The Vancouver Aquatic Centre Demolition Is Back On

The demolition of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre is again underway. On Nov. 3, just one day after the newly elected Vancouver Park Board commissioners were sworn in, a court-ordered interim injunction pausing the demolition of the West End fitness complex — including its 50-metre pool — expired.

A memo from park board staff to the newly elected commissioners, obtained by The Tyee, noted that to “avoid any further project costs resulting from delay claims, staff will be recommencing demolition activities upon expiration of the injunction.”

A group of pool users called Protecting Our Vancouver Aquatic Centre Society had launched a court petition in an attempt to save the pool, the only one that permanently offers 50-metre lengths in Vancouver.

A B.C. Court of Appeal justice placed an injunction on the demolition of the 52-year-old pool on Oct. 13, just four days before the municipal election.

The injunction came less than a month after the B.C. Supreme Court dismissed Protecting Our Vancouver Aquatic Centre Society's petition to force the Vancouver Park Board to replace the 50-metre pool.

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre has been closed to the public since the end of June after persistent maintenance problems, including chunks of concrete that were falling off the ceiling and into the pool.

Based on advice from park board staff, earlier this year park board commissioners chose to replace the existing 50-metre pool with a 25-metre facility.

The pool at Hillcrest Aquatic Centre in Vancouver’s Riley Park neighbourhood rotates between opening 25-metre and 50-metre lanes. Hillcrest had its 50-metre pool hours extended after the Vancouver Aquatic Centre closed, to make up for the loss.

Otherwise the closest 50-metre pool is at the University of British Columbia’s Point Grey campus.

Swimmer Tony Correia told The Tyee neither Hillcrest nor the UBC pool is a substitute for the Vancouver Aquatic Centre.

The West End resident said he went from swimming up to four times a week with the English Bay Swim Club to quitting the club and not swimming at all since the Vancouver Aquatic Centre closed this summer.

“If I worked in the city, I might be more inclined. But I live in the West End for a reason: it’s a 15-minute city,” Correia said, adding he commutes daily outside the city via transit for work and doesn’t want to commute more.

“I don’t drive. All of my physical activity stuff is usually within walking distance.”

In September, Protecting Our Vancouver Aquatic Centre Society, co-founded by recreational swimmers Jon Girard and Mayeli Alvarez, asked the B.C. Court of Appeal to intervene in the demolition.

The group had hoped the injunction that expired Nov. 3 would buy time for candidates from one of the four municipal parties that supported rebuilding with a 50-metre pool to be elected to the park board.

This included ABC Vancouver, whose city councillors had voted only a year before to provide city funding for the 25-metre pool development. It also included Girard and Alvarez, who ran for commissioner seats under the TEAM for a Livable Vancouver municipal party.

Instead of electing supporters of a 50-metre pool at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, Vancouver voters elected four commissioners from the Coalition of Progressive Electors, or COPE, and three from the Green Party of Vancouver.

Both parties made election pledges to build a 50-metre pool elsewhere in Vancouver.

Although the society’s Appeal Court case is technically still open, Girard told The Tyee they are unlikely to pursue the case any further.

“It’s a funding thing,” Girard said, adding it would cost an additional $40,000 to $50,000 to take the city and park board back to court. “It’s an incredible amount of work to build a case.”

Altogether, the society fundraised about $115,000 for its legal fight. It has spent at least $95,000 on legal fees, Girard said.

“We’ve had five lawyers up until now, across the various firms that we’ve used and the different parts of the case. And every lawyer that we’ve had, they’ve had a side lawyer that works with them, and that’s how they bill,” he said.

Stewart Prest, a policial science lecturer at UBC, said the issue was deeply felt by West End residents — but doesn’t seem to have been “the ballot box question for most Vancouverites.”

“It is one piece of a much larger parks puzzle and much larger community resource for the city.”

How we got here

In March 2025 the park board voted in favour of rebuilding the aquatic centre with a 25-metre pool, after pieces of the building’s exterior and even the ceiling, including over the pool itself, began visibly crumbling in 2022.

Park board staff had advised commissioners that it would not be possible to build a 50-metre pool to meet current accessibility standards within the existing building’s footprint.

In June 2025, despite significant opposition from public speakers who argued for a 50-metre pool replacement, city council voted to provide $22.5 million in funding towards the 25-metre pool project.

In an August 2025 post on their website, Girard and Alvarez announced they had filed for a judicial inquiry into the park board’s decision to rebuild with a 25-metre pool.

Funding for their legal costs was crowdsourced through a GoFundMe campaign. Girard told The Tyee they also received a few offline donations, bringing the total amount raised closer to $115,000.

But the court appearances in June and then September failed to stop the closure of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre on June 28 or prove the city’s 2022 plebiscite question to borrow funds to rebuild the centre obliged the park board to rebuild the 50-metre pool.

In early September Alvarez and Girard announced their park board election candidacy with the TEAM for a Livable Vancouver party.

In late September the society officially appealed the court decision, citing the Oct. 17 park board election. On Oct. 13, Justice Gail Dickson granted the interim injunction, ordering all demolition work on the Vancouver Aquatic Centre to cease immediately until at least Nov. 3.

Girard and Alvarez received over 20,000 votes each in the election, which Girard told The Tyee is impressive considering they campaigned for less than two months.

But it was just one-third of the nearly 60,000 votes cast for COPE candidate Sacia Burton, the seventh and final elected park board commissioner, on Oct. 17.

What comes next

Green park board commissioners Spencer van Vloten and Breanne Smart confirmed for The Tyee that the demolition has resumed. The board’s current focus is choosing a location for a new 50-metre pool elsewhere in the city, and maintenance and eventual replacement of other pools such as the outdoor pool at Kitsilano Beach.

“Park board staff will be getting back to us — it could be the end of this month — with recommendations and analysis of that,” said van Vloten, adding the two main contenders are the Hastings and Kensington community centres, which are both prioritized for renewal.

“We’re beginning that process. But it’s something we’re excited to make a reality.”

The Tyee also reached out to the COPE commissioners and arranged an interview with commissioner Tamiko Suzuki. However, Suzuki later cancelled the interview. Green Party park board incumbent Tom Digby also declined our interview request.

Van Vloten noted that the Vancouver Aquatic Centre has been rated one of the least utilized pools in the city since at least 2018, when it was operating at 26 per cent of its capacity.

Subsequent park board documents state capacity was approximately 30 per cent as of February 2025, “mainly due to the temperature, depth, and configuration of the lap and dive tanks, as well as the facility’s age and condition.”

Smart said she grew up swimming and has an interest in public infrastructure. She decided to run for park board in order to increase the access to public pools in the city.

“There’s a lack of aquatic infrastructure in Vancouver. I think per capita we have some of the lowest aquatic space in the country,” Smart said, adding that securing funding for redevelopment and long-term maintenance of park board infrastructure, including pools, is key.

With a mayor and majority of city council also coming from the COPE and Green parties, Smart said she is confident the city will be amenable to providing funding for these projects.

But given the recent federal budget announcement of $5 billion in national funding for culture, including recreation centres and ice rinks, as well as promises from local MPs and MLAs made to municipal candidates during last month’s city and provincial elections, Smart is also expecting some federal assistance.

“We want to make sure that we’re holding them to it,” she said. “The Green Party, we’re not a party that has huge promises.... We want to stick with politicians and hold them to their word, and stick to our guns about what we can accomplish and achieve.”

Girard told The Tyee he will believe the park board is building a new 50-metre pool elsewhere when he sees it.

“Vancouver needs more pools, but I don’t believe there’s really intent to deliver. Unless they prove to be capable of sorting out a project of relevant significant magnitude in short order,” he said.

“The problem really comes down to mismanagement of current assets. So current assets of the park board, there’s no valid reason why a facility of 50 years old is considered end of life, other than neglect or mismanagement of assets.”

A 2022 audit of public Vancouver recreation facilities, conducted before ABC Vancouver won the majority of park board seats in the 2022 municipal election, found over 70 per cent were in “poor” or “very poor” condition.

“Kits Pool is going through a similar — distinct, but in some ways similar — set of problems regarding its refurbishment. This is perhaps an indicator instead that, going forward, park board and city institutions really need to think about the very long term of their institutions in a more consistent way,” said UBC’s Prest.

“But of course, that is going to cost more money, as well. That’s always going to be a challenge: how do you set aside enough money for that?”

Kitsilano Pool was refurbished in 2018 at a cost of $3.3 million but was heavily damaged during winter storms in 2022.

Van Vloten told The Tyee that the new Vancouver Aquatic Centre is expected to be finished and open in three to four years. The park board staff memo to the new commissioners said they expect the new pool to open sometime in the last three months of 2029.

But while determining the location of a new 50-metre pool is a top park board priority, van Vloten said, a new 50-metre pool is at least six or seven years away from opening.

Like Girard, swimmer Correia does not believe the park board will follow through on the new 50-metre pool.

It’s a promise he said the board has been making since Correia moved to the city a decade ago, including holding extensive public consultations.

“I’m gonna call bullshit on that,” Correia said, adding city council’s cancellation of the West End waterfront renewal in 2024, after it was approved by the park board, only contributed to his lack of faith in municipal government.

“The only thing I agree with Ken Sim about is it’s time to get rid of the parks board. This is a board that’s past its best-before date.”