Helping communities understand their rights while rating municipalities on legislative compliance and transparency.
4N6 is a BC-based non-profit that researches and publicly rates how well each municipality follows the laws it's required to follow — and how transparent it is about doing so.
Compliance without transparency is hidden governance. Transparency claims without actual compliance are hollow. 4N6 rates BC municipalities on both dimensions — whether they follow the provincial laws that apply to them, and whether they openly show the public that they're doing it.
We map the provincial laws that govern BC municipalities — the Community Charter, Local Government Act, FIPPA, and more — and identify what each one requires.
Each municipality is scored across categories like open meetings, financial reporting, FOI responsiveness, and council conduct, then combined into an overall grade.
We translate dense legislation into plain language, so residents know what they're entitled to — without wading through legalese.
Mission
4N6 exists to help British Columbians understand their rights as residents of a municipality, and to give them an independent, evidence-based view of how well their local government is meeting its legal obligations — both in what it does, and in how openly it tells the public about it.
The name is a play on forensics — the practice of rigorous, evidence-based investigation. That's deliberate. 4N6 isn't an advocacy group with a predetermined conclusion about any municipality; it's an independent researcher that follows the paper trail, checks primary sources, and reports what it finds, gaps included.
BC's roughly 160 municipalities operate under a dense body of provincial law — the Community Charter, the Local Government Act, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, the Financial Information Act, and others — much of which includes requirements to inform and consult the public. In practice, provincial oversight of day-to-day compliance has diminished over time, and the burden of holding municipalities accountable has shifted increasingly onto residents themselves. 4N6 exists to close that gap: doing the research so individual taxpayers don't have to.
4N6 is being built deliberately, one region at a time, rather than all at once. Three tracks develop in parallel:
Every rating on this site is preliminary and will be revisited as the methodology matures and deeper research is completed.
BC law gives residents specific rights when it comes to their municipality — the right to see records, to attend meetings, to be consulted on major decisions, and more. Here's what the law actually says, in plain language, with a way to go deeper if you need to.
| If your concern is about... | Contact |
|---|---|
| Unfair or unreasonable treatment by a municipality | Office of the Ombudsperson — bcombudsperson.ca |
| A denied or mishandled Freedom of Information request, or a privacy breach | Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner — oipc.bc.ca |
| A question about what a municipality is legally required to do | Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs |
| A specific municipal decision, service, or bylaw | Your municipality directly — staff and elected officials |
Ratings now cover all 158 incorporated municipalities in British Columbia, across all 27 regional districts plus the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality: the Fraser Valley; all of Vancouver Island (Capital, Cowichan Valley, Nanaimo, Alberni-Clayoquot, Comox Valley, Strathcona, and Mount Waddington regional districts); Metro Vancouver; the Squamish-Lillooet, Cariboo, Fraser-Fort George, and Peace River regional districts; the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality; Northwest BC in full (Bulkley-Nechako, Kitimat-Stikine, North Coast, and Haida Gwaii); all of the Okanagan (Central, North, and Okanagan-Similkameen regional districts); the Kootenays in full (East, Central, and Kootenay Boundary regional districts); and the Thompson-Nicola, Columbia-Shuswap, Sunshine Coast, and qathet regional districts. (Central Coast Regional District is the sole BC regional district with no incorporated municipalities — Bella Coola, Ocean Falls, and its other communities are unincorporated or self-governing First Nations, so there is nothing to rate there under this framework.) Each municipality is scored across eight categories tied to specific provincial requirements. All grades below are preliminary — based on what's publicly and easily accessible on each municipality's own website. Deeper verification of completeness and timeliness is ongoing.
Pick one rating item to see how every rated municipality scores on it, from strongest to weakest. Use it to see who is doing well, find a model to follow, or check how your own municipality stacks up. All scores are preliminary and reflect what is publicly and easily accessible on each municipality's website.
| # | Municipality | Region | Score | What we found |
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