The First 100 Days
A practical plan to move Vancouver from Black Box government to Glass Box accountability — with plain-language budgets, trilingual civic access, oversight with teeth, and public records people can actually inspect.
A city that asks for trust must first show its work.
TheOpenGov is not a promise to make government louder. It is a commitment to make government more visible, more traceable, and more answerable before residents are forced to live with the result.
Every major civic decision should be clear enough for residents to understand, traceable enough for journalists to inspect, and accountable enough for voters to judge.
Five actions to install the Glass Box.
The first 100 days should not be spent inventing slogans. They should be used to open the record, identify the bottlenecks, and begin building public trust through visible repair.
Launch a Plain-Language Budget Explainer
Residents should not need accounting training to understand where public money goes. The first priority is a public-facing budget explainer that translates major spending, increases, delays, and trade-offs into clear language.
- Show what changed from the previous budget.
- Identify major cost drivers and service impacts.
- Explain taxes, fees, debt, reserves, and capital spending in plain English.
Create a Rezoning Impact Summary Standard
Major land-use decisions should be understandable before they are approved. Every major rezoning should include a plain-language impact summary that residents can read without navigating technical fog.
- What is changing?
- Who benefits?
- What public benefit is returned?
- What infrastructure is required?
- What promises are enforceable?
Build the Promises vs. Votes Ledger
Public trust depends on memory. The city needs a simple way to compare campaign promises, council votes, staff recommendations, budget decisions, timelines, and final outcomes.
- Track what was promised.
- Track what was voted on.
- Track what was funded.
- Track what was delivered, delayed, or quietly abandoned.
Push for Oversight With Teeth
The Auditor General and independent oversight tools should be strong enough to inspect not only dollars, but also delays, procurement issues, service bottlenecks, and operational failures that affect residents and small businesses.
- Review recurring service delays and bottlenecks.
- Make procurement and project performance easier to inspect.
- Turn audits into public-facing explanations, not shelf reports.
Open the Civic Bridge
Vancouver cannot claim meaningful consultation if major decisions remain locked behind technical English. The first 100 days should begin a practical trilingual access standard for major housing, zoning, budget, and livability issues — starting with plain English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, with room to expand to more languages.
- Translate key summaries before major decisions, not after.
- Use ethical AI to accelerate access while preserving human review.
- Help residents understand what is proposed, what it costs, and how to respond.
How the first 100 days should move.
This is not a fantasy plan. It is a sequencing plan: find the records, simplify the language, expose the gaps, and make the next decisions easier for the public to inspect.
Identify the highest-impact budget, zoning, permitting, and service areas where residents most often experience confusion, delay, or lack of visibility. Begin collecting the public records, reports, timelines, and decision points that need translation.
Release working templates for budget explainers, rezoning impact summaries, public benefit tracking, and promises-vs-votes reporting. The goal is not perfection — it is visible repair that residents can test, challenge, and improve.
Begin trilingual distribution of selected civic explainers, invite community feedback, identify missing voices, and push for formal adoption of clearer public communication standards before major decisions are made.
AI should open the record — not replace the people.
TheOpenGov uses AI as a civic translation engine. It can help read dense reports, compare documents, summarize budgets, trace voting records, and translate civic language into accessible public explanations. But AI must remain a tool under human judgment, not another hidden system making decisions for residents.
Ingest
Read dense civic documents, reports, budgets, bylaws, staff presentations, and public records.
Translate
Convert technical material into plain English, Mandarin, and Cantonese for broader participation.
Audit
Compare promises, votes, funding, timelines, outcomes, and missing voices in the public record.
This is not anti-housing. It is anti-black-box planning.
Vancouver must change. But change must be transparent, livable, infrastructure-ready, and accountable to the people who must live with the result.
Density needs infrastructure.
Growth must be connected to schools, transit, parks, childcare”>
Growth must be connected to schools, transit, parks, childcare, sewers, community services, small business capacity, and neighbourhood livability. Housing policy should be tested against local incomes, not only speculative market values or abstract supply targets.Density needs infrastructure.
Affordability needs evidence.
Ask Us First. Open the Record. Install the Glass Box.
The first 100 days are about beginning the repair: turning dense documents into public understanding, turning promises into trackable records, and turning consultation into something that happens before the decision is already made.
Peter Tu [杜宗驥]
TEAM 2026
TheOpenGov.com
Structural transparency. Trilingual access. Oversight with teeth.
