Take five minutes
Write to Mayor and Council
A letter from someone who lives on an affected street carries more weight than a signature on a petition. Council members read correspondence, staff track it, and messages sent to the City Clerk become part of the official record for the file.
Here is how to make yours land.
What actually works
Councils discount form letters heavily. Two hundred identical emails get counted as one campaign. Twenty letters describing twenty different streets, in twenty different voices, get read.
So the template further down is a scaffold, not a script. The parts that matter are the parts only you can write: which street you live on, what it was like before, what changed, and what you have seen since.
Send it
Start here
mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca
This reaches the City Clerk's Office, which distributes your message to the Mayor, all ten Councillors, and the relevant staff. Correspondence sent here can enter the public record for a matter before Council, which is exactly what you want.
Open a blank email to Mayor and Council
This opens your email program with the address and subject filled in. The body is deliberately left empty, because a letter in your own words is worth more than a prepared one.
Copy them directly as well
The Clerk address gets your letter into the record. These land in individual inboxes. Doing both is stronger than either alone.
- Mayor Ken Sim
ken.sim@vancouver.ca - Rebecca Bligh
CLRbligh@vancouver.ca - Lisa Dominato
CLRdominato@vancouver.ca - Pete Fry
CLRfry@vancouver.ca - Sarah Kirby-Yung
CLRkirby-yung@vancouver.ca - Mike Klassen
CLRklassen@vancouver.ca - Lucy Maloney
CLRmaloney@vancouver.ca - Peter Meiszner
CLRmeiszner@vancouver.ca - Brian Montague
CLRmontague@vancouver.ca - Sean Orr
CLRorr@vancouver.ca - Lenny Zhou
CLRzhou@vancouver.ca
Writing it
- Say where you live. Your street, or the nearest intersection. This is the single thing that separates your letter from a form letter, and it is the thing staff look for.
- Say what changed. Not what you think of the policy. What happened on your street, in your lane, on your route to work or to school. Dates and specifics if you have them.
- Say what you want. Be concrete. Removal of a specific barrier, a review of a specific intersection, or a proper consultation before the next installation.
- Keep it short. Under a page. Nobody reads the third page.
- Sign it with your name and street. Anonymous correspondence carries almost no weight with a council.
A scaffold to start from
Replace every highlighted part. If you send this unchanged, it counts for very little.
Dear Mayor Sim and Councillors,
I live on your street in East Vancouver, where I have lived for how long.
I am writing about the traffic calming measures recently installed in my neighbourhood. Describe what your street or lane was like before. Two or three sentences.
Since the barriers went in, describe what you have actually seen. Traffic moving into the lane behind your house, a longer route home, difficulty reaching your own driveway, near misses, whatever it is for you. Be specific about where and when.
I am asking Council to say clearly what you want. For example: review the barrier at a named intersection, restore two-way access on a named street, or commit to consulting residents before further installations.
I would welcome a reply.
Your name
Your street, Vancouver
Or write to the department directly
Mayor and Council set policy. The barricades themselves were designed and installed by City staff, and a letter to the department that did the work asks a different question: not whether the policy is right, but what evidence and consultation it was based on.
Both routes are worth using. They reach different people.
Where to write
slowstreets@vancouver.ca
This is the address the City has used when forwarding resident complaints about the traffic calming programme.
Better still, phone 311 first
A call to 311 creates a numbered service case. That number is a record the City has to account for, and you can quote it in every message afterwards. An email on its own creates no such trail. Ask for the case reference before you hang up, and ask when someone will call you back.
Questions that are hard to deflect
One resident who wrote to the department took a different approach to most letters. Rather than arguing about the barricades, she asked for the record: what consultation took place, who was asked, and what they said.
These are her questions. They work because each one has a factual answer that either exists or does not, and either answer is useful.
- Were letters sent to residents with a survey to complete? If not, how was the survey distributed?
- How many people actually completed the survey?
- What were the questions asked?
- How many people received the survey?
- When was the survey period?
- What were the responses received to the survey, exactly?
- When were there meetings after the survey period?
- Where were the meetings held? What dates? What locations?
- How were residents informed of the meetings?
- How many people attended each of the meetings?
- How was information gathered at the meetings?
- What information was fed to your department?
She also described what the changes had done on her own block: a street that now runs one way at one end and the opposite way at the other, so it cannot be driven through; a back lane carrying traffic that used to be on the street; and a concrete barrier placed in front of a fire hydrant, on a stretch where vehicles are not permitted to park within five metres of that same hydrant.
That combination is what makes a letter land. Specific questions the City must answer from its own records, and specific consequences on one named street.
About this example. These questions come from a letter written by a resident of Hastings-Sunrise, published here with her permission and edited by the coalition. We have removed her personal details, and we have removed passages that expressed her own view of individual City staff. Those were fair for her to write in her own name. They are not ours to repeat.
Her account of what she was told, and when, is her account. We have not independently verified it, and we have not reproduced statements attributed to people who have had no chance to respond.
Then share it
Once you have sent your letter, post about it in the community group. Not to persuade Council, they will not see it there, but so your neighbours can see that someone on their street has spoken up. That is usually what moves the next person to write.
Post it
Facebook will not let a website write your post for you, which is just as well. Open the group, say what you sent and why, and paste the link.
A line to start from
Change it. A post in your own words does more than a copied one.
If you would rather we published your account on this site as well, you can send it to us directly. We publish nothing without your permission.
Two things worth knowing. Messages sent to Mayor and Council become part of the City's official communications and may be published, including your name. That is the point of writing to the Clerk rather than posting on social media, but it is worth knowing before you send.
Council members may reply personally, but in most cases a staff member responds on their behalf. A staff reply still means your letter was logged.
You do not have to do this alone
The coalition meets on Thursday evenings at the park in East Van. Bring your letter, or come and work out what to say with people from your own street.