Vancouver and Surrey business groups in spat over proposed name change
The Vancouver and Surrey boards of trade are facing a potential spat over a name.
Vancouver’s board wants to change its name to include the word “greater,” as in Greater Vancouver, to “better reflect our regional advocacy efforts,” said chairman Tim Manning in a notice to members.
About half of its 5,000 members work or own businesses outside Vancouver proper, Manning wrote, and “the reality is, our organization has been focused on issues that are region wide for more than a century.” The recommended name change represents the culmination of a four-year “transformation and re-branding” exercise, said Vancouver Board of Trade CEO Iain Black.
Members will vote Friday on the name.
The final step, Black said, “is to change the name of the organization to what we have been for more than 100 years.”
However, the CEO of Surrey’s board would prefer if Vancouver weren’t implying that it speaks for her organization, or any other Metro Vancouver business organization.
“Their intention is to be the voice of the region’s business community,” said Anita Huberman, but “in our opinion, they do not represent the region.”
Huberman said turning the Vancouver board into a Greater Vancouver board would dilute the name presence of every other Metro Vancouver board of trade or chamber of commerce, and wind up hurting regional lobbying efforts of Metro Vancouver’s business groups on issues such as transportation priorities.
If the Vancouver board wants to be the region’s voice, Huberman said, it should focus its efforts through the B.C. Chamber of Commerce in co-operation with other chambers of commerce.
Black said the Vancouver board has always been co-operative and its intention is to be “a regional voice, not the regional voice” for business. “We would never presume to speak for any of the other chambers, including, most notably, Surrey,” Black said.
The Vancouver board has a long history of championing regional initiatives, starting with the laying of a telegraph cable between Victoria and Melbourne, Australia at the turn of the 20th century, through to supporting Surrey’s bid to make Surrey-to-Langley light-rail transit the region’s top public transit priority.
The Vancouver board’s regional focus “is partly reflective of the fact our membership is slightly less than half from Vancouver, and it’s been that way for decades and decades,” he said.