Vancouver Fraser Port Authority

As the federal agency responsible for the stewardship of the lands and waters that make up the Port of Vancouver, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has an exceptionally vast mandate: enabling Canada’s trade through the port, while protecting the environment and considering local communities.

Encompassing over 16,000 hectares of water and over 1,500 hectares of land, the Port of Vancouver borders 16 municipalities and intersects the traditional territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations. As the country’s gateway to over 170 trading economies around the world, the port authority handles $1 of every $3 of Canada’s trade in goods outside of North America.

This substantial purview comes with a corresponding responsibility—with such large portions of the Lower Mainland’s population affected by goods movement, , projects, and developments going through the Port of Vancouver, public engagement is an absolute must.

The port authority and Civil Space teamed up to host the first round of engagement for the Pitt Meadows Road and Rail Improvements Project, which aims to separate two of the busiest road and rail crossings in the Lower Mainland, both of which are blocked each day by moving trains for an average of one hour and 45 minutes.

The port authority team chose Civil Space to be their engagement platform with the goal of increasing their reach and providing meaningful opportunities to gather feedback from the community of Pitt Meadows to inform the project. As with all projects, the port authority believes the outcomes are always better when the community has a say in projects that will affect them

While prior engagements had been run through contracted agencies—the Pitt Meadows engagement marked the formation of a new in-house Project Communications team at the port authority. This new four-person team needed to hit the ground running with an all-encompassing tool that allowed for agility, vision, and depth.

Beyond just needing a flexible toolset, the port authority’s Project Communications team wanted to ensure that they had the capability to create and run engagements in house, without needing to outsource every change and tweak.

Our partnership began with onsite training to get their teams and engagement leads situated early and well. Training began with functionality demonstrations and an open Q&A of the platform, followed by the live creation of an engagement. In advance of training, the port authority team was supplied with their Civil Space accounts, enabling them to work directly in their new instance and grow their familiarity early.

Onsite training provided immediate opportunities for exploration: the port authority team was able to investigate question types, learn more about unique capabilities of the platform, and begin to collaborate with one another on how they would create their digital engagement.

The port authority team was pleased to have digital methods easily accessible at their fingertips— ranking questions, map annotations, embedded media, and much more.

As they began to develop their strategy, however, the true value of a digital engagement became readily apparent: traditional paper engagements were reliant on presence, on manual circulation, and on manual collation. With their Civil Space engagement, the port authority could present a truly accessible experience.

Beyond just ensuring access through phones, tablets, computers, and WCAG compliant assistive devices, true engagement accessibility is defined by context. Not only did the port authority’s audiences need to reach the engagement from any digital device, they needed to immerse themselves in the surrounding contexts through additional information.

Having the historical and consequential context surrounding the engagement, along with the ability to access the information and questions digitally from any device, provided the port authority’s audience with true access, to both the interface and the meaning.

By the time they were ready to launch their engagement, the port authority team had leveraged articles, and a project hub that outlined the engagement process from end-to-end.

Launching a civic engagement is a delicate balance between fostering awareness, boots-on-the-ground exposure, and creating open space for participation. Between the port authority, the City of Pitt Meadows, and Canadian Pacific, there was buy-in across stakeholders and partners to spread the word and ensure that audiences had ample time, information, and context to participate. Between the three parties, the engagement was promoted via:

• Social Media Campaigns
• Newspaper Ads
• City-issued Press Release
• Flyers mailed to every property in Pitt Meadows
• Highway Billboards
• Banners in the City Core
• Digital newsletters
• Event listings

As part of an open-house session held shortly after the engagement launch, the port authority team provided attendees with cards that held the engagement URL, along with additional copies for interested citizens that couldn’t attend, neighbours, and coworkers.

The largest amount of participants in a previous port authority engagement had been just above 200 people.

With a new level of participation, the Port team found themselves inundated with profound insights that will come to shape the Pitt Meadows project:

• Residents of high-impact areas were able to voice their needs for the first time
• The majority of the community felt that local history and art needed to be reflected in the project
• An overwhelming amount of feedback highlighted the importance felt by the community for additional safety measures for women and children