Public officials who believe they are in the right do not, as a rule, wait until 10:31PM to email the people challenging them and warn them to ask their lawyer what their "risks" are.

That is exactly what happened to us last night.

With nothing but a weekend standing between now and Monday, July 20 — the day the Vancouver Park Board is scheduled to hand final approval to the demolition contract we are challenging in the Supreme Court of British Columbia — an email landed in the inboxes of this Society's two directors. It did not come from the City's lawyers. It came directly from Tom Digby, Commissioner and Chair of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation — reaching past his own counsel to write to the other side of the very lawsuit his Board has spent months citing as the reason it "can't comment" on this project. (The petitioners in that case are this Society and its Managing Director, Jon Girard.)

We are going to publish that email in full, because we think every voter in this city should see it. And then we are going to say plainly what it is: a blatant intimidation tactic, put in writing, by the Chair of a public board, aimed at the residents holding it to account — with only a weekend before a vote it does not want disrupted.

The timing is worth sitting with. Yesterday afternoon, at 1:30, I took the March 4 transcript we published to the province's airwaves on the Jill Bennett Show. I laid the whole thing out and named it in plain language — a corruption of process that, in our view, raises questions serious enough to reach into potential criminality. I did not soften it, and I will not here. You can hear it for yourself:

By 10:31 that same night — barely nine hours after I came off the air, and a day after a speaker made the same point from the podium at City Hall — the Chair of the Park Board was emailing us to blame us and level baseless accusations. Draw your own conclusions about what tends to prompt a message like his.

What the Chair Wrote

We are not paraphrasing. These are the Chair's own words, in the order he wrote them.

He opened by assigning us blame:

I am holding you two personally accountable for the outrageous hostility and abusive behaviour demonstrated at city hall yesterday, and in abusive emails and public statements about our staff and elected public representatives, regarding the VAC demolition.

He then described a stranger who had approached him:

Separately I was confronted last weekend by someone who I had never met who said in an aggressive and confrontational manner that he hated me for what I did with the VAC.

And here is what he says he told that stranger about us:

…turns out he was not informed that we were $100M short and did not have the land rights to expand the VAC footprint. I told him that you two, Jon and Mayeli, knew these facts and were lying to him.

He continued:

You two have gone way past any reasonable level of civil discourse in this matter. Park Board will bring in extra security for our meeting on Monday. Any abusive behaviour will lead to immediate dismissal of the speakers list. Any confrontation or threatening behaviour towards the public or staff, in the parking lot outside the building, will be met with police action.

And he closed like this:

I advise you to consult with your attorney, who I know for many years, when you consider next steps in this matter. Ask him what your risks are. Govern yourselves accordingly.

Read that last paragraph again. Then read it a third time, and ask yourself what it is doing there.

Here it is, in full. Read it for yourself — and then we will tell you, plainly, why not one word of it moves us an inch.

The Silence That Wasn't

Start with the plainest fact, because it needs no interpretation.

For nearly a year, this Board's position — in public statements, in correspondence, in the practiced deflection every resident who has emailed a commissioner has received back — has been that it cannot discuss this matter because it is in active litigation before the Supreme Court of British Columbia. That line has been used to decline interviews, to dodge questions, and to keep the public at arm's length from the single most consequential decision this Board will make this term.

But that silence was never as principled as it sounded. It has always been a one-way valve. When staying quiet served the plan, the Board stayed quiet. When speaking served the plan, commissioners spoke freely — from the safety of their own Board meetings, where the process is theirs to control. There, they have found plenty to say: reaffirming the 25-metre decision, talking up the building's supposed safety risks, and, more than once, scolding the very residents writing in to object. "It's before the courts" has never stopped this Board from speaking when it wanted to push the vote forward. It only ever stopped the Board from answering.

And yet, on the eve of the final vote, the Chair of that same Board sat down and personally emailed the two litigants — by name — to tell them he holds them "personally accountable," to relay a private conversation about them, and to advise them to ask their lawyer "what your risks are."

We will let the reader hold those things side by side, exactly as we did with the transcript, and draw the line that draws itself:

A Board that would not give the public a straight answer for nearly a year — only "we can't comment" — found several hundred words, at night, the moment it wanted to warn the people challenging it.

That is not our characterization of his motives. That is the sequence. We are simply putting it on the record.

We Do Not Control the Public. You Chose This.

The Chair's email opens by holding us "personally accountable" — for conduct at a public meeting, for "abusive emails," and, remarkably, for a stranger he says confronted him on the weekend and told him he "hated" him for what he did with the VAC.

Take the emails first. Many of the messages the Chair calls "abusive" appear to be residents using a template on our website to write to their own elected officials about a decision that affects their city. That is not abuse. That is the single most ordinary act of democratic participation there is, and a commissioner who experiences a constituent letter-writing campaign as an attack has misunderstood the office he holds.

Now the stranger. We are a registered non-profit with donors and members across this city. We publish; people read; some of them feel strongly. We do not — and cannot — control what any member of the public chooses to say to an elected official, any more than a newspaper controls its readers or a business controls its customers. To collapse a stranger's words into our conduct is not accountability. It is a search for two named people to blame, because that is easier than sitting with the fact that a great many Vancouverites are angry — and that they are angry for reasons the record supports.

So let me set the record straight, and speak to the Chair directly as Jon Girard.

Tom, I'll be as direct with you as you were with us. We do not control our donors. We do not control our members. And we most certainly do not control what a stranger on the street decides to say to you about the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. That is not our narrative to manage, and it is not our job to manage it. We are independent investigative journalists, and we do this work with integrity — we follow the record where it leads, and we publish what we find. If a member of the public walks up to you and tells you they hate what you did with the VAC, that is not our doing and it is not our problem. It is yours. You got into politics. You voted to approve a plan rife with corruption of process. You knew what you were signing up for. There will always be people who don't like what you decide, and some who will even hate you for it. Learning to carry that is the job. If you can't, then politics isn't the place for you.

"Lying"

The Chair writes that he told a stranger we "knew these facts and were lying to him" — the "facts" being the City's claim of a "$100M" shortfall and its claim to lack "the land rights to expand the VAC footprint."

Our answer is short. It is not our job to inform the public of the City's case. That obligation runs the other way: a public body owes residents transparency; a volunteer Society challenging it does not. What we obtain through our FOI requests and the discovery record, we publish as we see fit — vetted, and in our own time. That is how an investigation works. It is not lying.

And we are hardly hiding anything. Months ago, under our own names, we published the internal emails showing senior City staff — Deputy City Manager Armin Amrolia among them — directing this project and its costing toward a predetermined outcome. People who are lying to the public do not spend months putting the documents in front of it.

We have never claimed to speak for the City's finances or its land file. We have never been obligated to — we are the people who sued to force this information into the open, not the people who were paid to be transparent about it and refused. When a Society raises questions a public body will not answer, the answer is for the public body to open its books. It is not for the Chair of that body to tell strangers the questioners are liars. There is a word for publicly telling a third party that named individuals are lying, when you cannot know it and the record cuts the other way. Spoken aloud, as the Chair describes doing, that word is slander; put in writing, it is libel. We name it plainly — and we leave it with our lawyer, the one the Chair was so eager to remind us he knows, to consider.

Read the Warning for What It Is

We have been careful and precise for nearly a year, because precision is the whole of our credibility. So understand that we do not use the following words loosely, and we are done softening them.

This email is a blatant intimidation tactic.

Look at what it is made of. "Extra security." "Immediate dismissal of the speakers list." "Police action" in the parking lot. And then, unprompted, the Chair reaches for our lawyer — "who I know for many years" — and tells us to ask him "what your risks are" and to "govern yourselves accordingly." A public official does not need to name-drop his acquaintance with your counsel to make a point about civility. That detail is not there by accident. It is there to be felt. Strip away the tone and what remains is a sitting Chair, with only a weekend before the vote, telling the two people challenging that vote in court that they should be thinking about their "risks."

That is not a message about civil discourse. That is an attempt to raise the cost of opposition — to make us calculate, and quiet down. We will name it for what it is: a blatant intimidation tactic, put in writing, by the Chair of a public board, against the residents holding it to account.

And it will not work.

And note the one concrete governance threat buried in the middle of it: any abusive behaviour will lead to immediate dismissal of the speakers list. Read literally, that is a sitting Chair announcing, in advance of a public hearing, that the conduct of one attendee can be used to shut down the registered right of every other resident to be heard. On Monday, Vancouverites will sign up to speak about the pool their city voted for. They should know, going in, that their Chair has already put the entire speakers list on notice — and they should hold him to the bylaws that govern how, and whether, he is permitted to do that.

One More Recipient

The Chair did not send this only to us. Among the recipients was a representative of the Canadian Dolphins — the largest swim club at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, and the facility's single biggest community stakeholder. We are not affiliated with them whatsoever. In the copy we are publishing, we have redacted that individual's name. We have left the organization's domain, @canadiandolphin.ca, visible, because the fact of the inclusion is the point.

We will not speak for the Canadian Dolphins, and we will not put words in their mouths. We will only note the obvious: a club of that size depends on the Park Board and the City for the pool time its members need — not only at the VAC, but at public facilities across Vancouver. When an official sends a warning to the people challenging his Board and loops in a stakeholder that relies on that same Board for its access, the choice of recipients is worth noticing. So we will ask the question plainly, and let readers weigh it for themselves: why was that address on this email at all? A public body should be the last institution on earth whose stakeholders feel they must stay on its good side to be treated fairly. This is not the mafia.

Why We Are Not Moving

Here is what the email did not accomplish.

It did not change a single fact in the transcript. It did not un-close the pool, or restore the land rights, or reconcile the "unsafe building" the public was barred from with the same building rented out to a private group the very next day. It did not answer the procurement questions. It did not lift the reserved judgment. It did not make the borrowing authority mean something other than what more than 100,000 voters were told it meant.

What it did was tell us we are close enough to the nerve that the Chair would rather manage us with a blatant intimidation tactic than answer us.

We are not employees of the Park Board and we are not its subjects. We are a registered non-profit and, in this matter, we are functioning as the people doing the slow, documented, primary-source work of finding out what actually happened to a public asset and telling residents plainly. We will keep doing exactly that. We will keep it accurate, we will keep it on the record, and we will not be talked out of it by an email sent after dark.

So, with only the weekend between us and Monday's vote, our asks to this Board are unchanged — and now they are urgent:

• Do not hand final approval to this contract on Monday. Under section 488 of the Vancouver Charter, the authority to stop rests with the Board. Demolition is the one step that cannot be undone.
• Defer until the matters are independently examined — the reserved Supreme Court judgment. No reputable City moves to approve a contract while simultaneously pending authority in a reserved ruling.
• Wait for October. This is a generational decision about a public facility, months before an election. Let the incoming Board, accountable to a fresh mandate, make the irreversible call — not the outgoing one, in the final days of its term.

Stop the demolition. Open the record. Let the voters decide.

For journalists: The Chair's full email, our correspondence record, the March 4 transcript, the affidavit record, and the City's own engineering reports are available for review. Email us here. Counsel is not available for comment.

If this made you as angry — a Board that "couldn't comment" for nearly a year, emailing the litigants a warning with only a weekend before the vote — then do something with it. Show up on Monday, July 20. And help us fund the fight, because the City's legal budget is unlimited and funded by your taxes, and ours is funded by you. Chip in to continue to fund the fight.

Last Updated: July 17th, 2026

With thanks,

Jon Girard
Managing Director, PROTECTING OUR VANCOUVER AQUATIC CENTRE SOCIETY

PROTECTING OUR VANCOUVER AQUATIC CENTRE SOCIETY (S0083228) is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to democratic accountability and voter rights. The judicial review (Case No. S-263492) has been brought pursuant to the Judicial Review Procedure Act.