Park board GM retiring from challenging role
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, taking in its beauty and rare scale.
“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. Not everybody gets what they want in the end.
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. As the guy in charge of making change in a place that wakes up resisting change,” he said with a chuckle, “it’s an interesting task.”
He naively thought he could swoop in and solve everything in a year. Two of three issues have found solutions: There is a longterm agreement with the aquarium to help it after whales and dolphins were banned, and there is a meeting of the minds, it seems, with almost all of the city’s community centres.
East Vancouver doesn’t have its fair share of parks — it is “sadly deficient,” Bromley said. The board’s new VanPlay, a 25-year guide to the future, has as its top priority the equitable distribution of parks.
“Which is only right and fair,” Bromley said. “There are not as many trees on the east side, there are not as many facilities, there are not as many acres of green space.”
Oppenheimer Park should be so much more for residents of the Downtown Eastside, he added, once (or if ) some of the more immediate issues such as housing are tackled. He was shocked to see the conditions in the neighbourhood when he first arrived.
He had been to some of the rougher inner cities in the U.S., worked a long time in Toronto’s rough-and-tumble Jane and Finch neighbourhood, but had never seen tragic conditions such as those in the DTES.
“It doesn’t rest well with me. I’m not used to it, and I don’t think anyone should get used to it,” Bromley said. “I think when Oppenheimer is resolved and people are, hopefully, into better housing, we’re looking at ways of restoring that park with people from that community in a more meaningful way to make sure it serves their needs.”
Under Bromley, the board began consulting with the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. When he arrived, an employee told him that if the phone rings and it’s a First Nations’ caller, don’t answer, it’s just trouble. “But that’s not the way I do things.”
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.”