BC Business
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Geoff Plant, partner, Heenan Blaikie LLP; Civil City Commissioner, City of Vancouver.
Often at the centre of media scrums outside the Victoria legislature during his tenure as Attorney General from 2001 to 2005, Geoff Plant stepped down from the public podium when he chose to return to private law practice in 2005. However, the opportunity to serve the public came knocking once again last May when he was appointed Civil City commissioner, heading Mayor Sam Sullivan’s Project Civil City. Charged with the seemingly impossible task of clearing Vancouver’s streets of drug dealing, panhandling and street violence, Plant seems invigorated by the challenge. Why did you choose not to run again in 2005 after one term with the Campbell Liberal government? It was an amazing adventure to be able to serve constituents and also to be able to make a difference on public-policy issues, but it’s not a retirement plan. And I was coming up to my 50th birthday. It seemed that if I wanted to achieve something in the next part of my life, I should do it while I was in my early 50s rather than leave it to my mid-to-late 50s. How did the Civil City position come up? I got a call from the mayor’s office and was asked if I was interested. The project was ambitious but really quite exciting – maybe daunting is a better word. But I seem to go for those sorts of challenges. How much of your time does the position take up? We deliberately set this up on the basis that I wouldn’t be doing it full time, in part because there is a valuable role for city staff to do the legwork and the actual implementation work. My skills are ¬better suited to helping achieve the coordination and the communication that the leadership part of the position requires. Project Civil City has lofty goals: reduce poverty, homelessness, drug dealing. How much power does the mayor’s office really have to tackle these social ills? The mayor has the ability to influence the direction of the city in lots of important ways that are directly relevant to this, but I don’t have the powers of the mayor. My fundamental job is to be a coordinator among the different agencies at all three levels of government that have some responsibility for the social, health and justice issues that this project is concerned with. There aren’t very many positions in government where someone’s main job is simply to bring people together across silos, and I think that’s the job here. So at the end of the day, if there are different approaches that need to be taken to law enforcement, it would be the police and the justice system that do that, not me. And the same is true of dealing with mentally ill or addicted people and dealing with housing and homelessness issues. I won’t be the policy maker; I won’t even be the implementer. I will hopefully serve a role bringing all those people together so they’re working together. A lot of people think it requires more than improved communication and coordination of agencies – that it will also take a lot more money, and you probably won’t have a lot of power to convince the three levels of government to open their wallets. But I may try. Coordination and communication are not a substitute for the investment that’s necessary to deliver social policy. Some of this is about spending money, and the principal money spenders here are the provincial and federal governments. I expect that a part of this job is going to be to talk to and work with provincial and federal officials to see whether and how more money may be available and where it could be most effectively used. And you’re quite right; I don’t have any power over that money. But it’s about being an advocate. Skeptics say the Civil City commission was created to sweep problems under the carpet during the Olympics. The project is deliberately couched in terms that require us to look at sustainable solutions, and that means striking at the causes, not just symptoms. The Olympics are a catalyst, an opportunity to get the provincial and federal governments engaged more intensively in a consideration of issues that everyone knows have been around for a long time, and yet, while we sometimes make progress and sometimes don’t, the long-term track record is not very effective. Sometimes it’s hard to find the motivating factor to really engage people. So I’m delighted the Olympics present the opportunity for us to do that work. When you were attorney general, the Liberal government passed the Safe Streets Act, restricting aggressive ¬panhandling. Do you think such acts of incivility can be legislated away? The key thing is, that toolkit has to have lots of tools in it, and some tools are better for some purposes than others. It is a complex set of issues and you might find that the law will help in one area but it won’t in another. What I learned as attorney general is that if you ask the right people enough ¬questions, sooner or later you’ll figure out how to ¬personalize the issues so that you can actually identify the people who are concerned. And once you identify them you will learn that they each present in different ways. Sometimes it might be a mental-health issue, and sometimes it might be a drug-addiction issue. It might be both. It might be none. There might be times and places where enforcing the law is actually exactly the right thing to do, and it would be wrong to exclude that from the equation. It would be equally wrong to assume that law enforcement is the only answer here. How has the change of career affected your personal life? It’s great to have gotten my private life back – mostly [laughter]. My wife and I made another change in our lives: we moved from Richmond, where we raised our family, into Vancouver, where we grew up. It’s fun to be back in the city that we think of as home. Leaving politics has given me more time to travel and do some of the things that are important in my life, so I’m glad of that. Once in a while, I read a transcript of Hansard and am extremely thankful that I am no longer in politics. But I have nothing but admiration for all the people who do it, whichever side of the floor they’re on.