After growing the Vancouver park board’s food and beverage revenues over 12 years, Mark Halyk was laid off. Now, he’s running for office.
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The recent transformation of a ho-hum hotdog stand near the Kitsilano Pool into one of the Lower Mainland’s most vibrant waterfront patios has been heralded as a success by city management and politicians.
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The proud planner of that project was Mark Halyk, the Vancouver park board’s longtime manager of food and beverage operations. Halyk and the park board partnered with local company Batch to deliver the new patio with lighting, seating, live music, and food and alcohol service. Concession revenues increased more than 2,500 per cent.
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It wasn’t Halyk’s first success leveraging park board assets to boost city revenue and create something people liked.
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That made it all the more shocking, Halyk said, when he got the news in January that his position had been eliminated and he was out of a job.
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After 12 years at the organization, Halyk had seen duplication of services between park board and city departments. So when Vancouver city council directed staff last year to find more than $100 million in efficiencies in the 2026 budget to freeze property taxes, Halyk didn’t think it was necessarily a bad idea.
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“I definitely saw there were areas to streamline,” he said. “There is fat to trim.”
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But he never thought he would be on the chopping block.
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“I just brought in so much added revenue,” he said.
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In the private-sector hospitality industry, where Halyk previously worked, such results would be celebrated with promotions or raises.
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Halyk was told his termination was not performance-related, but part of the city’s efforts to cut costs, he said.
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That didn’t make sense to Halyk or to his former colleagues.
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Some of Halyk’s past colleagues at the park board, speaking on the condition they would not be identified publicly, said his termination surprised many staffers, considering the success he had delivered in his portfolio over the years. Former colleagues said it didn’t make sense to cut a person responsible for generating so much revenue, and commented that Halyk brought an innovative approach to his work, at an organization that does not always value innovation.
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When Halyk joined the park board in 2014, he brought more than two decades of hospitality industry experience, including six years in Toronto as chef manager for the Four Seasons Hotel chain, before launching his own catering company in Vancouver.
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Halyk’s private-sector experience made him a bit of an outlier at the park board, he said, where many people were career government employees.
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But, he said, he was hired in part because of his “entrepreneurial spirit,” and his early efforts at streamlining operations, through initiatives such as more efficient purchasing processes, were well-received initially by senior management. When he started trying to do more innovative things — such as the Kits Pool concession transformation — he ran into interference, he says.
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Despite what he described as limited support from senior management, Halyk said he worked directly with the elected park board commissioners to get Batch running.
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Batch launched in the summer of 2024, without a permanent liquor licence, using a series of special-event licenses. It was an immediate hit. By 2025, Batch had a proper liquor licence and expanded its capacity to 475 people.
