Does the Vancouver Art Gallery have a new controversy on its hands?

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Some time this year, the Vancouver Art Gallery is expected to share conceptual renderings of the new – er, latest – design for its controversy-plagued new home.

For those just tuning in, the desire to build a new headquarters for the VAG has now been years in the making. To say it’s been a humbling exercise would be trite. Depending on who you talk to, the idea is either delusional, or the vision of true believers who won’t be cowed by setbacks or negative headlines.

Originally, Swiss “starchitect” firm Herzog & de Meuron got the assignment to come up with the design. And they did. And it was grand. And it was also extremely expensive. Truthfully, the VAG had no business employing such a costly firm to come up with a vision, even if the result was stunning. With an eventual projected price tag of more than $600-million, it was beyond the gallery’s means.

Ultimately, reality prevailed: Herzog & de Meuron were let go and the gallery hired two architecture firms – Formline, a local outfit, as well as Toronto-based KPMB. Formline’s founder is Alfred Waugh, one of the few registered First Nations architects in Canada. Mr. Waugh is not someone without views on all matters political and otherwise. He’s often expressed them on Facebook and LinkedIn. And Prime Minister Mark Carney would not appear to be someone Mr. Waugh thinks too highly of.

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Many of Mr. Waugh’s posts contain links to materials from dubious sources. In a post last April, he wrote [sic]: “A revealing video on the corruption with Green Washing and how Global Elitist are lining their pockets … of which Carney is one of the architects.”

Another post from March 20, six days after Mr. Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister, includes a graph of the real-GDP-per-capita growth rates of several countries, with Canada near the bottom. “This is Canada’s performance under Marc [sic] Carneys [sic] financial advice … this is why Trump prefers Carney.” There is another that references Mr. Carney’s father, “and his views of Indigenous people as culturally retarded. … A nice role model for our leader.” There were others expressing similar disdain for the Prime Minister.

For whatever reason, Mr. Waugh decided to take some of the posts down. I asked the VAG if they were aware of these posts before they hired Formline and Mr. Waugh.

“The gallery’s selection of architects was based on the merits of the proposal and the qualifications of the design team,” the gallery said in a statement to The Globe and Mail. “Our focus remains on ensuring the project and its partners uphold those expectations, and we are not going to comment on individual social-media posts.”

I also asked the gallery if it was concerned that Mr. Waugh’s anti-Carney commentary might impact future efforts to secure funding from the federal government. The answer was, “We know they [Ottawa] share our support of the project, including its public value, community impact and long-term economic and social benefits.”

We’ll take that as a no, then.

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I asked Mr. Waugh if he wanted to comment on the material in his social-media posts, but he declined: “At this time I won’t be providing comment,” he said in an e-mail.

In the grand scheme of things, this may not be an existential problem for the gallery. However, you might wonder how much, if any, due diligence was done on Mr. Waugh, including taking a look at his social-media posts to see whether there was anything problematic in them. Mr. Carney became Prime Minister in March last year, while the new architects were picked in September. The posts on Mr. Waugh’s account were up long before and after the VAG’s selection was announced.

But it would appear the gallery has no problem with the material, and so we move forward. We don’t know when, precisely, the new design will be revealed. Once it’s fully costed, the gallery says it will confirm the project’s updated budget and financing plan. It will also reconfirm donor commitments. There have not been many so far.

Last June, the gallery announced it was making deep cuts to staff and programming as attendance and revenue hit a 15-year low. It didn’t help that it spent – wasted – $64-million on the Herzog & de Meuron design that was ultimately scrapped.

It’s difficult to imagine a new gallery getting built without a major influx of capital, including more money from the province and possibly from the federal Liberals in Ottawa, which earlier committed $30-million toward the project. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of those discussions.