After repeated failures by UBCM officials to provide minutes of their meetings when asked, and repeated denials over their availability; UBCM’s Executive Director has now provided minutes from previous years. The bare bone ‘minutes’ fail to even record how the individual elected officials (delegates) voted on resolutions.
This is a remarkable double standard compared to how local governments are required to act by the Province in recording the motions of elected officials.
UBCM takes a year to approve ‘minutes’ with hardly any data, showing a major need for reform of the institution so that it is transparent and accountable to the electorate in a timely way.
Above: an example in the 2024 ‘minutes’, of a UBCM resolution that was anonymously endorsed by elected officials (delegates) at UBCM. The majority of UBCM delegates voted in favour of this resolution to have online voting for local government elections, despite apparently, seldomly using their own electronic voting system at UBCM.
By Sasha Izard
Oct 24, 2025
Recently CRD Watch investigations have shown that the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM), is hardly the transparent and accountable institution that the public would expect in a democracy.
The following are recent articles that I have written on the subject:
The proposed “Permanent Provincial Housing Policy Roundtable” is an astroturfing effort by the Real Estate Lobby in BC, with the help of a complicit media in the province. Questions must be asked about close to $100 in value gifts to numerous MLAs. – CRD Watch Homepage
“No, we do not have minutes.” – The Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) fails to document meetings that lead to resolutions. – CRD Watch Homepage
Complete lack of transparency: “As far as UBCM Resolutions Committee and my role as chair no we do not take or distribute minutes of the plenary sessions.” – CRD Watch Homepage
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To recap, in these articles I showed how UBCM officials repeatedly failed to provide minutes of the resolutions session when asked.
Continuing where I left off in the now series – on Oct 18, 2025 I emailed UBCM’s President and Vice Presidents (3) with the following questions:
I have two questions regarding UBCM.
1. Does UBCM make minutes of its meetings?
2. Does UBCM make minutes of its convention?
Thank you,
Sasha Izard
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On Oct 20, 2025 Councillor Jenna Stoner of the District of Squamish, who is the First Vice President of UBCM responded:
Hello Sasha,
Thank you for your email and interest in UBCM, I am indeed on the Executive as first vice president this year.
In response to your questions:
- Does UBCM make minutes of its meetings?
We do have minutes of all of our meetings, however these are only available to Executive members. We provide a summary of our quarterly Executive meetings to our membership via email.
2. Does UBCM make minutes of its convention?+
UBCM takes minutes of the Annual General Meeting portion of our convention. These are captured and voted on by our membership for approval at the subsequent year’s AGM, in addition to the annual report.
Convention itself is a 5 day event with multiple sessions running in parallel, as such we do not take or make minutes available for the entire event. We do provide summaries for each day in The Compass newsletter (see Sept 22-26th editions) and have increasing moved to publish convention content on the UBCM YouTube channel.
I hope that is helpful.
Warmly,
Jenna
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I replied:
Hello,
Thank you for your response.
Are any of UBCM’s minutes of its meetings, and conventions available for the public to read?
If so, where can I find them?
Thank you again,
Sasha
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Hi again Sasha,
No, the minutes of our meetings are not publicly available. As noted in my email below, there are various summaries, annual reports and video available should you be interested in reviewing those.
May I clarify what it is that you are seeking to find from meeting minutes? I may be able to help you locate what you are looking for.
Thanks,
Jenna
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Hi Jenna,
Thank you again for your response.
Why are the minutes of the meetings not publicly available?
“May I clarify what it is that you are seeking to find from meeting minutes? I may be able to help you locate what you are looking for.”
Thank you for your helpful offer.
I am looking for the minutes of the resolutions sessions/resolutions committee sessions/plenary sessions from this September.
– Sasha
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Jenna fell silent, a notable pattern that I had observed upon asking similar questions to two previous UBCM officials, as shown in the earlier articles.
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Have you ever had the experience of asking one person in government a question, only to have another person pop up and answer, almost like popping out of mystery door in the Price is Right?
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‘Minutes’ finally arrive, for previous years at least:
The following day, on Oct 21, 2025
UBCM’s Executive President Gary MacIsaac wrote to me:
Good afternoon Sasha Izard.
I am following up on your questions that were directed to some UBCM Executive members. Your emails were forwarded to me for reply.
First, thanks for your questions.
1. Does UBCM make minutes of its meetings?
Our board meetings are quarterly and minutes are not shared publicly. Instead we release a breakdown of decisions in our electronic newsletter after each quarterly. Our newsletter is a public document and you can sign up for it quite easily. Here is a link to a recent publication following the meeting from this summer:
https://www.ubcm.ca/about-ubcm/latest-news/highlights-ubcm-executives-july-meeting-0
2. Does UBCM make minutes of its convention?
Yes, the minutes from the previous year are approved at the AGM at Convention each year and are then posted to our website. For your reference, here are links on the UBCM website to the 2024 Convention minutes and the 2023 Convention minutes.
Thank-you
Gary MacIsaac
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I replied:
Hi Gary,
Thank you for your response.
Why do the minutes from the convention not include who voted on the motion?
Also, why do they not include the discussions on the motion?
Thank you again,
Sasha
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Gary wrote:
“Hi Sasha.
The minutes don’t include the details of who voted for each motion because it would be impractical to do so in our convention setting. There are around 1000 voting delegates (I would need to check the exact number) and there are multiple meetings happening all over the convention space at the same time as the resolutions debates. So delegates are in and out of the room. And in order to keep things moving, and with over 200 resolutions to be debated, we typically use the manual show of voting cards to gauge the vote in the room, and only resort to electronic voting when it comes down to a close vote. The electronic voting actually takes more time to administer.”
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Hello Gary,
Thank you for your response.
Although, I understand there are many resolutions debated or discussed, and many votes made, unless those discussions are recorded, and records kept of who made the votes, there is no transparency.
This is a double standard, because the same is not allowed by the Province for Local and Regional Governments, at which elected officials also make many motions, and are required to record the names of who voted for or against the motions. As you know, UBCM is made up of numerous of the same elected officials. Why would it be that these officials are required to keep this information for their meetings of local government, but the same does not apply to UBCM, which itself is under Provincial Act?
I have a solution to making voting on resolutions at UBCM easy, quick, and accountable.
Each delegate receives a booklet containing each resolution to be voted on. Each resolution would have a tick box with a yes or no, next to it.
The delegate can then tick off their vote, one after another for each resolution.
At the end, they sign the booklet, showing that it is indeed the delegate that voted on the resolutions and have approved their votes with their signature.
After that, it is a simple task of counting/tallying up the votes on each item, and then preserving them for the record.
As such each delegate’s vote on a resolution would be preserved and the delegates would be accountable for their votes.
These can then be included in the minutes of the resolutions.
Thank you,
Sasha
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After noting the clear double standard in regard to government mandated transparency requirements for local government officials, and UBCM’s lack of accomplishing the same standards in its minutes, despite UBCM being made of many of the same elected officials; and then providing a pragmatic solution to him, UBCM’s Executive President fell silent.
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Conclusion:
UBCM, despite being an intergovernmental forum for elected local government officials, does not live up to the same basic standards of voting transparency, that the Provincial Government mandates for both local and regional government meetings.
It is critical that for UBCM to serve as a vessel of local democracy, instead of acting like a mere rogue element of it; to achieve the same level of standards in making votes by elected officials open recorded, accountable, and transparent for the general public to see.
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See also:
Index of articles and other material regarding the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) – CRD Watch Homepage
CRD Watch Homepage 
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