Vancouver city councillor George Puil was instrumental in setting up the Greater Vancouver Regional Transit (GVRT) board.Nick Procaylo/The Globe and Mail
George Puil, a former high-school teacher who became a long-time and curmudgeonly city politician, a conservative foil for some of his more left-leaning fellow councillors, appeared to find purpose from disappointment.
Mr. Puil, who served the city first on Vancouver park board and then city council from 1962 to 2002, was key to forming the region’s now much-praised transit agency. He died on Dec. 10 at age 92 and was remembered by many this past week as a singular character in local politics, one who combined the toughness he’d learned as a star football and rugby player in university with a passion for service to the region.
As a councillor with the ruling Non-Partisan Association, his eye was always on the city’s property-tax bill, and he frequently questioned spending on various items.
“He brought a very sharp and clear conservative perspective to city council,” recalls former councillor and MP Libby Davies, who saw Mr. Puil engage in frequent theatrical verbal brawls with her very left-wing co-councillors Harry Rankin and Bruce Eriksen (also Ms. Davies’s husband).
“We used to call it the live soap opera,” she recalled.
But Mr. Puil was rejected by the NPA as a possible mayoral candidate when the city chose to go with the lesser-known but more popular Philip Owen. Mr. Puil went on to become the chair of the Greater Vancouver Regional District in 1996 where he found a mission. At the district, Mr. Puil led the way in fighting for a regional transit agency so that the Lower Mainland could have more direct control over transportation.
“He did a lot of creative things that the public didn’t know about. He negotiated the change where we gave up [control over] hospitals to get TransLink,” said former NPA council colleague, Lynne Kennedy.
After working with B.C. NDP minister Joy MacPhail to create TransLink, which came into being in 1999, he also became the chair of the agency’s first board.
Unbelievably to some, he argued passionately to introduce a $75 vehicle levy to help pay for part of the TransLink budget – something that even the NDP government eventually bailed on, fearing political backlash.
“That showed his real personality, the TransLink board. He was prepared to take the heat,” said Gordon Price, another former NPA councillor.
Mr. Puil demonstrated that willingness many times, keeping his home-phone number public so anyone could call him and never backing away from a difficult meeting with Vancouver citizens or others in the region.
In the book City Making in Paradise: Nine Decisions that Saved Greater Vancouver’s Livability, former Vancouver mayor Mike Harcourt and GVRD manager of policy and planning Ken Cameron described how Mr. Puil, even though barely recovered from a difficult knee operation, insisted on going to every council in the region to sell his idea of the new transit agency.
In West Vancouver, where councillors were not in favour of a new source of taxes, they made him stand for an hour during the presentation despite the obvious pain he was in.
“But George took everything they threw at him and was literally still standing at the end. The man had enough guts to match his conviction that this was the right thing to do,” Mr. Cameron is quoted as saying in the book.
That willingness to do battle came from a long history of competitive sports.
Originally from Alberta, Mr. Puil went to high school in Vancouver and then the University of British Columbia, where he excelled at football and rugby, playing for both teams.
A tribute to him on the website of the UBC Thunderbirds sports teams noted that, “according to Ubyssey sports reporter Allan Fotheringham, Puil ‘is the most dangerous broken field runner ever to pull on a Thunderbird sweater.’ ”
Mr. Puil later became a social-studies teacher and a football coach at Kitsilano Secondary School but continued to play rugby for B.C. and Canadian all-star teams until 1963. He was eventually inducted into the B.C. Football Hall of Fame. His school football teams were feared by the rest of the league and people would come from all over the province for his coaching, said his wife, Judi.
Mr. Puil lost his job as city councillor in 2002 after he was voted out as Vancouver residents, irate about a 123-day bus strike they blamed on him and ready for a change at city hall, turned to a new party to lead council.
He did some development-consulting work for Marcello de Cotiis’s Amacon company after that, according to Ms. Puil.
But outside the city, he was renowned for the work he did establishing TransLink.
“Internationally, he was better recognized than here,” Ms. Puil said.
He was also remembered by many of his students, who posted praise on social media or who remembered him quietly.
“He loved his students and he did a lot for them,” Ms. Puil said. “They would phone, even years later, and need a bus ticket or some help and he did that.”
A service to celebrate his life will take place in the new year.
Special to The Globe and Mail