Every case like this has a room.

Not the courtroom, and not the council chamber where the cameras are. A different room — smaller, quieter, off the record, where the people who have already made up their minds decide what everyone else will be allowed to see. For fourteen months we have argued that a room like that existed for the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. That the 50-metre pool was not carefully studied and reluctantly abandoned, but condemned in advance — and that the reasons the public was given were assembled afterward, to fit a verdict that had already been reached. We were told, more than once, that we couldn't prove it. That it was a theory. That absent a smoking gun, it was just noise.

We found the room.

It is a March 4, 2025 video call, transcribed automatically by the software the participants were using, and handed to us — we can only assume by mistake — inside the discovery records the City disclosed to us late last year. It was buried several folders deep, nested where no one was likely to look. We nearly didn't. And when we opened it, we found senior City staff and the project's own architects sitting together and doing something that has nothing to do with engineering, nothing to do with feasibility, and everything to do with stage-management.

They are planning how to make the 50-metre pool look impossible. And they agree, in writing, to hide the drawing that would prove it isn't.

This is that story, told in their own words. Read them slowly. Every quotation below is verbatim from the transcript.

The Timeline Is the Confession

To understand why this meeting matters, you have to know exactly where it sits.

On February 24 and 25, 2025, the Park Board held the hearings a record number of Vancouverites turned out for — speaker after speaker demanding the 50-metre pool the city had voted for. The public pressure was enough that the Board would not simply rubber-stamp the staff plan. Instead it sent staff away with a task: go back, and come back with a definitive answer on whether a 50-metre pool could be made to work. The reconvened meeting was set for March 31.

The transcript we are publishing is dated March 4 — squarely in the gap. After the public forced the question open. Before the answer was delivered. This is not a meeting about whether the 50-metre pool fits. By March 4, the people in this room are long past that question. This is a meeting about how to walk into the March 31 hearing and make sure the answer is no — and how to make that no look like a finding instead of a decision.

The room where March 31's verdict was written was convened on March 4. We were just never supposed to see inside it.

"Because It Looks So Reasonable"

Here is the sentence around which everything else turns.

The group is discussing what it would actually take to fit a real 50-metre pool at the site. The answer is not exotic. You expand the building's footprint modestly to the west. It works. Everyone on the call can see that it works — and that, precisely, is the problem they spend the meeting solving. Because a solution that works is the last thing this room wants the elected Park Board to see.

Listen to Derek Fleming, the principal architect on the project, on the option that would save the 50-metre pool:

The end of story, like if it was up to me, I wouldn't even recommend showing an expanded footprint because it looks so reasonable.

Read it twice, because a public consultant does not often say the quiet part this cleanly. The architect the public is paying to find the best answer is recommending that the best answer be hidden from the decision-makers — for the express reason that it "looks so reasonable." Because a commissioner might see it and agree.

He had already walked the room through the logic. Turning to City staffer Sarah Iacoe, he conceded the expansion is no great hardship:

…when you look at this, you go, well, that doesn't seem like a big hardship to make this building a little bit bigger and get on with what we want.

And then, the tell — the reason showing it would be dangerous:

…it doesn't look catastrophic. It looks kinda reasonable, and like somebody would just say, you know… just ask for more money, just ask for more money.

Sit with what that is. That is not an architect assessing a structure. That is a hired contractor gaming out public and political reaction — worried, out loud, that the truth is too reasonable to risk showing, because someone might draw the obvious conclusion and ask the City to fund it. So the recommendation is to keep it off the page entirely. Iacoe — remember her name — closes the loop, explaining why the workable option can't be shown:

It's not helping. It's not supportive to the narrative that we've got here and the facts.

The narrative that we've got here. Not the evidence. Not the answer. The narrative. When a public body starts curating reality to protect a narrative, it has stopped serving the public and started managing it.

Hired to Prove. They Chose to Disprove.

This is the heart of it — and it is worse than a single bad meeting.

When you retain architects and engineers on a public project, you are buying their independence. Their duty is to the truth of the thing: what can be built, what cannot, and what it costs. They are supposed to be the neutral experts, the professionals whose loyalty runs to the facts and not to anyone's preferred outcome. That is the entire value of hiring them. You pay for an honest answer you can rely on.

What this transcript documents is the precise inversion of that duty. This is not a team trying to find out whether the 50-metre pool is possible. It is a team that already has its orders and is working backward — engineering not a building, but a case. And they say so.

Here is Sarah Iacoe, telling the room what her General Manager wants:

…in feedback from my GM, you know, he does really want to see that the test fit was disproved.

Disproved. Not tested. Not honestly assessed. Disproved. The objective, stated plainly by a senior City staffer relaying her boss, was not to learn the answer. It was to manufacture a specific one — a document that closes the door on the 50-metre pool — and the entire meeting bends toward producing it.

Watch how the curation works in practice. When it emerges that a smaller, code-compliant clearance might actually fit inside the existing footprint — an inconvenient fact — the instinct is not to examine it. It is to erase it:

…I'd rather not even put the code minimum in… so don't even put it on the drawing.

And Fleming, generalizing the technique into a rule:

…don't show the things that speak to [what works against us]. Well, only show the things that speak to what works [for us].

That is not due diligence. That is corruption of the process, in the plainest sense of the word. The deliberate suppression of a true and workable answer so that a predetermined one can be sold to elected officials as though it were a finding. And they said it out loud, to each other, in a private meeting they plainly never imagined the public would read. This is not us inferring bad faith from ambiguous scraps. This is what these people say when they believe no one is listening: hide the option that works, show only what helps the narrative, get it "disproved." The mask is not slipping here. In this room, among themselves, there was no mask.

The $310,706 Question: Steve Jackson

Let's put a name and a number to that General Manager.

The "GM" who "really want[ed] to see that the test fit was disproved" is Steve Jackson, General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board. According to public remuneration figures, Jackson's base pay is $310,706 for 2026 — up from $298,689 the year before. That is what the public pays, every year, for the most senior professional steward of its parks and recreation system.

And this is what that steward wanted, in his own subordinate's account: not an honest test of whether the city's voters could have the pool they approved — but proof that they could not. He did not ask his team to find out if it was possible. He wanted it disproved.

There is a word for a highly paid public official directing that a voter-approved public project be discredited rather than honestly assessed, and then presenting the manufactured result to elected officials as though it were an independent finding. We'll let you supply it. What we will say plainly is this: the public is paying a third of a million dollars a year for due diligence, and what this transcript shows being purchased instead is its opposite — a paid effort to defeat the very thing the public voted for.

The Architects' Conflict Isn't a Side-Note. It's the Engine.

It would be one thing if the architects had been reluctant passengers in this. They were not. They were driving.

Acton Ostry and MJMA hold the design contract for this project — awarded through the City's own procurement process — and their continued interest in it depends on the project moving ahead, not on whether the public gets the pool it voted for. These are not disinterested arbiters who stumbled into a political strategy session. They are paid contractors with a direct financial stake in delivering the building the City wants, and in this transcript they are the ones steering the room toward how to sell it.

It is Fleming who says don't show the expansion, "because it looks so reasonable." It is Fleming who coaches the group that "it is important for them to hear the words say safety" — the messaging, not the finding. And it is Leland Dadson who confirms, matter-of-factly, exactly what would make the 50-metre pool work:

…this is what we have to do to make it work. We'd have to expand to the West…

Knowledge the room then agreed to keep from the elected Board.

Here is the line no one should walk past. A professional retained to give an honest, independent feasibility opinion does not spend the meeting engineering the optics of a political vote. The instant your expert stops asking is this true and starts asking how will this look to the commissioners, you no longer have an expert. You have a spokesperson with a stake in the outcome. The public commissioned independent judgment and paid for it. What it received, on the evidence of this transcript, was a conflicted contractor helping to script a result.

Managing the Room: The Speakers

The stage-management did not stop at the drawings. It extended to the people.

Late in the call, the conversation turns to the March 31 public hearing itself — and to the inconvenient reality that the public keeps showing up to oppose the plan. Tony Syskakis, a City staffer, floats an idea for handling the crowd:

…there were more people that wanted to talk in favor. But they're essentially intimidated, left… If we are able to have the positive people speak earlier…

…so they don't linger for hours, and hearing all the booze [boos] and leave. It might be beneficial to the overall conversation.

Move the supportive speakers to the front, before the opposition fills the room and the "boos" set in. And Sarah Iacoe — the same staffer — does not shut it down. She takes it aboard:

…I don't know if we can re-rank them, but I'll take that away, Tony.

In the same stretch of the meeting, the group discusses actively recruiting favourable voices — using an accessibility consultant to find people who will testify that a 50-metre pool would "intimidate" disabled swimmers and that there is "broad support" for the smaller leisure design. "You just need to get a few of those people out to speak," Fleming offers. "Maybe get a representative from the Rick Hansen."

We want to be careful and precise here, because it matters. This is a documented discussion about how to shape who the Board hears from, and in what order — an effort to curate not just the evidence on the page, but the voices in the room. What the public deserves to know is simple: while families and swimmers and Olympians were preparing to plead for their pool in good faith, believing they were addressing a Board that had not yet decided, staff and the City's paid consultants were in a private meeting treating that public hearing as one more surface to be managed.

Sarah Iacoe Played a Big Role in This Room. Then She Swore an Affidavit.

Now we come to the part the courts, and the public, need to see with absolute clarity — and we are going to state it flatly, without embellishment, because it needs none.

On March 4, 2025, Sarah Iacoe sat in a meeting where "safety" was discussed not as a conclusion the evidence had produced, but as language — a word the commissioners needed to "hear." Where the achievable 50-metre option was set aside because it was "not supportive to the narrative." Where the stated goal, from the General Manager down, was to see the pool "disproved."

And Iacoe was no silent bystander taking notes at the back of the call. She was one of its most active voices. She is the one who declares the workable 50-metre option "not supportive to the narrative that we've got here and the facts." She is the one who carries her General Manager's demand into the room — that he "really want[s] to see that the test fit was disproved" — and then argues to "continue with our preferred approach." She is the one who, when a colleague proposes moving supportive speakers to the front of the public hearing so the Board doesn't sit through the "boos," does not object but replies, "I'll take that away, Tony." And she is the one who, looking ahead to locking in the footprint story, tells the room they will "really try to lock down the appropriate statement… so we can really clarify that there is no wiggle room." Narrative, messaging, speaker management, the "disproved" verdict — at every turn, Iacoe is not observing the strategy. She is helping to drive it.

Later, this same City staffer swore an affidavit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia — affidavit evidence advancing the very "unsafe building" story this campaign has challenged from the beginning. The same safety story that helped defeat our injunction and close the pool to the public.

And here is where that story reveals itself. Because the City closed the Vancouver Aquatic Centre to the public on Sunday, June 28 — citing, when pressed in court, public safety — and then, as we documented, opened the very same building the very next day, June 29, for a private group. Children in the water. Lifeguards on duty. A building too dangerous for the public on Sunday was safe enough to rent out for a private children's swim on Monday. A safety case that evaporates the moment money changes hands was never a safety case at all. It was a narrative — and now we can see, in this transcript, the room where that narrative was chosen as the message before it was ever sworn as evidence.

We are not going to tell you what was in Sarah Iacoe's mind. We don't need to, and it isn't our place. We are simply going to set the two things side by side and let you, and every commissioner, and every journalist reading this, draw the line that draws itself:

First she was in the room where "safety" was selected as the narrative. Then she swore to it in court.

That sequence is now part of the record. What is to be done with it is a matter for the courts — and our counsel is reviewing this transcript in precisely that light.

What This Confirms

For over a year, the City and the Park Board have hidden behind a practiced choreography of deflection. The City says the design is the Board's call. The Board says it doesn't control the money. And everyone, in unison, insists the 50-metre pool simply — regrettably, unavoidably — doesn't fit. This transcript takes that choreography apart.

• The 50-metre pool was not found to be infeasible. It was made to appear infeasible, deliberately, by the people presenting the finding.
• The option that would have worked — a modest footprint expansion the participants themselves called "reasonable" — was withheld on purpose from the elected officials whose sole job was to decide.
• The goal, from the General Manager down, was not to test the pool but to see it "disproved."
• The "safety" story was chosen as messaging in a private meeting before it was ever sworn as evidence in a courtroom.
• Even the public hearing was treated as something to be managed — the speaking order, the recruited voices, the optics of the room.
• And the hands on the wheel throughout included the very architects the public is paying, whose contract depends on the outcome they were busy shaping.

This is what it looks like when a public institution decides the verdict first and shops for the reasons afterward. It is reckless. It is a contempt for the more than 100,000 Vancouver voters — better than four to one — who approved a 50-metre pool. And it unfolded in a room the public was never meant to enter.

We're in it now. And we're not leaving.

For journalists: We are making the March 4 transcript and a timestamped index of the key exchanges available for review, alongside the affidavit record, the closure-and-private-rental timeline, and the engineering reports the City commissioned itself. Click here to email us. Counsel is not available for comment.

If this made you as angry as it made us — an option hidden because it "looked reasonable," a pool "disproved" on the public's dime, a safety story written before it was sworn — then do something with it. An appeal is real work and real money. The City has an unlimited legal budget funded by your taxes. We have you. Chip in to fund the appeal.

Last Updated: July 15th, 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.