Today the Society is publishing, in full, the formal complaint we filed against Park Board Chair Tom Digby over the email he sent us at 10:31 p.m. on July 16. We are publishing it because we have submitted it three times, and the office responsible for policing Park Board conduct has not once confirmed it exists.
No file number. No receipt. No letter. Nothing.
Below is the complaint, the record of every attempt to file it, and the rule that guarantees no one will rule on the Chair's conduct before you vote on him.
What we filed
The complaint concerns one document. It is an email from the Chair's official City account, signed "Commissioner & Chair," sent to the two people challenging his Board in court, four days before the Board's final vote on the demolition contract. We published that email in July. These are the lines the complaint rests on, in the Chair's own words:
I am holding you two personally accountable for the outrageous hostility and abusive behaviour demonstrated at city hall yesterday…
I told him that you two, Jon and Mayeli, knew these facts and were lying to him.
Any abusive behaviour will lead to immediate dismissal of the speakers list.
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.
The complaint alleges that this email breaches the Code's rules on how a Commissioner must treat members of the public, on accurate and non-defamatory communications, and on using the influence of office only for the duties of office. It also asks the Commissioner to find out why an officer of the facility's largest user group, a club whose pool time the Park Board allocates, was copied on it.
It does not ask the Integrity Commissioner to rule on the pool. It asks her to rule on the email. We said we would take part in informal resolution. We still will.
The office knows how to acknowledge a complaint. The same Integrity Commissioner serves both City Council and the Park Board. On September 8, a member of the public filed a complaint against Mayor Ken Sim. Two days later that person had a letter on City letterhead with a file number, COV-IC-301, explaining exactly what would happen to it and when.
Two days and a file number for that complaint. Four weeks and nothing for ours.
It used to work for us, too. On April 1, 2025, we filed a complaint with this same office over the Park Board's February 2025 meetings on the Aquatic Centre. We emailed it to [email protected], the same address that now replies that it is no longer in use. Sixteen days later, Lisa Southern's office answered in writing, under file number PB-IC-040. It declined the complaint on jurisdiction and explained exactly why. We disagreed with the answer. But we got one.
Under Southern: a working inbox, a file number, and a written answer in 16 days. Since she left: a dead inbox, a form with no receipt, and silence.
A complaint with no file number cannot be followed up, cited, or proved to exist. A complaint system that issues none, and whose own published form points to a dead inbox, is not accountable to the people who use it. In the Society's view, that is no small administrative lapse. The office has the same name it had under Southern. The process no longer has the same integrity.
No ruling before you vote
We will be precise, because precision is the whole of our credibility: no finding has been made against the Chair. Under the Code, none can be made before October 17.
The Park Board Code of Conduct lets the Integrity Commissioner suspend any investigation for the 90 days before general voting day. It requires her to reject outright any new complaint about a Commissioner seeking re-election if it arrives between the close of nominations and voting day. Tom Digby is on the ballot. That is why the complaint against the Mayor was parked until after the election, and why ours will be too, if the office ever admits to having it.
We said in our complaint that we would not object to a pause until after voting day. We meant it. We did not agree to silence.
Think about what that rule does. For the last three months of every campaign, the referee can leave the field. Whatever an incumbent does in that window, to a resident, a critic or a stakeholder, no one with authority will look at it until the votes are counted. The only people left who can judge the Chair's email before October 17 are you. So read it.
Who appoints the referee
The Park Board appoints its own Integrity Commissioner, and a two-thirds vote of Commissioners can suspend or end that appointment. When the current Commissioner took the Park Board role in February, the Chair who announced and welcomed her was Tom Digby, the Respondent in our complaint. That is not an allegation against anyone. It is the structure, and the structure is the problem.
Vancouver has already watched what happens to an integrity commissioner who reports on the powerful.
In July 2024, Lisa Southern released reports on complaints involving the Mayor's office. Days later, an ABC-led council voted to suspend her office's work pending a review of her role. The motion was led by ABC councillors Brian Montague and Lenny Zhou, and opposition councillors warned it looked designed to stop further investigation of ABC.
Her office went back to work. On August 22, 2025, in report COVIC-010, she found that Mayor Ken Sim and seven ABC councillors breached the Code of Conduct by moving City business forward in private, on email chains with a quorum of Council. She reported that the Mayor's Office never answered her requests for documents, that the councillors used a Signal chat whose messages delete themselves, and that she had no power to compel any of it. She found their conduct was not inadvertent, and asked: "Why keep to the shadows…?" The Mayor publicly rejected her conclusion.
Eight weeks later, the City confirmed her contract would end on December 31, 2025, saying her term had reached its natural conclusion under the bylaw's two-term limit. Her successor took office on November 1.
Southern herself described these offices as creatures of bylaw, where the body being policed is also the "creator, changer or canceller of the oversight role." The City's own outside reviewer concluded that a fully independent integrity office is not possible in Vancouver without provincial legislation.
In the Society's view, an office whose predecessor was frozen after reporting on the Mayor's office, brushed off by the Mayor when she found him in breach, and then replaced, and which is now appointed by the Board whose Chair it must judge, has every structural reason to keep its head down. Whether this one does is a question it can answer the simplest way there is. Send us a file number.
What we are asking
Of the Integrity Commissioner:
- Confirm in writing that our complaint has been received, with a file number and the date of receipt.
- Fix the front door. Take the dead email address off the City's published complaint form, and give every online submission a confirmation number.
Of the Park Board, our asks are unchanged:
- Halt the demolition until the new Park Board can decide.
- Open the record on the 25-metre decision.
- Respect the vote. The 2022 plebiscite authorized borrowing for a 50-metre pool renewal.
Last Updated: October 7th, 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 appeal (Court of Appeal File No. CA51872) arises from the judicial review (Case No. S-263492) brought pursuant to the Judicial Review Procedure Act.
