Decade as parks chief had its ‘extremes’
Retiring GM of Vancouver board looks back at enjoyable and difficult moments
Malcolm Bromley just can’t get over Stanley Park, which stretches out beneath his 26th-floor West End balcony.
The general manager of the Vancouver park board, who retires on May 30 after 10 years on the job, has wandered the park at all times of the day and night.
“I’ve been in it alone and with others. I’ve walked it, cycled it, driven my car through it, done other things,” said Bromley, who turns 62 this month. “The sounds, the sights, it’s just stunning.”
His job, however, has been no walk in the park. There was the banning of cetaceans at the aquarium, pop-up tent cities in Oppenheimer Park, a half-dozen community centres that resented central control and lots of other issues that don’t automatically jump to mind when you’re thinking parks.
“It was the hardest part of my entire career,” said Bromley,
who started working in government in Belleville, Ont., in 1979, and then in Toronto in 1981, where he was director of recreation before coming to Vancouver.
“It was extremes,” he said. “It was the most enjoyable, it was the most difficult and most challenging because of the issues, I think, that had been percolating for a number of years before my arrival.”
Vancouver’s park board is the only elected one in Canada and, like democracy in general, all that consulting and inclusion of all the voices can be frustrating and slow things down. But you end up in a better place, Bromley said.
“The fact we don’t have freeways, we have very low pollution, these are a result of a community that’s not going to just stand by and let bureaucrats or the government roll them over.”
Under Bromley, the park board began consulting with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.
In 2011, before reconciliation, he invited chiefs and administrators to the park board for the first time. “If I had one thing I’m the most proud of, it’s our work — and it’s still in its infancy — with the three Nations here.”