What's really going on with the Langley City code of conduct dispute

Fair warning: this is a long read, and it rewards being read in one sitting rather than in pieces.

This story has been boiled down to outrage and slogans almost everywhere it appears, and that is precisely why it needs the opposite treatment.

What follows is built entirely on primary documents, the court filings, the bylaw, the investigator's reports, the letters between the parties, and it tries hard to be fair to both sides while still offering real analysis rather than a shrug.

If you know someone who is unclear on the details, or certain of something that turns out to be wrong, send it to them.

From the outside, this story has all the markings of a classic municipal scandal. A sitting Langley City councillor is taking her own Council and the Mayor to BC Supreme Court.

The City has quintupled its legal budget, from $90,000 to $500,000. The Chief Administrative Officer says much of the increase will go toward defending the City against the petition, along with a separate legal matter the City says it cannot discuss publicly. By that same official's accounting, the City has already spent roughly $328,000 on code of conduct matters over two years.

The councillor has accused the Mayor of trying to "persecute" her for her political speech. The Mayor has since announced a re-election slate with three Council colleagues, two of whom, Councillors Albrecht and Wallace, were the targets of Mack's own code of conduct complaints. A fifth member, Councillor James, has endorsed the slate. She is the one who filed the complaint against Mack now drawing the most attention. The councillor at the centre of the petition is potentially the most likely challenger for the mayoralty in October.

Six months out from an election, those are the makings of a Big Controversy. Big money. Big accusations. A question centred around Charter rights. A direct clash between two of the more prominent figures in Langley City politics.

But the actual story is more grounded, and less flattering to the loudest framing, than the controversy version suggests.

The Langley Union has reviewed the Petition to the Court filed by Councillor Delaney Mack on May 6, 2026, the Response to Petition filed by the City of Langley and Mayor Nathan Pachal on June 5, the supporting affidavit from CAO Francis Cheung, and the investigation file, including the Mayor's notices of investigation and the underlying complaints.

What follows is what those documents show, in the order it happened.

The bylaw at the centre of all of this

In April 2023, Langley City Council adopted Council Code of Conduct Bylaw No. 3225.

Every sitting councillor voted in favour, including Councillor Delaney Mack. The bylaw was passed after amendments to the provincial Community Charter encouraged municipalities to formalize codes of conduct for their elected officials.

Section 32(a) has come into focus as a controversial aspect of this bylaw. It requires a councillor, when communicating Council decisions to the public or the media, to do so both "accurately" and "in a positive manner," even if they disagreed with the majority. Those are two distinct requirements joined together, not alternatives. A councillor is expected to meet both.

The bylaw also sets out a complaints process: the Mayor conducts a preliminary assessment and decides whether a matter warrants investigation, an external lawyer investigates and reports, and Council then meets in closed session to consider the report and decide what, if anything, to do.

That process has now been triggered four times, all involving Councillor Mack.

Complaints one and two: Mack as the complainant

The first two complaints were brought by Councillor Mack herself, and both alleged bullying and harassment.

On January 26, 2025, she complained that Councillor Paul Albrecht had breached the bylaw, citing conduct such as laughing while she spoke, hand gestures, and what she described as aggressive body language.

An external lawyer, Ritu Mahil, investigated.

Her report, dated December 2, 2025, found only "occasional eye rolling and muttering" proven, which she concluded did not meet the threshold for harassment. On February 4, 2026, Council accepted the finding. No contravention.

Councillor Albrecht, responding to The Langley Union, provided a detailed account of the process on his side of it.

Council was notified of the complaint on February 25, 2025, and he provided his response on March 5. The investigator was retained on March 20, and he met with her on April 28.

He said that during that meeting, "the investigator asked if I would be willing to meet with Councillor Mack to resolve the issue," and that he "was more than willing to meet with a third-party present."

A Notice of Conclusion followed the December 2 report on January 9, 2026, before Council's February 4 acceptance of the findings, with Council issuing its formal conclusion letter to both councillors on February 20. Councillor Albrecht confirmed that he did not retain legal counsel during the process. From the January complaint to the February 2026 conclusion letter, the matter took just over a year to resolve.

Councillor Albrecht also spoke to the personal impact of that year on him.

He told The Langley Union: "The impacts of this process upon me over the last year cannot be understated. I have felt muted, self examining my words/actions, as well as somewhat challenged to freely participate at the council table as I normally would due to the need to self reflect."

He said he had taken the complaint seriously from the outset because "I believe this was an attack on my character and could significantly harm my reputation," and that although the report cleared him, "the result of this process is a loss of trust."

He said he believed "this issue should have been resolved much earlier" and noted that while the code of conduct was implemented with good intentions, "it has some flaws or shortcomings to prevent such a long process for complaints as the investigation report identifies that no breach/violation occurred."

On May 26, 2025, Councillor Mack complained about Councillor Rosemary Wallace, alleging incidents including glaring, hitting a desk, switching seats to avoid facing her, and muttering "that's a stupid question" during a meeting. Wallace said she had referred to "staff time" and denied the rest.

Mahil found Wallace's account more credible and identified no pattern of harassment. Her report was dated January 30, 2026, and on April 7, 2026, Council accepted the finding. No contravention.

Councillor Wallace, responding to The Langley Union, said "there was an opportunity to get together with Councillor Mack to resolve the Code Of Conduct Complaints but she declined."

Councillor Mack was given a targeted opportunity to respond to that specific statement, in addition to the general opportunity to comment on the article, and had not responded by publication.

Both matters are closed, and in both the independent investigator found that the councillor whom Mack complained about had done nothing that breached the bylaw.

These two complaints matter to the larger story for one reason: Councillor Mack's petition argues that the complaint later filed against her was retaliation for them.

Complaint three: an email, two requirements, and two failures

On June 13, 2025, Councillor Teri James filed a complaint against Councillor Mack alleging a breach of the previously mentioned section 32(a).

The statements at issue began as an email. According to Mayor Pachal's Notice of Investigation, Councillor Mack sent them in a private email to a resident who had come to her with questions, and the resident then posted that email to a Facebook group called "Say NO to the 6 Story Building."

She wrote the words privately to a constituent, and someone else later made them public.

The private nature of the email does not lessen either the accuracy or the positivity obligations.

A councillor answering a constituent one to one is translating what Council actually did into plain terms for someone who was not in the room and is relying on her account of it. The bylaw makes no distinction between broadcast and private communication, and section 32(a) applies to both.

The complaint James filed was much broader than what was investigated. Her original complaint pressed more than a dozen statements, including a claim that Councillor Mack had misrepresented bike lane usage.

Mayor Pachal, conducting the preliminary assessment, dismissed most of them, including the bike lane allegation, on the ground that they did not describe a decision of Council and so fell outside section 32(a) entirely.

Statement A, on her budget amendments: "In terms of policy recommendations, I offered numerous amendments to the Financial Plan, which would have permitted us to retain capital reserves, and get us closer to delivering these amenities ... Not one was supported by the council majority."

Mahil found this statement not accurate in part, and not communicated in a positive manner.

Statement B, on her development referrals: "Additionally, I have attempted to refer numerous development applications back to staff to amend amenities, or request Community Amenity Contributions proportionate to the value being created with the application ... Once again, of the numerous referrals that I have made with this intention, not one has been supported by the council majority."

Mahil found this not accurate in part, and not communicated in a positive manner.

Statement C, on the City's spending priorities: "Instead of addressing our core needs, we have a budgeted this year to provide a podcasts, more bike lanes that 0.2% of the population uses daily, and 6-figure investigative studies for projects that we lack the financial capacity to build over the next decade plus."

Mahil found this not accurate in part, and not communicated in a positive manner. The investigator's specific concern, on the public record, attached to the forward-looking part of the claim: that Mack could not reliably assert the City would lack the capacity to build the named projects "over the next decade plus," because that is a prediction about future budgets she was not in a position to make as a statement of fact.

Statement D, on her deferral motion: "I did want to mention that I put forward a deferral motion during Monday's meeting. I had hoped that council would support an Open House so we could ensure that members of the public have been adequately heard. This was unfortunately voted down."

This is the one statement Mahil found accurate. She faulted it only on tone. The line "unfortunately, this was voted down," she wrote, implied Council was uninterested in hearing from residents, when the deferral had actually been declined because an open house would need to be developer-led to comply with legislation and the Official Community Plan. Mack, who was at the meeting, knew that reason and did not share it with the resident, which "may have put Council's decision in a positive and reasonable light." On that basis Mahil found that "because Statement D was not communicated in a positive manner, the Respondent has breached s. 32(a)."

Mahil's overall conclusion, dated March 13, 2026, was specific (list formatting added editorially for easier reference):

• "Statement A is not accurate in part, and is not communicated in a positive manner;
• Statement B is not accurate in part, and is not communicated in a positive manner;
• Statement C is not accurate in part, and is not communicated in a positive manner;
• Statement D is accurate but is not communicated in a positive manner."

She found Councillor Mack in breach of section 32(a) on all four.

The split matters. Three of the four statements failed on both counts, accuracy and tone. The fourth, about the deferral motion, was found factually accurate and faulted only for how it was framed.

So one of the four findings against Mack turns solely on the constitutionally contested half of the bylaw, while the other three rest on accuracy as well as tone.

Councillor Mack's defence seems to fold the accuracy and tone findings together and recast both as a free speech grievance.

That is the version that has been broadcast into the public conversation: that she is being punished for criticizing Council, and that a rule demanding 'positive' speech is an unconstitutional muzzle.

The constitutional question about the 'positive manner' requirement is real, and we take it seriously below. But it does not touch the accuracy findings at all. Three of the four statements were found inaccurate in part, and even if a court were to strike the positivity requirement entirely, those findings would remain.

The Charter argument, however it turns out, does not make inaccurate statements accurate.

What actually happened on May 4

On May 4, 2026, Council held the meeting that became the flashpoint. The City's position, in its court filing, is that this was a preliminary step.

Council voted to "receive" the report and to direct the Mayor to schedule a future closed meeting at which it will decide whether a contravention occurred and what, if anything, to do. That meeting has not been scheduled. As of June 5, Council has made no finding and imposed no sanction.

Councillor Mack's position is that this is a distinction without a difference, and her petition argues that by receiving the report Council in substance adopted its findings. Much local coverage has described her as having been "found to have violated" the code.

As a matter of procedural fact, that is not yet what has happened. The independent investigator made that finding. Council has not yet ruled on it.

Complaint four: Mack v. James

On October 6, 2025, after the James complaint against her had gone to investigation, Councillor Mack filed her own complaint against Councillor James.

She alleged that James had abused her office, failed to uphold the bylaw's foundational principles, and, above all, that James's June complaint was an act of reprisal for Mack's earlier complaints against two other councillors, filed in bad faith and "weaponizing" the very section Mack was accused of breaching.

Rather than set out the facts on the form, Mack's complaint adopted her lawyer's August 1 letter by reference, the same letter that was her defence to the James complaint, and stated that the violations "took place."

When Mayor Pachal wrote in November to say the complaint was not clear and invited her to clarify or redraft it, she declined and chose to rely on it as written.

Pachal dismissed it on May 7, 2026, on two grounds.

First, he found it did not meet the bylaw's requirement to set out a detailed description of the facts.

Secondly, on the retaliation allegation specifically, he reasoned that because the independent investigator had by then found James's complaint substantiated, it could not be characterized as vexatious, malicious, or made in bad faith.

The number that has dominated the public conversation

If one figure has shaped how residents see this story, it is $500,000. At the May 25 meeting, Council lifted the legal fees budget from $90,000 to $500,000, attributed by staff to "unanticipated legal and professional costs related to labour, employment and investigation matters."

When Councillor James asked how much related to code of conduct investigations, Councillor Mack said the figures were confidential. CAO Francis Cheung disagreed, reporting that the investigations had cost $186,000 in 2025 and $142,000 so far in 2026.

Asked by The Langley Union where the new budget would go, Cheung said it covers defending the City against the petition and a separate legal matter the City has been dealing with since 2025, the cost of which he described as also significant and continuing into 2026. He said he could not discuss that matter, or say whether any continuing investigative costs relate to anything other than the concluded James/Mack investigation, citing confidentiality.

The cost is real, but it does not all trace to Councillor Mack. The roughly $328,000 spent on code of conduct matters reflects the four intertwined complaints, three brought by Mack and one against her.

But the CAO has confirmed that a separate and significant part of the City's legal spending, and part of the new budget, relates to an unrelated matter the City will not discuss.

The headline $500,000 is not a measure of what the Mack file alone has cost. And even the part that is cannot tell you who is right.

What Councillor Mack is actually asking for

The public conversation has compressed this petition down to a free speech challenge. It is considerably bigger than that.

The Charter argument is one of nine orders Councillor Mack is asking the BC Supreme Court to grant, and most of the others have nothing to do with free speech. Read in full, the petition is an attempt to unwind the entire two-year complaint process, including the two complaints she herself brought and lost.

Here is what she is actually seeking, in the order her petition lists it.

1. A declaration that the May 4 decision was procedurally unfair and unreasonable. This is the meeting where Council voted to receive the investigator's report on her own case. She wants the court to rule that the way Council handled it fell short of the standard of fairness the law requires of a quasi-judicial process.

2. A declaration that the February 4 and April 7 decisions were also procedurally unfair and unreasonable. These are the meetings where Council accepted the findings clearing Councillor Albrecht and Councillor Wallace, the two councillors Mack herself had complained about and the two complaints she lost. She is now asking the court to fault the same process she later invoked, in the two matters where it ruled against her.

3. An order setting aside Mayor Pachal's October 7 referral decision. This was the decision to send the James complaint to an outside investigator in the first place. Setting it aside would mean the investigation that found a breach should never have proceeded at all.

4. An order setting aside all three Council decisions, February 4, April 7, and May 4. Beyond declaring them unfair, she wants them formally quashed, including the Albrecht and Wallace outcomes. The striking part is that she is asking the court to set aside results from the very process she herself set in motion as a complainant, presumably to argue the whole procedure was defective end to end.

5. In the alternative, an order sending all four decisions back to Council for reconsideration. If the court will not quash the decisions outright, she asks that they be returned to Council to be redone in line with the court's directions.

6. An order directing Council to reimburse her legal fees. For both the complaint process and this judicial review. Council denied her earlier reimbursement requests, and she is asking the court to override that.

7. A declaration that section 32(a) is unconstitutional and of no force and effect. This is the Charter challenge, and it is the most substantive single argument in the petition. Her strongest point targets the "positive manner" half of the clause.

Requiring an elected official to describe Council's decisions positively, even ones she voted against, can edge toward compelling her to voice a view that is not her own, and the freedom to criticize one's own government sits close to the core of what section 2(b) of the Charter protects. Reasonable people can find that requirement troubling, and a court may well agree.

The bylaw anticipates this kind of challenge. Section 35 states that nothing in it is intended to affect a councillor's Charter rights, and section 65 provides that any portion inconsistent with provincial or federal law has no application to the extent of the inconsistency. But neither clause decides anything on its own.

Both presuppose that a conflict has been established, and whether section 32(a) actually conflicts with the Charter is the very question the court must answer. Section 65 likely has no force until a court does the work first, establishing a real conflict, at which point the offending portion falls away and the rest stands.

The City's answer is that the clause governs only councillors performing their official duties, who voluntarily take on heightened obligations, and that any limit is minimal and justified. It also notes that Councillor Mack voted to adopt this bylaw in 2023. She previously voted in support of the rule she now calls unconstitutional, and lived under it long enough to file two complaints of her own before it was turned on her.

Even a complete win here would reach only the positivity requirement, not the separate finding that Councillor Mack communicated inaccurately.

It is worth pausing on why an accuracy requirement exists at all, because the answer is not abstract. Public trust in institutions is not self-sustaining. It erodes when officials are free to describe what their government did in whatever way serves them, and it collapses when enough people come to believe the official version of events is just another opinion to be shouted down.

We are watching that collapse unfold in real time south of the border, where the MAGA movement has shown how quickly fact-free online outrage, repeated often enough by people with titles, can detach a large share of a population from any shared set of facts about their own government.

Once that detachment sets in, elections, courts, and public agencies all start to look illegitimate to the people primed to distrust them, and the damage is extraordinarily hard to reverse.

A clause asking a Langley councillor to describe Council's decisions in a way that does not erode public confidence in them, even when they disagree with the outcome, is a modest thing.

When they speak from the authority of elected office, they are no longer just one more critic; they are part of the institution, and the power that comes with that carries a responsibility not to corrode public trust from within.

The slow-motion warnings playing out elsewhere should make residents take that principle more seriously, not less.

8. An interim order staying the October 7 and May 4 decisions. A pause button. She wants those two decisions frozen so that Council cannot proceed to rule on a contravention or impose any sanction while the case is before the court.

9. Costs. Standard in litigation: she asks that the City cover her legal costs for the petition.

Taken together, this is not a narrow constitutional appeal. It is a request to set aside an entire chain of decisions, from the Mayor's first move to investigate, through two outcomes that went against her, to the report on her own conduct, and to freeze the process before Council can finish it. The Charter challenge is the part that has drawn the cameras, but it is only one line item out of nine.

What Mack says was unfair, and how the City answers

The petition sets out a series of specific procedural-fairness complaints, and the City's Response to Petition, filed June 5, answers each one. Neither side's account has been tested in court.

Access to the reports

The first dispute is about how Councillor Mack and her lawyers were allowed to see the investigation reports. Three reports are involved: one on each of the complaints Mack brought against Councillors Albrecht and Wallace, and one on the James complaint against her.

The disagreement has two separate strands: the terms on which the councillors themselves could review a report, and the terms on which Mack's lawyers could.

On the first strand, the released file is clear, and it does not support the idea that Mack was singled out.

When the Wallace investigation concluded, the City sent every member of Council the same letter, dated February 10, 2026, setting out identical conditions for reviewing the report.

Each councillor had to attend at City Hall in person, within a set window, to read the report in Council Chambers in the presence of the City's outside lawyers; no phones or devices in the room; a copy of the report and named notepaper provided on site; notes confined to that copy or notepaper, with no separate notes; everything sealed in a named envelope and kept by the City afterward; and no removing, copying, photographing, or recording.

The same terms went to Wallace as the respondent, to Mack as the complainant, and to the other councillors as bystanders. Mack was given the same style of supervised review for the report on her own conduct.

In every instance the released record shows, the City applied one supervised, no-take-away-copy template to everyone, regardless of whether a councillor was the complainant, the respondent, or neither.

Asked about the review process, CAO Cheung confirmed this account to The Langley Union.

(Note: The equivalent conclusion letters for the earlier Albrecht report are not part of the files we've reviewed, so this describes every case the record shows rather than all four matters.)

Mack argues that this supervised viewing is not what the bylaw promises a respondent. Section 50(h) directs that a copy of the report be "provided to Council and the Respondent Council Member who is the subject of the Complaint," and Schedule B of the bylaw, its own notice template, reads "Enclosed is a copy of the investigation report and recommendations."

She reads that as a right to a copy she can keep and work from, not an appointment to view one under supervision.

She also points to section 54(m), which lists "restricting how documents are provided to the Council Member" among the sanctions Council may impose after a finding of contravention, and argues the City applied a penalty-like restriction before any finding was made.

That second point is weakened by the uniformity just described: if the same supervised review applied to councillors who faced no complaint at all, it is hard to read it as a sanction aimed at her. The firmer version of her argument is the textual one, that "a copy" ought to mean a copy.

The second strand concerns her lawyers, and here the City offered more.

Reviewing a report to give legal advice is a different thing from a councillor reading it, and for the Albrecht and Wallace reports the City offered to courier a physical copy to her lawyers' offices, under undertakings to keep it confidential, not copy it, and return it by a set date. This is where access actually stalled. Her counsel objected to the return-date condition, arguing it would prejudice her ability to obtain advice and to seek judicial review, and declined to sign undertakings they had not drafted. The Mayor's February 3 and March 31 letters show he accepted most of their proposed revisions and offered to extend the return deadline, while her counsel held out to keep the report until the end of any judicial review and appeal. So in the strand where a retained copy was actually on the table, the impasse came from a dispute over undertakings, not from the City refusing access.

The City's filed answer ties the strands together. It says Mack "was provided an opportunity to review each of the investigation reports before they were received by Council, and did so," and that her lawyers were entitled to review them "subject to reasonable restrictions on the dissemination of those reports in accordance with section 117 of the Community Charter."

Section 117 imposes a duty on every council member to keep confidential any record held in confidence by the municipality, and any information considered in a closed meeting, until it is lawfully released, and it lets the municipality recover damages for a non-inadvertent breach.

The bylaw lends the City support here: section 50(d) requires "the utmost confidentiality of the process," and section 50(f) says "all participants will be asked and expected to maintain confidentiality and sign a confidentiality agreement."

There is still a gap Mack can press.

Section 117 governs what a councillor must do with a confidential record once she has it; it does not, by its terms, say the City may withhold a usable copy in the first place. Its premise is that confidential records will be in councillors' hands, which is why the duty not to disclose them exists at all.

Mack can argue the City conflated her duty to keep the report confidential, which section 117 imposes and which she would owe regardless, with her right to receive a copy of it, which section 50(h) grants and which section 117 does not touch.

Whether the general confidentiality duty can justify limiting the specific copy entitlement is a question for the court.

What "receiving" the report actually meant

The second dispute is structural.

Mack argues that section 50 lays out the complete process: the report goes to Council and the respondent, then a single closed meeting considers the findings and decides on any remedy. She says there is no step in the bylaw to merely "receive" a report, that the word is undefined, and that by receiving the report on May 4 and directing a later sanctions meeting, Council in substance adopted the investigator's findings.

The bylaw, however, contains a separate set of provisions headed "Fairness Procedures Applicable to Council Determination of Measures."

Section 51 requires that the respondent be given notice at least seven business days before the closed meeting "at which Council will consider the measure," using the Schedule B notice, which is written to be sent after "a finding has been made."

Section 53 makes "determining culpability and possible sanction" the sole responsibility of Council. The City argues that the May 4 meeting made no finding, that "all that occurred" was Council receiving the report and directing the Mayor to schedule the later meeting, and that it could not have imposed a sanction on May 4 without first giving the seven business days' notice the bylaw requires.

The two strands of her argument on this point sit somewhat uneasily together.

She objects that Council improperly split the process by merely "receiving" the report on May 4, and separately that the May 4 meeting moved too quickly and left her unable to fully respond. Read together, those positions point in different directions. If the bylaw required the finding and any sanction to be decided in a single meeting, the result would have been Council resolving both on May 4, the faster outcome she objected to.

The two-stage approach she questions is also what has, so far, kept any finding from being made, and what preserves the seven business days' notice and separate submissions meeting the bylaw provides before sanctions can be weighed.

The remaining claims

A few smaller claims round out the petition.

Mack says she was entitled to cross-examine Councillor James, the CAO, and the investigator. The bylaw provides for interviews during the investigation and for the respondent to make submissions with counsel at the closed meeting, but it does not provide for cross-examination before Council.

She says Council rubber-stamped the investigator and improperly handed its role to a City lawyer in a conflict of interest. The City responds that Council "was entitled to receive and rely upon the investigation reports and the factual findings contained therein," citing earlier BC court decisions.

She says the constitutional issues were never put to the investigator; the City does not dispute that they were outside the investigator's terms of reference, but says culpability is for Council, and that the Charter argument can be made to Council and to the court.

On the May 4 decision specifically, the City raises a threshold argument that, if accepted, would dispose of much of the petition: that the decision is not judicially reviewable, that Mack was "not adversely affected" by it because no finding was made, and that any challenge to it is "at best, premature" because Council has not yet ruled.

The petition is one side's pleading and the response is the other's.

Like the constitutional question, these procedural arguments turn on contested readings of the same bylaw, and they are headed for argument over multiple days in front of a judge.

Civic responsibility for residents

This is not a simple case of free speech martyrdom.

The finding against Councillor Mack rests partly on accuracy, and accuracy is not a matter of opinion or tone. But it is not nothing either, and it is not over. Council has not ruled, and the constitutionality of the positivity requirement is a serious open question.

The kind of local government most of us say we want, one that thinks carefully, follows fair process, and makes decisions that hold up, depends on us as much as on the people we elect.

Officials bend toward whatever generates the most pressure. If the loudest thing in the room is always outrage, that is what they will learn to answer to. If we can manage to stay curious, patient, and demanding of evidence rather than spectacle, we make room for them to do the same.

That is our part of the bargain, and on this story it costs us nothing more than diligent patience.

Read the filings. Hold the facts. And for this story, more than most, do not let anyone tell you which side to be angry at, at least not yet.

References and Further Reading

This article draws on court records, municipal and provincial documents, and prior reporting.

Court records. BC Supreme Court File No. S263386 (Vancouver Registry), available through Court Services Online:

• Petition to the Court, Mack v. The Council of the Corporation of the City of Langley and Mayor Nathan Pachal, filed May 6, 2026
• Response to Petition, filed by the City of Langley and Mayor Nathan Pachal, June 5, 2026
• Court Services Online civil file summary, File S263386

City of Langley.

• Council Code of Conduct Bylaw, 2023, No. 3225
• Langley City Council meeting records, including the financial plan amendment of May 25, 2026

Provincial legislation.

• Community Charter, SBC 2003, c. 26, including sections 113.1 and 117
• Principles for Codes of Conduct Regulation, BC Reg 136/2022

Prior reporting.

• Matthew Claxton, "City councillor disputes led to expensive Code of Conduct investigations," June 17, 2026, Langley Advance Times
• Matthew Claxton, "VIDEO: An expensive fight over Langley City Council code of conduct," May 28, 2026, Langley Advance Times
• Matthew Claxton, "Councillor takes Langley City council, mayor to court over freedom of speech," May 7, 2026, Langley Advance Times

The Langley Union sought comment before publication from Councillor Delaney Mack, Mayor Nathan Pachal, Councillors Teri James, Paul Albrecht and Rosemary Wallace, and Chief Administrative Officer Francis Cheung. Councillors Albrecht, James, and Wallace and CAO Cheung responded, and their comments are reflected above. Mayor Pachal acknowledged the request and declined to comment. Councillor Mack did not respond to multiple requests before the publication deadline. Any comments received after publication will be added.