On March 10th, 2026 — just eight days after we published internal emails proving that senior City staff predetermined the death of the 50-metre pool, directed architects to stop work on alternatives, and scripted talking points for elected officials — Vancouver Park Board commissioners sat in a public meeting and, one by one, reaffirmed their support for the very decision those emails exposed as predetermined, falsified, and corrupt.

Not one commissioner acknowledged the evidence. Not one asked how a decision they were told was theirs had actually been made in a deputy city manager's email chain ten months before they voted. Not one demanded to know why five options became one.

Instead, they praised the staff who misled them, scolded the public for being upset about it, and passed a neutered version of an Auditor General motion that was carefully rewritten to ensure it could never hold anyone accountable for the Vancouver Aquatic Centre.

The Motion That Was Gutted Before It Hit the Table

Commissioner Scott Jensen's original motion, submitted at the February 23 meeting, invited the Office of the Auditor General to undertake a performance audit of the recommendation to replace the existing 50-metre pool with a 25-metre pool at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. Over five hundred people wrote in ahead of the March 10th meeting — to demand it be strengthened with an immediate pause on the project and genuine public input.

What Jensen brought to the table on March 10th was something different. The "therefore" clause had been amended. Not with what the public were demanding, but rather, the new language shifted the audit's scope away from the VAC decision itself and toward a vague review of "decision-making frameworks" for "major capital projects" — with one eye on the future Kitsilano Pool renewal and the other firmly closed to anything that happened at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre.

Jensen explained the change by saying he wanted to ensure the audit stayed within "the jurisdictional realm of the Park Board" and that information coming back would be "valued only for the Park Board." Translation: the motion was rewritten to make sure the Auditor General's report would produce governance recommendations for future projects, not findings about what went wrong on this one.

Commissioner Laura Christensen's very first question confirmed what the rewrite was designed to protect: "Is it your intention that this would pause the ongoing work on the VAC project?"

Jensen then gave a single word answer: "No."

Four Commissioners, Four Performances, Zero Accountability

What followed was a coordinated display of commissioners reaffirming the decision that discovery emails had just shown was made behind closed doors — while praising the staff who made it for them.

Commissioner Laura Christensen

Christensen set the tone immediately, delivering her lines with a robotic precision and a look of thinly veiled contempt for anyone who might dare question the decision: "I want to be very clear that I still support our decision from the March 31st meeting to proceed with a 25-metre pool at the VAC." She encouraged her colleagues to do the same — "I hope that given the correspondence we've received on this item (referring to nearly a thousand sent letters), that if my fellow commissioners feel similarly about that, that they will also reaffirm the support for this ongoing project."

And they did. Every single one.

Commissioner Scott Jensen

Jensen — the man who introduced the original motion — didn't even show up in person, opting to participate remotely rather than face the public whose pool he helped kill. He reaffirmed his support for the 25-metre pool before voting on his own motion to audit it.

Read that again: the commissioner who asked the Auditor General to investigate the process that produced the 25-metre recommendation simultaneously told the room he supports the 25-metre recommendation. If the Auditor General finds the process was corrupt — and the discovery emails strongly suggest it was — Jensen has already told the public he doesn't care.

Then Jensen reached for the oldest tool in the playbook — fear:

It wasn't too long ago that the roof started falling again, and we were receiving a lot of complaints about the pool being closed again. I really do concern or worry about the fact that this pool, if it is not invested, will just be an empty shell while we wait for it to collapse down.

This is fearmongering, not fact. The Ausenco rehabilitation study concluded that the building's major structural elements are sound and that remediation could deliver another 50 years of service life. The Acuren NDT testing found less than 15% thickness loss in the steel roof structure, with no cracking indications. When a piece of concrete fell from the ceiling in November 2025, triggering a temporary closure, the subsequent engineering investigation resulted in precautionary netting — not a condemnation of the structure. Two independent engineering assessments, including the post-incident report, identified no major concerns with the building's structural integrity.

Jensen's rhetoric of imminent collapse is contradicted by every professional engineering assessment in the record. But it serves its purpose: it manufactures urgency, forecloses deliberation, and makes anyone calling for a pause sound like they're gambling with public safety. It is the same manufactured fear that staff used to pressure commissioners into approving the 25-metre design under artificial time constraints — and Jensen is now repeating it as if it were his own conclusion, rather than a talking point fed to him by the people who predetermined the outcome.

But Jensen saved his most telling remarks for the public who supported his motion. After acknowledging that he met "a lot of people with the swim clubs" who were "extremely passionate and very lovely," he pivoted:

There has been some very hurtful language that has been directed at staff. And I think that that is not acceptable and it's not supportive. It does not help move things forward.

He went further: "I felt at one point I wanted to rescind [the motion] because of the hurtful language that was being shared."

Let's be clear about what happened here. Hundreds of people used our platform to email Park Board commissioners, City Council, and senior staff demanding a pause on the project and real public input on the March 10th meeting (originally scheduled for March 9th). Jensen's response was not to grapple with the substance of those emails or the evidence that prompted them. It was to characterize public advocacy as bullying, shame the people who wrote in, and use their passion as a reason to nearly abandon the only accountability mechanism on the table.

This is the commissioner who asked for the audit. And he nearly pulled it because people were, as he claimed, "mean" to the staff who killed their pool behind closed doors (all the while never providing proof of any such demeaning comments).

Commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky

Bastyovanszky's contribution was perhaps the most brazen. After noting that he stands by his vote — "which is when I sent it back to staff to find a 50-metre pool option" (a distinction he was careful to make) — he declared: "The aquatic centre project is, it's been approved, it's moving forward. Construction planning is underway and focus now is on delivering the facility for the public."

Then came this: "I also want to take a moment to recognize the work of staff across the organization, including the director of REFM, Armin Amrolia and the REFM team."

Stop. Read that carefully.

Armin Amrolia is the Deputy City Manager — not "the director of REFM." Bastyovanszky got her title wrong. We don't know why. But the title is beside the point. The fact that he mentioned her by name at all is the tell.

Why is her name in his mouth at all?

In the entire history of this project — across dozens of public meetings, staff reports, media interviews, and Park Board deliberations — no commissioner has ever publicly mentioned Armin Amrolia by name. Not once. She has operated entirely behind the scenes, invisible to the public record, communicating through internal email chains and confidential memos. Her name entered the public discourse for the first time eight days ago, when we published the discovery emails showing she directed the architects to kill the 50-metre pool.

And now, at the very first public meeting after that article, a commissioner spontaneously decides to publicly thank her by name? In the middle of a motion about auditing the process she is accused of corrupting?

This was not spontaneous. This was a coordinated response — a public show of support, scripted to signal to Amrolia and the staff around her that the Park Board would not turn on them regardless of what the evidence showed. It is the clearest indication yet that the commissioners and the staff they are supposed to oversee are operating as a single unit, with the staff writing the script and the commissioners reading it aloud.

He followed it up with: "Be nice to staff. It's not them."

It's not them? The emails are literally from them. The directive to kill the 50-metre pool is in their words. The instruction to stop work on all other options was sent by their director. The scripted talking points were authored by the Deputy City Manager. The Confidential Board Briefing Memo that told commissioners a 50-metre pool wouldn't fit — contradicting the City's own procurement commitments — was signed by their General Manager.

It is, in the most literal and documented sense, exactly them.

But Bastyovanszky wasn't done. In the span of sixty seconds, he managed to contradict himself in a way that would be remarkable if it weren't so revealing. He told the room:

The PNE amphitheatre tripled in cost from $64 million to $184 million. That $120 million could have gone to the Aquatic Centre. And the City Council spent that money behind closed doors. It was done in camera. And so all this reinforces the value of the Auditor General's work.

Unpack that. Bastyovanszky is simultaneously:

1. Admitting that a recent major City project tripled in cost — a staggering governance failure that apparently warrants no accountability for anyone involved.
2. Claiming that $120 million that "could have gone to the Aquatic Centre" was spent elsewhere — an argument that has never been raised in any public Park Board deliberation, suggesting it was freshly scripted for this occasion.
3. Acknowledging that City Council made this spending decision "behind closed doors" and "in camera" — the exact kind of backroom decision-making that the discovery emails prove happened with the VAC.
4. And doing all of this moments after telling the public to "be nice to staff" because "it's not them."

If City Council spent $120 million behind closed doors and that money should have gone to the aquatic centre, then it is absolutely "them." Bastyovanszky is describing the same pattern of unaccountable staff-driven decision-making that our evidence documents — in-camera deals, closed-door spending, elected officials presented with fait accompli — and somehow arriving at the conclusion that this vindicates the staff rather than indicting them.

The contradiction is so glaring that it can only be explained one of two ways: either Bastyovanszky doesn't understand his own argument, or the talking points he was given weren't designed to be internally consistent — just individually useful in deflecting blame from City staff onto City Council.

Chair Tom Digby

Digby was last, and he was the most direct in his contempt for the evidence — and for the people presenting it (read: us). He opened his remarks by noting that "these words might be scrutinized by lawyers who are pursuing this" — an acknowledgment of our ongoing Supreme Court judicial review, and a signal that his comments were calibrated for the legal record.

Then he delivered this:

I have read through various allegations that have been made about the process we went through in this Park Board and the information that was provided by staff. I have found no evidence of any failures or even any alleged failures that would have influenced my decision.

This statement is either an admission of willful ignorance or something far worse. If Digby has genuinely "read through" the discovery emails — in which Amrolia directed architects to kill the 50-metre pool, Schouls confirmed all work was stopped, and Amrolia told staff they had "likely landed on the design" months before commissioners saw anything — and found "no evidence of any failures," then he is telling the public that none of this would have mattered to him. He is saying he would have voted the same way even if he had known that five options were reduced to one by an emailed staff directive, even if it meant that staff had acted beyond their authority, executing with zero oversight or scrutiny across multiple project altering decisions — like an out-of-control freight train barelling down the tracks with no way to stop, and he is seemingly perfectly fine with it.

That is not a defence. That is a confession that the Chair of the Park Board does not believe commissioners need complete information to make $175-million generational decisions — or that he had the complete information all along and was part of the process from the start.

He continued: "I felt the information I had to vote on in March of last year was high quality. It was on time, it was highly relevant."

High quality. On time. Highly relevant. Notice what's missing from that list: complete. Information can be high quality and still be selectively curated to produce a predetermined outcome. A briefing memo that tells you a 50-metre pool "will not fit" is "high quality" if you never see the procurement documents proving the City committed to 135,000 square feet. A single-option presentation is "highly relevant" if no one tells you four other options were killed by staff directive. Digby is describing the experience of being expertly managed — and mistaking it for the experience of being properly informed.

Then came the statement that may prove to be the most consequential line spoken at this meeting:

I was grateful for numerous irrelevant, less important matters that staff filtered out along the way.

Read that one more time. Let it sink in.

The Chair of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation — the elected official with exclusive jurisdiction over a $175-million public infrastructure project — just told a public meeting that he is grateful that staff decided what information he needed and what information was "irrelevant."

We now know, through discovery, that what staff "filtered out" includes the full scope of alternatives that were explored and abandoned — options involving renovation, expansion, and competition-standard pools that were systematically suppressed from the public record and from the commissioners who were asked to vote at the meetings of February 24th, 2025, February 25th, 2025 and March 31st, 2025.

Discovery documents reveal something that makes this even more damning. The Ausenco rehabilitation study — which confirmed that renovation of the existing structure was "feasible and practical" — was abandoned after two cost estimates placed a renovation at between $155 million and $166 million, which at the time was considered over budget. Staff used these numbers to justify killing the renovation path entirely and pivoting to a reduced-footprint new build.

But here is what they never went back and reconsidered: the "cheaper" alternative they chose — the inferior, smaller-footprint, 25-metre pool design — ended up costing $170 million anyway. The project blew past the very budget ceiling that was used to disqualify renovation. Park Board commissioners had to go back to City Council and ask for an additional $30 million on top of the original $140 million capital plan allocation. The renovation that was rejected as too expensive in 2024 would have come in under the final cost of the replacement that was approved in its place.

Yet at no point — not when the budget climbed, not when the additional $30 million was requested, not when the discovery emails were published — did any commissioner or staff member revisit the renovation option. The decision was made. The door was closed. And Digby is grateful it stayed closed.

This is not a story about information being innocently "filtered" for efficiency. This is a story about alternatives being killed based on cost projections, the chosen path then exceeding those same costs, and no one in a position of authority ever looking back. Digby's gratitude for the filtering is gratitude for a system that ensures he never has to confront the consequences of decisions made on his behalf — decisions that may have cost Vancouver taxpayers tens of millions of dollars they didn't need to spend.

This is a commissioner who is publicly announcing that he prefers not to know — and who considers the suppression of evidence to be a service rather than a failure. When the Auditor General's office receives the invitation to review this project, they should start with this quote.

A Pattern of Silencing Critics

Digby's performance at the March 10th meeting was not an isolated event. It fits a documented pattern of the Chair using his position to shield staff from scrutiny while intimidating members of the public who raise legitimate concerns.

On February 3rd, 2026, following a Park Board meeting at which I spoke during public comment about staff withholding information from commissioners and later reiterated via email, Digby sent a formal email reply — copying Commissioner Laura Christensen and the Park Board inbox — in which he characterized the remarks as "grossly misinterpreted" and "not at all acceptable." He wrote:

Jon your comments last night about staff behaviour, which you repeat below - and have again grossly misinterpreted - were not at all acceptable. I regret not intervening during the meeting, but I have twice subsequently apologized to staff groups for your words.

The Park Board is committed to a safe workplace. Our staff team is always professional and neutral in the debates in the room. You will be required to respect this should you wish to speak again at a Park Board meeting.

He disclosed that he had "twice subsequently apologized to staff groups" for the public comments — comments that, for the record, pointed out that staff had withheld information from commissioners, a claim now conclusively proven by the discovery emails.

The Chair of the Park Board — an elected official whose primary obligation is to the public — apologized to staff for a citizen telling the objective truth at a public meeting. And then he implied that citizen might be barred from speaking again.

When Digby says the staff team is "always professional and neutral," he is saying it about the same staff who directed the architects to kill the 50-metre pool, ordered a stoppage of work on all alternatives, and scripted the talking points for elected officials. If that is Digby's standard for professional neutrality, it explains a great deal about how this board operates.

The Confidential Briefing Memo: The Script They Were All Reading From

To understand why four commissioners delivered near-identical talking points — all reaffirming the 25-metre pool, all praising staff, all dismissing public concern — consider a Confidential Board Briefing Memo from General Manager Steve Jackson, dated February 20, 2025. In its closing section, the memo disclosed that staff had obtained City Legal's opinion that the shift from 50 metres to 25 metres was "highly likely to be resistant to a voter's potential legal challenge," and instructed commissioners to "treat this as confidential legal advice and information." This was not neutral legal analysis — it was a pre-packaged legal shield, telling commissioners that staff had already cleared the path for the downgrade before they were ever asked to vote on it.

We have already published evidence that Amrolia sent scripted "Key Messages" to Mayor and Council in January 2025, telling elected officials exactly what to say about the VAC. And now, at the first public meeting after the discovery emails were published, every commissioner used their speaking time not to ask questions about the evidence, but to reaffirm the predetermined outcome and defend the staff who predetermined it.

The coordination is unmistakable. The question is no longer whether commissioners were misled. It is whether they have chosen to remain misled — and whether they are now actively participating in the cover-up.

What Happens Next

The Auditor General motion passed unanimously — in its gutted form. It will produce, at best, a set of governance recommendations for future projects. It will not pause the VAC project. It will not examine the specific decisions documented in the discovery emails. And by the time any report is delivered, the existing 50-metre pool may already be rubble.

We are not waiting for that. Protecting Our Vancouver Aquatic Centre Society is preparing its own formal complaint to the Office of the Auditor General this week, requesting a comprehensive investigation into the VAC decision-making process — one with the teeth that the Park Board's gutted motion deliberately removed.

A second motion, related to a request that City Council take action on the VAC file, was deferred to March 30th — after Council reconvenes on March 12th to address the matter. The commissioners signaled hope that Council would "ask for the report that we are planning to require through this motion" — suggesting the Park Board is looking to City Council to provide political cover for a decision that both bodies are now implicated in enabling.

Our judicial review in the Supreme Court of British Columbia continues. The commissioners had a chance to demonstrate that democratic accountability means something in Vancouver. They chose instead to demonstrate exactly what happens when elected officials stop asking questions and start reading scripts.

For journalists: We are available for interviews and can provide the full meeting transcript, all referenced documents, and additional evidence from the discovery record. Click here to email us.

For legal observers: The March 10th meeting transcript is relevant to our ongoing judicial review proceedings. Commissioner statements regarding the adequacy of information provided by staff may be material to questions of procedural fairness.

Last Updated: March 12, 2026

Next Update: Following the March 30 Park Board meeting and City Council's March 12 session.

This is the second in a series of articles based on records obtained through a discovery agreement with the City of Vancouver in connection with ongoing Supreme Court proceedings.