The candidate survey

Vancouver elects a council and a Park Board on October 17. Every candidate will say children should learn to swim; that sentence is free. The four questions below are not — each one asks for a commitment specific enough to check later, on a measure this site documents. Every candidate for mayor, council, and Park Board receives them by email on the same day; all responses are published here verbatim, and so is the list of candidates who didn’t answer.

1. The stampede. On August 25, Vancouver released its entire fall lesson season at one instant; 93% of children’s entry seats were gone the same evening. Burnaby, Richmond, and Surrey all use gradual or queue-managed release. Will you direct staff to replace the single-instant release before the next fall registration, and if not, why is the current design better?

2. The missing numbers. The city has never published a waitlist count in children (only “requests”), a staffing turnover rate, or a target for how many entry-level seats a fall should offer — and its fall entry gate has swung 40% year to year with no published explanation. Will you commit to a published quarterly aquatics dashboard — unique children waiting, seats offered against a stated per-child target, staffing levels — within your first year?

3. The locked door. In four years of catalogue data, Vancouver offered zero publicly registerable instructor certifications; Richmond sells the same credential to any resident for $638 and most of its courses fill with waitlists. With the Aquatic Centre closed, this fall’s catalogue posts no National Lifeguard course at all. Will you direct the Park Board to open instructor and lifeguard certification to public registration and subsidize the certification pathway, as Richmond, Surrey, and Burnaby each already do in some form?

4. The stalled program. Council voted unanimously and the Park Board five to one for free beginner swim lessons, then council left the funding to a later budget and the board set no deadline; the costed options sit in this site’s working answer at roughly $420,000 to $1 million a year. Will you fund a free-beginner-lessons program with an entry-capacity target — stated in seats per 100 kindergartners — in the 2027 budget, and which of the working answer’s options (A through D) is closest to what you’d support?

Responses

Sent: [date]. Response deadline: [date, ~2 weeks]. Non-responses are listed after the deadline. Responses are published unedited; a candidate may revise once before the deadline.