Interviewed by Michael Scoular.
Since many students will be voting or taking an interest in municipal politics for the first time, what would you describe as the role of local politics? What can city councillors actually do?
The role of municipal politics really, I like to describe it in this way: from the time you get up, walk out the door and come home, we’re taking care of a lot of your needs, like the water in your toilet and sink, and the lights that go on, the pavement outside, the garbage pick-up, all those things you take for granted each day. That’s what we’re mandated to do, taking care of that part, but the mandate has certainly expanded over the years with senior levels of government saying, “We can’t afford this, we can’t afford that, we’d like you to share,” and sometimes they say, “No, you take care it,” and soon we’re doing things we weren’t ever intended to do. But our role is to make the community you live in as liveable as possible.
Who do you view as your constituents?
That’s a good question — we were asked that at the all-candidates forum. I believe I support the greater good of all the city. At the same time, I know that when it comes down to contentious issues or where there is a sharp divide in opinion, I represent those who share my values because, after all, I believe they’re the ones who elected me in the first place because they like the values I stand for. I always use the slot machines as a good example: gambling. I know some people say because I’m a Christian I was against gambling on moral grounds, and it’s never been a moral question for me. I mean, we all gamble, I gamble with my investments — that’s gambling! I’ll look at social and economic arguments, because people who are use slots are the people who can least afford it, so it’s a socio-economic impact on a certain segment of our society. I know there’s a group of people there who want me to say no, because they believe it’s on moral grounds. And they’re the ones who elected me to a great extent, and there’s the ones who feel like I do. So I believe I’m supporting them, even though I would have no trouble walking into a casino and trying slots a few times — that wouldn’t bother me because I can control myself. So it’s not like, “Oh, this is some disgusting thing and we got to protect everyone, the kids, from evil.” That’s not at all where I’m coming from.
At the same time, who’s my constituency? Even though personally I could’ve voted yes for the slots because it means another $1 million a year for the city, we get 10 per cent, roughly a million, that’s one per cent on a tax increase. It’s hard to say no to that. If it was just that, I’d say yes, probably. But because of all the other factors, I say no.
How will you receive or gather the views and desires of the entire constituency instead of just those most active around City Hall?
A lot of it comes to us without asking for it. It’s voluntarily submitted to us through emails or public hearings. Public hearings are the best way to listen to people, especially on the low-barrier housing. There’s a packed house, people had something to say on both sides, that to me is valuable. But when the audience is empty, there’s a public hearing and it’s two or three people, they’re opposed, and they’re vehemently opposed. And I think “Are they representative, likely not.” And then they say, “Why aren’t you listening to the people?” I just bite my tongue. Because I know, housing’s a good example, I know there’s a whole neighbourhood up there who are all opposed to it, the one that was just this last Monday passed. And I feel for them, they’ve got needles and stuff in their neighbourhood, these guys are stealing stuff, pilfering, but their decisions, their feelings, are based on, to a great extent, on ignorance. And we have failed them in not educating them enough, but I think regardless of how much we educated them, they’d still be opposed, and I don’t think until that house actually goes up and there are real men in there, and real lives changed, where they’ll get to the point and say, “It’s not that bad — actually this is a good thing.” Because that’s what’s happening everywhere else. These projects work. Low-barrier housing works. The literature is clear. And so all I can do is just sort of harden my senses a bit to all their criticism. I know elections come up, but you don’t make decisions based on an election coming up. I would be surprised if many of them voted for me, although the whole council supported it. I’m thinking the whole community there, not just those people. Of course, the previous one in the spring. The business community, I didn’t agree with that, the C7 zoning. I feel their fears were overstated.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
Other than becoming very social media active — tweeting and Facebook and that, which I’ve done since the last election. If I get invitations here to come, I like to do that. I’m not as pro-active in that respect as I perhaps should be. I really encourage the young people in the Youth Commission, they do the shadowing and I try to encourage them to do their part, and I offer as much mentoring as I possibly can. And there are young people running — a 19-year-old, Kobes. But I told some people who said, “You can’t have a 19-year-old running the city,” I said he’s one of nine people, potentially. He can contribute. And I think one young voice, we need it. And I think we sell ourselves short, we cheat ourselves by excluding people like that simply because he isn’t paying property taxes or he hasn’t had the life experiences I’ve had. I’d be prepared to have younger blood on the council for sure. And the only reason we don’t is those who are post-that age and are already married, young families, they can’t afford to. You can’t survive on a councillor’s remuneration, so they don’t until they’ve retired or independently wealthy or self-employed. And that’s a sad thing.
How did what you were doing on city council change over the three years compared to what your initial goals were during the last campaign?
Senior government has these throne speeches and then they set the agenda for their next term and then — we don’t do the same thing. Although I will say our present city manager, George Murray, shared with us since he was hired in the last year or so, that where he’s heading is he would like to set out four-year budgets, four-year vision, four-year goals. So that when councillors are elected, we can actually say, “This is what we want to do in the next four years.” What we do now is we budget year by year by year. We set a five-year financial plan, but those are just because the government requires it, and every year we change it. We tweak, and every year we continue to publish a five-year financial plan, because it’s legislatively required. So it’s really meaningless because things can happen next year that just make it meaningless.
Things that we set out to do in the previous council — think of the social housing. I was elected in ’05 with George Ferguson and we established the Abbotsford Social Development Advisory Committee, I was on the initial one, specifically with the purpose of addressing these social needs, specifically homelessness etc. Here we are in 2014 and we’re yet to build a facility for homeless men. So this is my third term, going into a fourth hopefully, we’ll finally see it. There’s a good example of agendas that continue to carry forward, carry forward, get deferred etc. It’s difficult.
And what causes that, is it the nature of the work?
And of municipal government in general. Because we budget year-by-year. It’s an annual thing. And then every year, the public, it’s the property tax: “What are you going to do for us in terms of keeping it low?” And that seems to be the only focus, keeping our property taxes as low as possible, and that colours everything else we do, really. And that’s a sad commentary, I think on society in general. I was calculating last night, I know we spend $80/capita in Abbotsford on parks, recreation, and culture. And that’s $11 million every year, give or take. So I was thinking, if we committed to paying $40/capita every year for X number of years, that’d be $5 million, we could put a huge dent in the social housing, affordable housing, the homeless etc. I would be an advocate for what like Bellingham has done. They voted in their election a few years ago, they agreed that they would pay $80/household for five years and that accumulates to a huge amount of money, and they’re building social housing all over the city right now to take care of the homeless. Because everyone’s committed to paying $80 extra per year, well if we’d even pay $40 extra per year, so affordable. But I know it would be very unpalatable, people would rebel. But you know it’s not an idea I would be unafraid to advocate for in my next term to pick the right time and say, “Let’s see if this will fly.” But I know it would take until the next election, four years hence, because to hold a referendum in mid-term is very expensive. It would be hard to justify having a referendum mid-term on something like that.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
I’m thinking of this building here [Abbotsford Centre], it is just beginning with new management and a new contract with Global Spectrum. We’ve had a good year, we’ve had about 10,000 more visitors this year than we had last year, five sellouts I think, named the second-best building that size in Western Canada in terms of attendance, so that I think augers well for the future for that. And hopefully next year we’ll have a tenant, I’m thinking Western Hockey League — we won’t go professional hockey, just too expensive. WHL, these are young guys who don’t get paid salaries, overhead would be a lot less.
We started with the new city manager, he’s done a core-services review — the previous city manager, we asked him to cut the budget, we were down to four or five per cent, he said, “Okay, I can do it, but where do you want me to cut, because we’re going to cut right to the bone, cutting programs etc.” The new city manager has got it down to zero and he hasn’t cut anything. He’s an accountant, he knows where the efficiencies are, he’s re-juggled, re-tooled, he’s done things that the other one simply was unable to because of skillsets, two different skillsets. The other one had a degree in social work, in sociology, this one’s an accountant. He sees numbers and structures and he’s able to see efficiencies. And so what we’re hoping to do now in the next few years and I’m hoping that we can restore the funds in the DCC fund that we withdrew to build those two interchanges [McCallum and Clearbrook]. Once we get that restored, and that should be a couple years at the most, then we can begin to think of expending significant money again on whatever those projects may be, it may be more infrastructure, roads, transit.
And I know that’s a topic that students would be keenly interested in seeing addressed. We just had on Monday, stage one of the OCP review is finished and they gave us the read, the big takeaways. They did all the research, now they presented the research: “Abbotsford is a complete city with undeveloped neighbourhoods.” And something that really caught my interest: “At least 50 per cent of Abbotsford’s population lives within a five to 10 minute walk of a bus stop.” That’s very significant, but he says the neighbourhoods are ill-developed or not developed in a way that is conducive to using buses. So that’s where we got to target and work on: the neighbourhoods. And that to me is big, and as you know the UFV master plan has been adopted. I’m impatient for it to happen, to see the development of spaces where people like to congregate and hang out. Like you see in other cities, a liveable, walkable city where you live there, you shop there, go out there for coffee with friends and socialize. That’s what I want to see for this district, for all the hubs in Abbotsford with a transit system that will link them all.
Going back to what you were saying about the Abbotsford Centre, there was talk in the past of making the arena open to the public — is that still going to happen?
The new deal we’ve inked with Global, there’s a clear understanding that this is a community facility and we will make it as accessible as possible, and now without a major tenant, a hockey tenant, obviously it’s going to be easier. But there’s also a clear understanding that if and when we get a tenant, a hockey tenant, they’re going to have to share it with the community, not like the AHL team who basically owned the sheet and no one else could get on it. It was all protected in contracts etc.
And would something like public ice time be part of that?
I’m on the parks and recreation culture commission as well, and it’s a good question to raise, because I’m guessing the staff is going to tell us it’s feasible, but it’d be very expensive, because of staffing and they may say that we’d rather have public skate over at ARC or somewhere else than here because of that. I’m just guessing. I don’t have an answer — right now we have nine minor hockey leagues using it and men’s leagues, we have six or seven teams using it. So there is public use of it now.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
