his own party’s councillors shouting and swearing at each other, a clear sign of cracks in the ABC supermajority, it’s honestly impressive that Sim is the one who comes off as the most unprofessional of the bunch.

“Why is Ken Sim walking around with snacks like a toddler,” one commenter asked.

Unserious behaviour with serious consequences

Seen by many as a deeply unserious mayor, who converted a city hall boardroom into his own personal gym and does chin-ups while chatting with columnists, Sim’s checked-out demeanour throughout the brief Oct. 23 clip will do little to belie this reputation.

Amid this unserious behaviour, however, is a serious bid to violate privacy rights. The tempestuous discussion on when to break for dinner is part of a larger debate over the motion of ABC councillors Brian Montague and Peter Meiszner to allow the Vancouver Police Department to access and record footage from the city’s traffic cameras.

Per the council members’ motion, this resolution’s aim is to “significantly enhance the VPD’s operational capabilities by providing real-time visual information that allows for a more effective and efficient deployment of police resources to incidents as they occur, not only for quicker response times but also for more informed and effective decision-making in critical situations.”

The counter-argument is that providing warrantless surveillance tools to the police is not only unwarranted but unconstitutional, as registered social worker and Pivot Legal Society anti-stigma campaigner Nina Taghaddosi explained in council chambers, not long after the recess.

“When people are in public space, we still have a fundamental and constitutional right to privacy,” she said. “Police powers to search people are limited to certain situations, and especially by the need to obtain a warrant from a judge. We’re very concerned that it’s unconstitutional to provide the police with unlimited and unsupervised access to the city’s video surveillance network.”

It’s just the latest move from a troublingly pro-police council and mayor, who has already allowed the VPD budget to balloon to over $443 million, and now wants to bypass provisions of the Criminal Code designed to protect individual privacy rights in public spaces.

When the motion came up, Coun. Klassen first asked if anybody wanted to abstain due to conflict of interest — a reasonable question, as Montague, co-sponsor of the motion, was the VPD spokesperson during the StingRay surveillance scandal and, prior to that, part of multiple surveillance positions within the department.

Meanwhile, Kirby-Yung, the star of the viral video clip, is married to former VPD officer Terry Yung, who recently ran with the BC NDP in the 2024 provincial election in Vancouver-Yaletown. At the time of this writing, Yung had 8,553 votes, 984 more than Melissa De Genova of the Conservative Party of BC.

De Genova is a former Non-Partisan Association park board commissioner and city councillor who is also married to a police officer. In 2022, De Genova introduced a similar, surveillance-minded motion in favour of installing closed-circuit televisions in Vancouver, so as to prevent violent crime. It was voted down 8-1, with only De Genova in favour.

But there were no conflicts, at least until council started talking about when to eat dinner.

Later that same evening, council voted to approve the motion, with Coun. Pete Fry the lone vote against.

“We have reasonable rights to privacy, including from unwarranted state surveillance,” said Fry, who argued that traffic camera footage should be recorded but made available to VPD only upon request.

“I do think it’s an erosion of our civil liberties,” he added.

The motion moves next to city staff, who are scheduled to report on the financial and legal implications of the plan by early 2025.

Council also agreed to delay dinner, if you were wondering.