How Crown Corporation BC Assessment’s Paid Membership with the Urban Development Institute is Being Obscured
BC Assessment Doubles Down on its Denial that it is a Member of the UDI.
By Sasha Izard
October 2, 2024
In a recent article, I showed that BC Assessment denied that it is a paying member of a registered organization on the BC Lobbyists Registry known as the Urban Development Institute aka the UDI.
It took less than a week after writing that article, for BC Assessment to double down on that denial, despite the evidence being clearly in front of them showing otherwise.
Previously, on August 19, 2024
BC Assessment sent me an email with the following text:
“Thank you for contacting BC Assessment.
I have confirmed that we are currently not a member of the Urban Development Institute.”
After this, I sent a Freedom of Information request to BC Assessment to see data regarding its membership with the UDI, as BC Assessment in 2023 had been on the UDI’s own members directory that was taken down from public view in November of that year; however, I had a backed-up copy of it in my possession with BC Assessment listed.
The response to the FOI request that I received from BC Assessment, revealed in the response that BC Assessment is indeed a paying member of the UDI, as can be seen from various invoices and a receipt of BC Assessment having paid the UDI to renew its membership on April 2 of this year (2024).
On September 27, 2024, I asked BC Assessment some questions regarding their FOI response.
I asked for them to explain their claim of reimbursing employees for their memberships in the UDI.
I also asked them why it is that “In the FOI package it gives a receipt for an invoice # DUES000452 2024-04-02 Membersh p Renewa [sic], however the invoice is not included in the FOI.”
On October 2, 2024, a self-identified Legal Counsel/Privacy Officer with BC Assessment stepped in with a response to my previous emails:
“In response to your first question, our intention with the information provided was to make clear BC Assessment, as a crown corporation, does not hold a membership with Urban Development Institute. Therefore, as noted in your request, there was never a “decision made to discontinue, or terminate BC Assessment’s membership with the Urban Development Institute.”
In response to your second question, BC Assessment has no record of an invoice for receipt # DUES000452 2024-04-02.”
I emailed back to them with the following receipt from their own FOI response, that shows that their claim that “BC Assessment, as a crown corporation, does not hold a membership with Urban Development Institute” is false.
The receipt shows that BC Assessment renewed its membership with the UDI only half a year ago, and BC Assessment in their own email noted that they had not made a “decision to discontinue or terminate BC Assessment’s membership with the Urban Development Institute.”
BC Assessment was doublespeaking badly, even in their own same paragraph. If they expected to pull the wool over my and the public’s eyes, they were badly mistaken.
If they paid for an annual membership with public funds only half a year ago, but they didn’t make a decision to discontinue or terminate it; where did it go, thin air?
Note: The description on the receipt of “Membersh p renewa” [sic] indicates that BC Assessment renewed their membership with the UDI on April 2, 2024.
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In addition to emailing that receipt to BC Assessment and further data and screenshots showing that BC Assessment is indeed a paying member of the UDI, I included the following text:
“Through Archive.org I found the exact membership that was paid for.
It was a renewal of an Associate III membership. This was a renewal of the membership that BC Assessment already had, ergo BC Assessment still has a paid membership with the UDI.”
I got a response back from the original FOI officer at BC Assessment 6 minutes later:
“Hi Sasha,
BC Assessment conducted a thorough search of their records to provide a response to the attached freedom of information request.
As noted on the attached response letter, should you have concerns with BC Assessment’s response you may, pursuant to section 52 of FIPPA, request a review by the Commissioner. Please refer to the attached letter for how to request a review.”
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Having gone down that road to nowhere before, I’ll save the reader months of waiting. Between you and I reader, I think they just didn’t want to answer the question with the screenshot of the receipt showing that BC Assessment had renewed their membership with the UDI right in front of their screen. How do you continue to deny the obvious? One alternative is simply to try to end the conversation instead.
All the evidence is already available in BC Assessment’s own FOI response, and on the UDI’s own website, as well as in snapshots of it from earlier times on Archive.org as to what the annual payments the Crown Corporation had been making to the UDI were for. They were for BC Assessment’s membership renewal with the UDI. So why not just admit it BC Assessment? What is the organization trying so hard to hide?
The picture that emerges from the combined sources of evidence not only shows that BC Assessment was annually renewing its corporate memberships with the UDI, but it also reveals what could be seen as a potentially highly elaborate shell game over the last couple years to obscure that what was being renewed was actually a corporate membership.
Let’s go into the details:
BC Assessment was paying annually for an Okanagan Associate III membership in the UDI.
Invoices from previous years describe this as a corporate membership.
Last year in 2023, the term membership and other information disappears from the renewal invoice.
In 2024 membership renewal is on the receipt.
“Membersh p renewa” [sic] is on the receipt, albeit spelled incorrectly. I think we can all figure out what that really means despite the spelling errors.
It can be discerned from the details on Archive.org of a historical snapshot of the UDI’s website, that BC Assessment paid for a (UDI) Okanagan Associate III membership in April of 2024. This can be discerned in that the payment BC Assessment made for membership renewal in 2024 on the receipt, is the exact same cost of an Associate III membership in early 2024.
Note, at the time of writing Oct 2, 2024 this basic form of the Okanagan Associate III membership (non secondary etc.) is missing on the UDI’s “Join UDI page”:
Join UDI | UDI – Urban Development Institute (archive.org)
However, in the previous snapshot of the same webpage (that works on archive.org from May 16, 2024) the basic Okanagan Associate III membership is there. What happened to it later in the year? It disappeared!
Join UDI | UDI – Urban Development Institute (archive.org)
Here is the entry from May 16, 2024:
Associate III Okanagan Associate III – Okanagan
Min Employees: 4Max Employees: 9Apply →
If one then clicks apply, guess what happens?
The following appears:
Chapter Selection
Application Details
Request Received
| Unit Price | Total | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Associate III – Okanagan This is a chapter inclusion membership This is a 12-month membership This membership includes Unlimited member slot(s) Firms and professional services that are instrumental in advancing the real estate development process within their respective fields of expertise. Including architects, accounting firms, commercial brokers, construction companies, consultants, educational institutions, engineers, First Nations, financial institutions, law firms, project marketing agencies, property management firms, and licensed real estate professionals. | CAD $907.50 | CAD $907.50 | |
| Total GST 5% | CAD $ 45.38 | ||
Total Due: CAD $952.88
The total amount due for this type of membership is guess what? It is the exact same amount that is found on the membership renewal receipt in the FOI dated to April 2 of 2024 for a payment made from BC Assessment to the UDI.
As mentioned, information regarding this standard (non-secondary) Okanagan Associate III type membership then disappears from the UDI’s website at some point during 2024.
It can no longer be seen on their website at the time of writing. However, other forms of the Okanagan Associate III memberships are still listed on it. Why did the UDI take information regarding the standard Okanagan Associate III information down later in 2024?
Also in previous years, it was an Associate III membership that was being paid for by BC Assessment to the UDI Okanagan. This was a membership renewal, ergo it was an Associate III membership in the UDI Okanagan that BC Assessment paid for this year (2024).
“Membership selection” is at the top right corner of the Archive.org screenshot shown previously.
For BC Assessment to claim that they do not currently hold a membership with the UDI is false. The receipt is there, and no evidence shows that they have discontinued their paid Associate III membership with the UDI.
BC Assessment has contrary to their own claim that they are not a member of the UDI, noted that they have not discontinued nor terminated their membership with the UDI.
As the evidence from the FOI reveals, BC Assessment has renewed their membership annually with the UDI over a number of years to present.
For BC Assessment to say that they do not hold a membership with the UDI is false.
BC Assessment claimed that individuals are being reimbursed for their UDI memberships. There is no evidence for this in the records in the freedom of information response.
That BC Assessment is paying for a block of employees to have a membership is true, but according to the evidence available in the FOI, there is no indication that BC Assessment has made any individual payment to any individual employee to have a UDI membership.
It is possible that BC Assessment may have paid for individual employee memberships (rather than memberships for employees in a block) in the UDI, but no evidence for this is included in the FOI response.
In the receipt in the FOI response it is shown that BC Assessment in 2024 made a single payment for the Crown Corporation’s UDI membership renewal. The type of membership purchased in the payment, also covered for a block of individual employees to have a membership in the UDI, ergo no one with this payment was being reimbursed for anything, despite BC Assessment’s claims that they reimburse employees for UDI memberships.
The payment on invoices in some previous years for the same Associate III membership that the block of employees had their memberships covered in 2024 (in the receipt), were described in previous annual invoices as a corporate membership, and the membership was described as being BC Assessment’s.
BC Assessment has only renewed the Associate III membership since then, thus their membership with the UDI was renewed. On the 2024 receipt the invoice is described as membership renewal although as already mentioned spelled slightly incorrectly.
Nowhere on the UDI’s own website UDI.org is there even the option, nor possibility of an individual paying for their own membership in the UDI. An individual can have a UDI membership paid for, by a corporate entity, but an individual themself, cannot make a payment for themself, as a single individual to have a UDI membership. There were no memberships for individuals listed on the UDI’s membership directory that was pulled down last year (a backed-up copy still exists).
The evidence that a single individual cannot pay for their own membership in the UDI, is that on the UDI’s website at the time of writing, the only option for an individual to possibly have a UDI membership is that they must be an employee of the applicant organization making the payment!
Single individuals cannot pay for their own UDI memberships. A corporate entity must do it on their behalf, ergo, there is no possibility on the UDI’s own website of a corporate entity like BC Assessment reimbursing individuals for a UDI membership, at least at present.
It is possible this happened in previous years, but the receipt that revealed (through the price on it), that BC Assessment paid for its UDI Okanagan Associate III membership renewal, was dated to 2024. Thus, a block of BC Assessment employees had memberships covered through the umbrella of a renewal of BC Assessment’s membership of the UDI. Those employees covered were not “reimbursed” for their membership. Their memberships were thus paid for by BC Assessment, not by themselves as individuals and then reimbursed by BC Assessment later.
So how on earth could BC Assessment be reimbursing individuals for UDI membership, when we know instead that BC Assessment is paying for a block of employees to have membership in the UDI under BC Assessment’s own renewed corporate membership with the UDI? Paying for employees to have something, is not the same as reimbursing them!
In my FOI request, I asked for data regarding BC Assessment’s paid membership with the UDI. I received invoices and a receipt showing this. If the invoices and receipt that I received through FOI do not show that BC Assessment is a member of the UDI, then why did I receive invoices and a receipt showing “membership renewal” in the response to my FOI request regarding whether BC Assessment had a UDI membership? Membership in the UDI that BC Assessment paid for is described in singular form on the receipt. It is not described on the receipt in plural form!
In other words, BC Assessment has provided me the plain evidence that they have paid the UDI for membership, even as recently as this year in the spring of 2024, but they are saying at the same time that they do not have a membership with the UDI, even though they have denied that they decided to discontinue or terminate their membership with the UDI.
BC Assessment’s corporate membership with the UDI continues and was renewed in April of this year.
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The following are screenshots from the FOI response reflecting BC Assessment’s UDI membership purchases/renewals going as far back as 2018, their earliest date of available records of this that was sent in the FOI response package. As the 2018 purchase was a membership renewal and BC Assessment is already described as a “UDI member” by that time, this shows that they already had a membership in the UDI prior to 2018.
Note: the UDI Accounting manager said “your company” referring to the Crown Corporation. “If your company does not intend to renew, please let us know in writing ASAP.” Nothing in the FOI shows BC Assessment ever writing to inform the UDI that they will not renew the membership, and BC Assessment themselves said they never made a decision to discontinue or terminate their membership with the UDI.
Note: The UDI was kindly asking for BC Assessment to “renew your Membership” for its “Annual Corporate Membership Dues”. At this stage, BC Assessment was paying for a Secondary Associate III membership with the UDI. They would in subsequent years upgrade that to an Associate III membership (non-secondary) with the UDI with a significantly higher price tag.
In 2020, BC Assessment had upgraded their UDI membership to an Okanagan Associate III membership. Their “Member Name” on the invoice is “BC Assessment – Okanagan” Note, according to the form, BC Assessment can also login to its “Member Center” on the UDI’s member directory, the list of which despite containing governmental members, is now hidden to the public. This renewal invoice is for as it states “Annual Corporate Membership Dues” in the UDI’s Okanagan Chapter. Who is paying for this? The Crown Corporation BC Assessment.
I thought this was cute: “Thank you for your support of the Urban Development Institute”. Yes BC Assessment, they are thankful for your continued financial support of their registered organization on the BC Lobbyists Registry.
Same time, same channel…
No inflation in 3 years of the same membership renewal. Not bad.
No inflation again in 2023, but the details decreased on the invoice. Nowhere is there talk of membership anymore, but at the exact same price as the last 4 years, you can guarantee this was a membership renewal of the same Okanagan Associate III variety that is listed in the description.
Membership renewal again appears on the receipt in 2024:
Although this membership renewal receipt does not mention that it is the same old Okanagan III membership, it is the exact same price as this specific type of membership in the first half of 2024, as revealed by the Archive.org snapshot of the UDI’s website mentioned previously.
Why did a significant amount of membership information disappear from the renewal invoice in 2023 and is not on the receipt in 2024 for the same membership item?
Why is there an invoice # listed on the receipt that differs from the receipt #, and yet no trace of that invoice was found in the FOI response from BC Assessment?
Where did the invoice go? Were there some interesting details about the “Membersh p Renewa” on it?
Already the government corporate memberships had been exposed by 2023. Was the UDI trying to hide the government corporate memberships in the renewal invoices for them? If a membership is being renewed and it was already established to be a corporate membership that is BC Assessment’s on previous invoices, then it is a renewal of BC Assessment’s corporate membership!
Thus, it appears that BC Assessment’s Corporate membership has been obscured and given as a result the most thinly veiled poor excuse for some sort of barely plausible deniability – yet the evidence as revealed, clearly shows that BC Assessment still has a paid/renewed corporate membership in the UDI – no matter what spin they and the UDI might try to put on it that the single payment BC Assessment made to the UDI that can be seen for membership renewal in 2024 somehow constitutes reimbursements for BC Assessment’s employees.
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Now don’t get me wrong, if you’ve read this far, I really salute your stamina, and I apologize accordingly. I understand that there is a fair amount of repetition in what I have been writing, but I am continuing this so that the reader can take this all with them, and for the reason that I want to hammer the point home, so that one is left without a shadow of a doubt that BC Assessment is still a paying member of the UDI.
Why? Because all BC Assessment has in their denial of their membership with the UDI is but to leave a shadow of a doubt (aporia) on what was already clearly obvious and in front of their face from the beginning, and especially after they sent the FOI response validating that they have a membership with the UDI and yet continued to deny it despite that.
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Finally, let’s look at the evidence on the UDI’s own website UDI.org, because that speaks volumes about how the current membership system in the UDI operates.
As the UDI makes frequent changes to its website, the reader can consult the Archive.org snapshot of the UDI’s website at the time of writing October 3, 2024
If one clicks on the top right on the UDI’s landing page at UDI.org at the time of writing, one sees the option “Become a member”.
If one clicks on this, it takes the person to the following URL:
Join UDI | UDI – Urban Development Institute
Note that Associate memberships are the first option. This is the category of membership that BC Assessment paid for, ergo, they (re)joined the UDI by renewing “a membership that is right for your organization and its employees”.
The text under Associate reads: “Firms and professional services that are instrumental in advancing the real estate development process within their respective fields of expertise. Including architects, accounting firms, commercial brokers, construction companies, consultants, educational institutions, engineers, financial institutions, law firms, project marketing agencies, property management firms, and licensed real estate professionals.”
You saw it here first, apparently BC Assessment under this category may be “instrumental in advancing the real estate development process within their respective fields of expertise.”
Otherwise, I’m not quite sure where they’d fit in this category. A financial institution perhaps?
If the Associate Membership option is under “Join UDI”, it’s pretty clear that its a membership join (or rejoin) if paid for and that is exactly what BC Assessment did.
If one clicks on the “membership” link in the contents on UDI.org at the time of writing, they land on: https://udi.org/get-involved/member-benefits. This makes clear that only corporate entities (organizations) are eligible:
“Eligibility
Is your organization ready? Our member organizations are involved in all facets of the development industry, from developers and builders to municipal governments – and everything in between. Our membership is organization-based, with all employees/staff eligible to directly access the benefits of membership. “
That’s right, the UDI’s membership system is organization-based, it is not individual-based. There is no way on their website for individuals to qualify/join as UDI members, unless they do so as employees at the behest of the company and/or other corporate entity that they work for. In other words, it appears that there is no way BC Assessment could be reimbursing their employees for UDI memberships as they have claimed.
This page is so transparent, you can’t even see through the glass…
As the saying goes, to see through a glass darkly.
“Whether your organization is dedicated to supporting professional development, looking to work with government on real issues, or just wants to make a difference in your local community.
A UDI membership can help.”
“Work with decision makers
Our member organizations have strong relationships with municipal and provincial governments, which has been instrumental in influencing key public policy decisions.”
You can say that again, the UDI even managed to rope branches of government in as paying members including Crown Corporations as evinced by the following section below this line:
The fine print reads: “Please Note: Membership eligibility is currently limited to those organizations listed above.“
What’s next?
Oh wait, I thought government entities like BC Assessment were applying on behalf of their employees, not employees applying on behalf of their organizations? All but one municipal government that joined the UDI as a member that I’ve researched so far on the subject, had employees sign the local government up without votes from elected officials to do so. Sometimes the elected officials were not even aware that employees had signed up local governments as a member in a registered organization on the BC Lobbyists Registry. At least one regional government joined the UDI as a member without a vote by the board of directors, and I suspect the same for various Crown Corporations.
Conclusion:
After the existence of government memberships in a registered organization on the BC Lobbyists Registry and conflict of interest issues became exposed by the public, it seems that the UDI may have found subtle methods of thinly cloaking its corporate memberships including governmental e.g. Crown Corporations under the guise of employee memberships, even though they are really part of the same corporate entity membership umbrella that has continued and been renewed over the years.
Claiming that employees are being reimbursed for memberships in the UDI by BC Assessment (which nothing in the evidence indicates to be true), may be preferable to admitting openly that employees are having their memberships in a registered organization on the BC Lobbyists registry, paid for by the Provincial Crown Corporation BC Assessment under the umbrella of its own paid corporate membership in the lobbying organization.
Focussing on employees, may be a way to shift the attention away from the organizational payments/memberships.
Although the invoices and receipts morph over time, the same membership renewals are being made year after year in the Province, that include government entities paying for memberships with a registered organization that lobbies the same government, and uses the clout it gets from its influence over the government, to gain more expensive paid memberships from its paying private member companies that pay a much higher price for their UDI memberships than the government entities, which the UDI of course wants as members, because it can show how much inside access and influence they can get with government.
While the UDI and the government entities which pay for memberships in it, may have created the most thinly veiled and shaky illusions of plausible deniability – they at least perhaps hope that the public can’t, or won’t read and understand a simple receipt:
If BC Assessment won’t tell the truth about its membership with the UDI, I propose that the Crown Corporation and the Ministry of Finance under whose authority it falls under, have betrayed the trust of the people of British Columbia.
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Update to article: Update: On Oct 19, 2024 I received as part of a Freedom of Information response from another government institution, the following message that had been sent to that institution warning about the change in membership system that took place on November 21, 2023 (the day the UDI pulled down all their branch websites, took to hiding their members directory, and put up a new site UDI.org):
The information shows that contrary to BC Assessment’s faulty narrative, memberships in the UDI are by organization. Employees can receive a member profile, but only under the aegis/umbrella of the corporate membership of the member organizations that they work for. Before seeing this, this membership system was something that I had already determined in this article through reviewing other material. I didn’t have this material available at the time, but it vindicates very clearly the conclusions that I had come to in this article.
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This article was the 2nd part in a series of articles on Crown Corporations listed on the backed-up copy of the UDI’s members directory.
The series continues with the following article:
BC Assessment claims that its employees received reimbursements for memberships in a registered organization on the BC Lobbyists Registry that represents private companies involved in development and real estate. – CRD Watch Homepage
This was the 2nd installment in a series of articles covering BC Crown Corporations’ (and Statutory entities’) paid memberships in the Urban Development Institute, after the UDI took to hiding its members directory from the public in late 2023.
The following links are of articles in the series so far:
CRD Watch Homepage 
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