As Cuts Loom, Vancouver Rejects Plan to Fund Beach Lifeguards

A little over a month after it was revealed Vancouver Park Board staff were planning to halve the number of lifeguarded beaches and lakefronts this summer, city council has declined to fund the lifeguards themselves.

Instead the majority ABC Vancouver councillors and Mayor Ken Sim voted in favour of referring a motion to fund the cut lifeguards back to the park board.

Last month news broke that lifeguards would not be provided for Trout Lake, Sunset Beach, Third Beach and Spanish Banks East and West between the May and September long weekends.

Instead park board staff said they would invest in lifeguards at their most crowded, incident-prone beaches: Jericho Beach, Locarno Beach, Kitsilano Beach, English Bay Beach and Second Beach.

On Wednesday, Green Party of Vancouver councillor Pete Fry presented a motion to council to address those cost pressures. The motion asked city staff to provide up to $600,000 to cover lifeguard costs at Sunset Beach, Third Beach and Spanish Banks East and West.

The motion did not include funding a lifeguard at Trout Lake. The east Vancouver lakefront is often closed to swimming over the summer because of high levels of E. coli bacteria in the water.

“I want to underscore the real timing importance to get this funding approved so we can actually onboard lifeguards in time for beach season,” said Fry, who called into council on Wednesday from Victoria where he was in meetings with the provincial government.

“I know that this council supports public safety in all its forms, and I think this is a really crucial investment.”

Thirty-two speakers addressed council, unanimously speaking in favour of Fry’s motion.

Several of the speakers were former Vancouver lifeguards, dating back decades. They spoke about the rescues they participated in at the very beaches impacted by the lifeguard cuts.

This included not just responding to drownings, but finding missing children, and addressing assaults, predatory behaviour and illegal beach fires.

Without lifeguards, speakers told council, other emergency responders like police and firefighters would be tasked with responding to these emergencies.

Stephen Foellmer, a former city lifeguard and firefighter, claimed to have rescued singer Peter Gabriel on Spanish Banks just days before his 1983 Vancouver concert.

“Without lifeguards on this beach, it would have been a big tragedy,” Foellmer said.

Others spoke about their own near misses with drowning, as well as the legacy of Joe Fortes, the city’s first ever lifeguard over 100 years ago.

Many speakers also cited the risk to the city’s tourists, including the hundreds of thousands of people expected in Vancouver for seven FIFA World Cup games this summer.

“Lifeguards prevent emergencies before they happen. They intervene early, educate the public, de-escalate unsafe behaviour and they provide immediate skilled response when seconds matter,” said Lenea Grace, executive director of the Lifesaving Society BC & Yukon, the certifying body for lifeguards.

But ABC Vancouver councillor Mike Klassen presented an amendment to refer the motion back to the park board.

“The responsibility for setting service levels and allocating resources is within the operating budget of the Vancouver Park Board,” said Klassen.

He denied that the city’s decision to freeze property taxes this year had resulted in a funding cut to the park board. Instead he said the park board’s budget has increased annually over the past three budgets.

“Given this sustained growth in funding, decisions about how to best allocate those resources, including whether to maintain, expand or adjust lifeguard services, properly rests with the park board,” Klassen said.

Despite dissenting votes from the non-ABC Vancouver councillors, Klassen’s amendment passed.

The motion was sent back to the park board, but won’t be addressed at their upcoming April 27th meeting. Because it involves human resources decisions, the motion will be discussed in-camera, park board commissioner and chair Tom Digby told The Tyee.

Funding cut or financial mismanagement?

Park board communications staff did not cite financial savings as the reason for the cuts, in their emailed statement to The Tyee last month.

But CTV News later reported board staff expected to save somewhere between $400,000 and $600,000 by halving the number of guarded open-water areas in the city.

In an interview with The Tyee before council heard the motion on Wednesday, park board chair Digby said the board’s commissioners were not involved in the staff decision to cut lifeguard positions. Staff had been trying to address the $11 million deficit the board faces because of 2026 city budget cuts, he said.

Digby, a Green party member, worked with Fry to craft his motion asking for city funding. But he says park board commissioners had already directed staff to look elsewhere for cuts, in case Fry’s motion did not pass.

“We said, ‘Look, either we’ll find the money at city hall. Or staff, you’re going to have to find us some other solutions,’” Digby said, adding he could not give specific details on where board staff could find the money for lifeguards, because it is a human resources issue.

Mayor Ken Sim previously criticized the park board for the lifeguard cuts, telling news media the park board received $1.2 million in additional funding in budget 2026.

At the time the mayor, who unsuccessfully tried to dismantle the park board, blamed the lifeguard cuts on the “dual governance model” created by a separate park board and city council.

In an emailed statement to The Tyee following council’s vote on Wednesday, Sim repeated Klassen’s assertion that the city has provided millions in budget increases to the park board over the last three years.

“Staffing decisions related to lifeguards are exclusively the jurisdiction of park board and the decision to reassign these lifeguard positions sits with them alone,” the mayor’s statement read.

“A referral of this motion directs the matter to the appropriate governing body and allows the park board to fully assess the impact of their decision, providing them with an opportunity to reprioritize lifeguards at beaches.”

Digby acknowledged the park board’s 2026 budget did increase by $1.2 million. But he says it’s not enough to keep services running.

“Because we had fixed cost increases of $12 million, that means, just do the math, we ended up $11 million short,” he said.

The non-ABC park board commissioners sounded the alarm last fall over tens of millions in predicted park board budget cuts required to afford Mayor Sim’s pledge to freeze property taxes in 2026.

The three ABC park board commissioners disagreed, however. They accused their fellow commissioners of “fearmongering” and “misinformation” for predicting budget cuts would result.

Sim’s “zero means zero” budget passed last November.

City staff have not yet released a line-by-line breakdown of the budget, as they have done in previous years. As a result, the extent of city and park board funding cuts or reallocations and what departments are impacted remains unknown.