Colwood council has deferred further discussion and a possible decision on how to comply with the Accessible B.C. Act after failing to come to an agreement in the council chambers.
Council spent just over an hour discussing the act’s requirement that municipalities have an accessibility committee, but the motion on the Sept. 11 agenda was shot down and attempts to amend it and pass a new motion did not come to a vote after Mayor Doug Kobayashi moved to instead defer discussion to a future meeting, which passed with only Coun. Kim Jordison opposed.
The issue of how to meet the act’s requirements has proven controversial for West Shore municipalities over concerns over a lack of consultation with people with lived experience with a disability and what role the existing Intermunicipal Advisory Committee on Disability Issues – which has served the municipalities for 30 years – would play.
Council was originally expecting to discuss a motion by Jordison that would have designated IACDI as Colwood’s accessibility committee, as the District of Metchosin has chosen to do.
Instead, Jordison told her colleagues she could no longer support the motion she originally introduced at their Aug. 28 meeting as she now felt it would not be possible to work with IACDI to update their terms of reference in order to comply with the requirements set out by the province.
She said she wanted to alter the motion so Colwood would instead create a new committee, separate from IACDI and from the Capital West Accessibility Advisory Committee, which has drawn criticism for being made up solely of municipal corporate officers with an unclear timeline on when it would be expanded to include community members.
The new Colwood committee would from the beginning include members of the community with lived experience with disabilities, and Jordison said she would encourage IACDI members to apply to be on this new committee as well.
But council immediately raised issues with Jordison’s amended motion, both on the fact they were now being asked to vote on a motion they had not had an opportunity to review and were unclear about as it was being written on the spot, and over disagreements about whether IACDI was working in good faith with municipalities on this process.
Jordison, Colwood’s council representative on IACDI, told her colleagues she had come away from an August meeting with IACDI chair Marnie Essery, Metchosin Mayor Marie-Therese Little and Colwood Coun. Cynthia Day with the understanding an agreement in principle had been reached over IACDI’s new terms of reference.
Jordison said she expected those terms of reference to be formally approved at IACDI’s next meeting, but instead received a new terms of reference document a few weeks later from IACDI that contained multiple changes, including the return of several points which she said had been removed by agreement as they were not compatible with the province’s new requirements.\
Day told council she had not compared the terms of reference Jordison was referring to with the terms which had been agreed to in principal following the August meeting, but noted IACDI was scheduled to meet to discuss and approve a new terms of reference document at its Sept. 28 meeting.
Day moved that the city continue to support IACDI as its “voice for the disabled” and that it work to draft terms of reference satisfactory to all member municipalities.
That motion never came to a vote however, as after hearing from multiple councillors at the table they felt uncomfortable voting on something that had become so convoluted and therefore hard to understand during the meeting, so Kobayashi moved the deferral of discussion.