Interviewed by Valerie Franklin
Since many students will be voting for the first time, what would you describe as the role of municipal politics? What can city councillors actually do?
Well, the city council sets the vision along with the mayor, which is then entrusted to the staff to implement. So I think council is key in setting the vision for the future in how planning is going to proceed with the many pressures predicted in this area for growth, how are we going to do that sustainably? Many people perceive someone who uses the word sustainability as being a single-issue candidate; however, sustainability covers all areas of our municipal life, whether it’s economics, whether it’s the environment. It’s keeping things in balance.
Who do you view as your constituents?
Well, the citizens of Abbotsford. But my prime motivation for being involved is my kids and grandkids, should they choose to live in Abbotsford either now or in the future, because clearly decisions we make now are going to impact future generations, and we only get one chance at doing that.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
Some of the more current, urgent matters are our whole homelessness situation in Abbotsford, and also our economics, our fiscal situation right now is somewhat challenging in light of the significant debt that Abbotsford carries. In some ways, that sports centre was an attempt to do a catch-up with other similar municipalities who had [similar facilities] of this size at the time. And I think unfortunately we were scared into something. But it also is an example of how in the past, they had not really planned all that well and put monies aside for needs of community centres and hockey arenas, perhaps.
I think there’s been lack of vision in the past. Some of our most popular green spaces in town here — well, Mill Lake is a classic example. The current council is not responsible for that, but the fact that all of a sudden, only maybe 10 years ago, someone discovered that that might make a beautiful city park — it’s the only lake in the downtown Abbotsford area, and all of a sudden after having rezoned almost three quarters of the way around that park, they thought, you know, it would be nice to have it. So we’ve been buying back residences, perfectly good houses on expensive lots, a significant taxpayer’s expense to create that park. Whereas if they’d been more visionary at the time, they would have said, we’re not going to zone residences around this thing, this is going to be a gem we’re going to need in the future, if not now, and planned for that. And I don’t see us doing that same kind of visionary planning for the future.
And with much of the growth going up Sumas Mountain, in my view there’s not enough attention paid to sensitive ecosystems up there. There’s not a recognition that we now need to start creating a fund to create buy just naturally green spaces. I’m not talking about playing fields, but natural green spaces the future generation will need to spend their times in to create a healthy community.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
That level of apathy exists in the greater community as well. It almost, I think, prompts politicians running for office to ignore those segments of society because they’re not going to vote anyway; why try and speak to their issues? That’s a tough one, unless somehow they see, get to see the decisions made today are impacting their future. I don’t know how you would pull them in.
I think perhaps there need to be more connections made with the university for a variety of reasons, one of them economic. A place like Surrey has done a great job in connecting with SFU and then Kwantlen, and by doing so, together they’re attracted some really great clean industries to the area. But there’s other reasons why we need to connect with this university. The young educated are going to come out of this facility, and where are they going to go to work? If we hope to keep them here at all, we’d better start paying attention to what they would like to see in a livable community. There’ve been polls that suggest that having a walkable livable community is really important to them, and increasingly the younger generation is not interested in buying cars, like in the Vancouver area. So the need to have a livable, walkable region is really key and I think having — perhaps council should hold its meetings here. I know that provincial government will occasionally hold their meetings in Fort Langley. It’s only symbolic, but if you had a council meeting right here in a large enough venue that students could be there, I think that would be excellent, and you could have an open mic.
If elected, how would what you want to do as councillor be different from what council is already doing?
Planning has been haphazard. And that’s created problems. For example, we’ve had leapfrogged development with huge residential development right up against the Aldergrove border at the end of the Fraser Highway which wasn’t thought out well at all, because now what we have is a two-lane highway which is no longer provincial which now we have to look after, and it’s not adequate to meet the traffic that currently uses it. We have Auguston up in the mountain, that was supposed to be a stand-alone community — well, to this day someone who wants to go to the corner store to get a quart of milk has to hop in their car and drive to Abbotsford. Things like that — there’s a proposal right now in front of council where they’re asking for rezoning on a piece of land for industrial purposes outside current — there’s a 30-year growth boundary, and it’s beyond that. And pressures are being placed on the City to approve it. We’ve taken, for example — they’ve approved taking out of the ALR, the removal of a significant chunk of land out near Bradner. Which is so foolish. I mean, the ALR means it’s a land reserve, and even if it’s not adequately farmed today, future generations, and for that matter global situations might require that we grow food there. It’s short-sighted, and Abbotsford has adequate industrial land around the airport area. So I think council needs to be able to listen to the community, but at times they also have to be willing to say no, especially when it’s powerful, moneyed people that are doing the pushing. Another example would be — there was an attempt to create a better tree bylaw. And perhaps that was poorly done in terms of engaging the community, but there was a huge pushback from some of the residents on the mountain who saw this as infringing on their rights — “It’s my tree, I want to cut it down, what are you going to do about it?” And so the City backed off from that, and unfortunately now we have a tree bylaw that’s even wimpier than the original one. So it’s that lack of recognition of the value of our natural world; it’s evident everywhere.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
We have probably thousands of bylaws on the books, but I’m thinking the one issue that’s so in-our-face right now is the whole homelessness thing. And it’s not totally within the power of the municipal government to solve that problem, but everything we’ve done so far in Abbotsford, much of what we’ve done so far in Abbotsford, has been very badly thought out or not thought out at all. We’re currently fighting court cases over the way we’ve treated the homeless, and it’s costing us a lot of money. But this whole, this plan that was in place to build a 22-unit low-barrier housing [unit] for downtown, which was opposed, only now to have us try and rezone a piece of City-owned land, which is going to cost — well, the land we bought in the first place is valued roughly at $1.5 million, whereas the community services development would have cost us very little if anything, because they owned the land already. And this new development is closer to the downtown core by at least 200 metres than the one that was rejected.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
