GEORGIA BASIN INTER-REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL INITIATIVE: “We had big goals. We had a lot of practitioners at the local government level who wanted to innovate, and we had a lot of political interest in how to do this,” stated Dale Wall, former Deputy Minister of Municipal Affairs
Note to Reader:
Published by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia, Waterbucket eNews celebrates the leadership of individuals and organizations who are guided by the Living Water Smart vision. The edition published on May 7, 2024 featured Dale Wall, retired Deputy Minister of Municipal Affairs. It was his job to implement regional growth management in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a founding member of the Green Infrastructure Partnership because he believed it would be an effective vehicle for peer-based learning that would build practitioner confidence to be innovative.
The reflections by Dale Wall are structured in four parts: Why, What, How, and Now What. His story adds a layer of detail to the previous edition of Waterbucket eNews that featured reflections by Joan Sawicki, the Parliamentary Secretary for the Georgia Basin Initiative in the mid-1990s, and subsequently a Minister of Environment, Lands and Parks.
Regional Growth Strategies for Healthy Communities
“The living legacy of the Georgia Basin Initiative is embedded in and embodied by the Georgia Basin Inter-Regional Educational Initiative. Launched in 1994, the Georgia Basin Initiative was a call to action by the provincial government led by Premier Mike Harcourt. The influence of the Georgia Basin Initiative has rippled through time in profound and lasting ways,” stated Kim Stephens. Waterbucket eNews Editor and Partnership Executive Director.
“Within a few years, the Georgia Basin Initiative led to a federal-provincial agreement to collaborate under the umbrella of the Georgia Basin Ecosystem Initiative. The first 5-year plan covered the years 1998 through 2003.”
PART ONE: Build consensus around the need for a regional approach (Why)
“Looking back, one of the things that one has to appreciate about the late 1980s and early 1990s in BC was the antipathy towards regional planning in the province. The provincial government had eliminated the authority to do that in the early 1980s,” stated Dale Wall.
“Until the early 1990s, there was very little interest in having regional planning in the province. You have to put yourself into the 1980s context. Most people today have either forgotten or do not know how pessimistic a period the 1980s was due to the recession.”
“Schools were closing. Entire towns were concerned about their future. It was more a question of how we do retain an economy. So, the sense of needing to address regional growth was seen as yesterday’s subject and not something that we needed to focus on.”
“It was in the late 1980s (after Expo 86) that we started to see growth and individual municipalities, particularly in the Lower Mainland, could not deal with a number of issues in isolation by themselves. It was then that the Ministry of Municipal Affairs re-introduced the idea that some kind of regional approach would be useful.”
Context for the first regional growth strategy
“Just before we started the regional growth strategies work, Metro Vancouver had done the first Livable Region Strategic Plan. In the day, that was a pretty dramatic document.”
“It helped that Ben Marr went from the provincial government over to Metro Vancouver (in 1991) to be chief administrative officer of the regional district. A former Deputy Minister of Environment, Ben Marr was a very good strategist.”
“As I recall, initially, instead of going to the Regional Board and saying we need to do regional planning…which might have been a tough road…Ben Marr introduced the idea of pulling together what he called REGIONAL INFORMATION SERVICES.”
“That is the foundation. You cannot do regional planning without that. Because it seemed non-threatening, Ben was able to get a service approved for that function. It was little steps. People who were able to look far enough ahead could see that this was going to be necessary. But they were going to have to create the building blocks to do it.”
Process to build consensus around the need for action
“Very careful work by the likes of Parliamentary Secretary Joan Sawicki and Erik Karlsen created the foundation by which we could move forward with development of regional growth strategies and then implementation.”
“That work changed, in many ways, the context.”
“We had people in local government who were keen on doing this…who were going to be the initiators of those conversations…and the initiators of those plans for managing growth.”
“And as elements of the regional growth strategy began to take on some life, we began to have discussions about new approaches to doing municipal work and municipal infrastructure.”
PART TWO: Hurdle the risk-reward barrier to innovation (What)
Editor’s Note: Circa 2000, drainage was a galvanizing issue for sustainable development for four reasons. The Fish Protection Act came into effect in 1997. The cumulative impacts of land use changes on stream health was proven. Implementation of streamside protection regulation was a work-in-progress. Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia was under development.
“We had big goals in the 2000s. We had a lot of practitioners at the local government level who wanted to innovate, and we had a lot of political interest in how to do this. But when it came time to implement real innovation, a risk-reward barrier would materialize.”
“At the time, I was working with Chuck Gale, a senior city engineer in the Metro Vancouver region. We had a conversation about innovation in drainage that I will always recall. I asked Chuck what it would take for municipalities to adopt innovative approaches along the lines of what Patrick Condon was advocating (for compact communities and to slow, spread and sink rainwater runoff).”
“And, Chuck said, you never face a public inquiry for just doing what is known. But if you innovate and it does not work, then really bad things can happen really quickly. So, we needed a way to build confidence amongst practitioners (to do drainage differently). Otherwise, the rate of innovation would be slow.”
“We saw the importance of enhancing and expanding the discussions that peers were having. We knew that we had to do that in more spaces and in more contexts. It was an important conversation.”
PART THREE: Frame the paradigm-shift as The New Business As Usual (How)
“In the 2000s, we understood that we were going to have to do cities quite differently if we wanted to achieve the sustainability goals that we had set for ourselves. And that was going to require substantial degrees of innovation.”
“As a matter of policy, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs was quite deliberate in the sense that we wanted to push the boundaries of how municipal infrastructure was developed. We knew that we were going to have to do this under pretty strict fiscal constraints. And so that is why innovation became so important.”
From the exception to the rule
“In the mid-2000s, we used the slogan The New Business As Usual to convey the message that, for change to really occur, practices that until then had been viewed as the exception must become the norm moving forward.”
“We were trying to find these innovative streams and ask ourselves, what is it going to take to move that work into common practice. It is one thing to do a pilot or a one-off. It is quite different to see those pilots become common practice across a whole range of local governments.”
“With the new grant programs, we had some funding to support innovation. Unless we created a positive receiving environment amongst the local professional staff, we would be funding a lot of conventional stuff. But we wanted to use our funding resources to achieve the type of innovation that we were hoping would result.”
“Moving good work from experiment to innovation to common practice…that is, FROM THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE. That is the space where the conversations facilitated by the Green Infrastructure Partnership had a very valuable role in building a network and extending knowledge.”
Branding image for the Green Infrastructure Partnership outreach and peer-based learning program
PART FOUR: Draw on deep knowledge to tackle growth issues today (Now What)
“That’s the historical bit from those times.”
“Was it successful? In part. Certainly, some innovations were disseminated in that way. And some I think are stalled to this day and we are still trying to figure out how to get them re-started.”
“Each time we face an environmental challenge, whether that be floods or droughts, we are once again forced to look at how we do business. A changing context challenges us to ask important questions.”
“When opportunities opened up in the mid-1990s to do things differently…and we needed to address tough issues related to sustainable regional growth…we had people with vast experience who were keen to do this work.”
“Some of these people had been in the jobs they were doing for decades. So, they had a lot of depth and had built strong networks. The extent to which they knew their context was extraordinary. They had also gained their experience under pretty constrained circumstances for quite a few years.”
“That is an incredible resource to have when you have to turn something around fairly quickly. We had people who brought latent experience, wisdom, the ability to innovate, and enthusiasm to something that they had long advocated for. What we were able to do was build on that extraordinary base.”
A perspective on the current reality
“This contrasts with the current context. We have a generation that brings a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of contemporary knowledge…but possibly does not have some of the really hard-earned skills that only come from working through the tough years.”
“Today you are seeing much more turnover in jobs. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just a different type of context such you have to learn how to innovate within that context.”
When the stars align
“Looking back at that era of innovation, it was an astonishing group of knowledgeable people that BC had in the provincial and local government service.”
“When they saw that the government of the day was interested in opening up new approaches to issues they had long thought were important…WOW, they had tremendous enthusiasm and they went for it,” concluded Dale Wall.
TO LEARN MORE:
To read the complete story, download a copy of Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Regional Growth Strategies for Healthy Communities.
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