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?
They can create an environment which encourages the development of resources and services for the students. A lot of students, they don’t have much impact on … life and learning. The municipal hall doesn’t provide funding for the university. But they can take in and encourage and create an environment where the university can accomplish more. In terms of the students, they can create an environment which enriches the students’ lives. The environment in which students can find accommodation, housing; an environment in which students can find entertainment.
I talked to some students and again I compare my experience at UBC to students’ experience here, and as far as I know, you don’t have a Pit [Pub]. You don’t even have a place to gather in the city … so what do we do? We say, you’ve gotta go to Langley or Chilliwack or Surrey. But you can’t take and go in a big carload because they only allow two people who aren’t your family members, so what you have to do is get the party bus. Well, that’s not a way to create a student body. Now, am I encouraging students to go drinking? No. But I think the opportunity should be there. Because that’s what life is. I shouldn’t be taking and imposing my desires and my values on you, I should be giving you the opportunity to take and experience life, you know? And experience nights at the Pit. Where do you dance? You can go buy coffee, but …
I think the other thing we can do as a city is to take and create opportunities for students for employment. We need to create opportunities for the students while they’re going to school, as well as when they graduate, and opportunities for more co-op programs. While we don’t take and fund the co-op programs, then we can provide the environment, which brings the businesses here which are interested in hiring students. I don’t believe that we should be making people who live, work, and play here fund these new businesses, but we can create an environment that encourages these people, these businesses to move to Abbotsford, because this is a desirable place to live.
When I moved here 20 years ago from North Vancouver, my wife and I and three kids … we opened a bed and breakfast. And that was one of the businesses that we do. We figured out who lived here, who grew up here, and who moved here. And the people who grew up here who had the attitude, they’d ask us, “Why would anybody come to your bed and breakfast? Who would want to come to Abbotsford? … There’s nothing to do here, there’s nothing here.” So then we’d say, you know what, Abbotsford’s incredible. We came from North Vancouver. If you want to get out of the city, it’s two hours before you can do anything. Here, you can hop in your vehicle and you can drive to someplace within half an hour and you can be out in the natural environment. And you’ve got hiking and fishing and mountain biking and cycling and you’ve got skiing very close, you’ve got golfing that’s just down the street, and because of the way Abbotsford’s situated, it may be big and square, but because of the agricultural land reserve and Sumas Mountain, we’ve got a very small city core.
And so we have the opportunity to take and develop a premier urban centre, high-density with all the amenities of a small city. And then we can maintain the green belt all the way around. What is a student looking for, a younger generation, a Millennial, looking for? They’re not looking for a 24-hour day job in some hole in the wall. They’re looking for a quality of life, right? So if we focus on improving the quality of life and the attributes of a good city, then we provide an increase for the opportunities for the students. My son came to UFV and he took his first year, his first semester … but there were absolutely no opportunities for him. He tried working here and he couldn’t find any opportunities, any jobs, because there’s no social life provided for this city, for your generation, bored teenagers — and he found that the culture was just so degrading. So he ended up leaving.
Who do you view as your constituents?
The people who live, work, and play here. Well, number one, the people who live here – we need to take and enhance the quality of life for people who live here. That means from the homeless to the students to the people who own houses or high rises.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
You reach out to the community groups. You take and you follow the philosophy of double A, Alcoholics Anonymous. They developed a program and they put it out into the community. They don’t have — when you join an alcoholics group, you don’t sign up with alcoholics international incorporated and follow their laws. You take and you ascribe to that, and they’ve got the framework, and then you take and go within the framework, and that’s a framework that works. So we have to take and get and reverse the trend that — it’s a black hole in City Hall, everything gets sucked into City Hall. I run a bed and breakfast, right? And I have an incredible worldview because I am privileged to host people from all over the world, and I talk to people, and that’s here I’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, what engages people, what doesn’t engage people, and it’s not going to be — it’s not a quick process, because we’re used to it … so how do we do that? My opinion is that instead of saying, “We’re City Hall and you’re the residents, and the only time you get to take and talk to us is at council,” or, you know, is that we are City Hall, we are here to serve you. So we take and we say, “Okay, you know what, this is what the plan is, this is what we’re doing, but this — and when you speak to us, we take and sit up and listen.” We consider your views. We consider it. We don’t consider it within our context, we consider it within the context of the residents.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
Talking to you.
Many students are apathetic about voting. Do you have any plans for how you might alleviate that?
Well, first I would encourage everyone to come out and vote, because if you don’t vote then you can’t complain. Now, that’s an old classic thing. I’m available to talk to any student, any student group, just give me the time to take and talk to them, and I will talk to them about the experiences I have. But you know, students are raised in an environment where we’re trained to take and just follow the procedures. They’ve done some studies and they’ve discovered that when you’re in one environment, then you’re trained to not take and create in new ways.
Sometimes I think that universities are even more that way than they used to be because of the political correctness. But how would I get students more engaged? The only way you can make a person engaged is if you take and value the input that the students have, or that anybody has. You have to create an environment in which people’s opinions and interests and desires are valued. Now, you guys sit around, and we talked about this earlier, and I’m not trying to encourage anybody to drink or go out and get drunk or anything like that, but it’s a very good example — so, you guys sit around and you talk about the fact that there’s no opportunities for you to take and have a social life in Abbotsford.
I think that part of the problem is that the society doesn’t place value on who you are and give you the opportunity to take and engage and empower the students to take and realize what they can take and accomplish … they have to be able to see that there’s some value and some actual response to what’s happening, right? And so, can I do that? Well, my whole objective is to take and make Abbotsford work for us, and that includes the students.
If elected, how would what you want to do as councillor be different from what council is doing now?
Well, I would treat everyone with respect, including the homeless. I think the way we’ve been treating the homeless is a travesty. I don’t think it’s effective, and I think that there’s very few that don’t agree that the homeless people are the most marginalized and needy people around, and we have lots of programs to take and fly down to Mexico or the Haiti or Honduras and build houses or look after the poor there, but what we do here is we take and we discriminate against and we take and ridicule them.
We need to be taking care for the people who are on the street. How are we going to do that? I don’t know … one idea that I’ve had is that we’ve got dog parks, we’ve got horse parks, we’ve got walking parks, we’ve got bike parks, we need a homeless park.
It needs to be in an area where the homeless find it desirable. One of the problems with Dignity Village is that it was way out in the middle of, on the other side of nowhere, and I don’t know how far that is, it’s probably a couple of kilometre walk to get to the meals at the Salvation Army. It’s Valley Road, out by the recycling houses. No, I don’t support that, because that’s building houses, little cabins. I think that we should be — that there is a potential, and this is me speaking from my perspective — you give somebody four walls and a roof over their head, who says they’re not going to take it and turn around and burn it? Don’t give them the independence. It may be it works for some people but what I’m talking about is you create a park, and you say, you know what — and then you contract a maintenance organization to maintain it.
So what you do is you then allow — you put in the basic amenity, a washroom, water — no showers, maybe a shower, maybe a — but you don’t want people to move in there and live there forever, but you want to take and enable them to take and go to the bathroom without having to find the nearest bush. And then you allow them to pitch their tents. You don’t build tent sites, you don’t build parking stalls, and you don’t have numbers — because these guys, why bother investing in that? And then you hire a contractor to maintain it. All they’re responsible to do is collect the garbage and — establish a relationship with these people. Because many of these people are disenfranchised and they have a very severe — this is my speaking, right? From what I’ve read. But I don’t know that for sure. But they have a trust issue. Nobody cares for them. But there are care communities in our community, in our city, who care for these [individuals].
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
The municipal responsibility is to stop treating the homeless with disrespect. So we start there, and then we take, and the responsibility is then, what we can do as a municipality is to support these organizations to come up with ideas. And then fast-track and streamline the approval process. Whether or not the ACS proposal was appropriate, the ACS project was appropriate, is secondary to the fact that the process was flawed. And that’s one of the problems with our City Hall, is it – at risk of offending somebody, they delay the decision. And they support moving forward. At the beginning of the whole process, which started I believe in 2006 or 2008, with an MOU [memorandum of understanding] signed with ACS, they should have taken and said, “We won’t sign this MOU until you have the support of the community.
Once you have the support of the community, we will take and sign the MOU.” Or maybe you sign the MOU and take and say, “The first step in this is you have to find the support.” You don’t go through two years, three years, four years of planning and council six months earlier than before the rejection, they actually voted almost unanimously in support of that proposal. And they, actually, prior to that, they dedicated a piece of city property, they said, “We give you this piece of city property,” right? So why would you give a piece of property if you’re not going to support the initiative? So you’ve gotta say, you know what, we don’t need development, and this is overall. Abbotsford doesn’t need development. They need good development. They don’t need bad development. And when a bad development comes along, we shouldn’t rely on our citizens to say it’s a bad development. We shouldn’t rely on the people who live, work, and play here. We should be – we should take and say, “You know, that’s a bad development. I can’t see how that supports the people who live, work, and play here. So no, I’m not going to proceed.” And then the developer, he doesn’t invest in that stinkload of money. City doesn’t invest a stinkload of money watching this development go through, and the citizens can sleep at night knowing that development has been turned down before it even happened. But in order to do that, you have to have a council that’s willing to say no, and this council has a very difficult time saying no.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
