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 municipal politics? What can city councillors actually do?
I think the role of city council is to take what the constituents want and implement it at City Hall. So we come to our constituents, ask them, “What do you guys want, what do we want to work towards?” And then take it to city hall and try to implement it through our staff, whatever way that is. So, depending on what they’re asking for, we may have to go to the parks and rec or we may have to go to the engineering department, whatever it is. So take what they have, simply implement it down at City Hall, and hopefully make the city here happy.
Who do you view as your constituents?
You know, it’s funny because some people say the only people that are constituents are the ones who vote. I actually say that people that live in our community are our constituents. Just because somebody may not vote, doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have their voice heard. But I think it’s every person’s responsibility to vote, because their voice is heard just that much louder, because some people will complain afterwards and unfortunately they weren’t part of the solution.
How will you receive or gather the views and desires of the entire constituency instead of just those most active around City Hall?
I think we actually have to go into the community. So, because I’m here, I’m going to direct it to this venue: I think we need to visit this venue and say, “What do the students want.” When we do development here, we say, “What do the students want to see,” not “What does a guy in a suit at city hall think should be put here.” I think we start at the grassroots, come to the students, and ask — we want your opinion, your opinion is valid, and we need to take that into consideration when we plan
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
I personally am not right now, but what I have done in the past is work with Junior Achievement, and part of what we do is we teach a little bit about politics. I started the very first youth centre [Abbotsford Youth Centre] which was run by the city of Abbotsford many, many years ago. I took on that position, they had no facilities for youth to have a hangout place, so I started the first youth centre. So my experience has been to actually come to the youth and just to give you an example when we built the youth centre we said, “What do you guys want?” “We want a pool table, we want a DJ, we want this and that” and we implemented it. There were some things we couldn’t give them like free food and drinks, but other than that we implemented pretty much everything that we could. The youth commission has now taken all that stuff over and done more with that.
If elected, how would what you want to do as councillor be different from what council is already doing?
I don’t think that what they’re doing is in touch with, and again I’m here, so when we take it for the students here, I don’t think they’re really in touch with what is going on here, I don’t think they really know what students want, because I don’t think they’re asking them. So I’ve been involved with youth all my life. So I’m not saying I’m the end-all be-all, but I can that say I actually enjoy sitting down, having a coffee, doing whatever and saying “What’s going on?” I worked with youth groups throughout this city and throughout cities like Vancouver and so on, so I actually embrace the fact that if anybody from here said “Hey we want to invite you down because we have these ideas, and we want to see if there’s some way that we can work together,” absolutely, I would embrace that wholly. So my biggest thing is saying all of that is really to engage and see what we can do. I don’t know if we can get a whole lot of people to embrace that, because I know students are always busy and they have all these different activities going on, but I think that if we do our best to engage and at every opportunity when we get a chance to be invited down that we actually take that opportunity to do it. That’s going to go a long way in the long run.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
Transit, that’s my big thing, and I think it would actually be a benefit to the students here as well. We actually have good transit, but we don’t have good enough transit. People don’t use transit because it takes them two hours to go where they can drive in let’s say 20 minutes or half an hour. It’s absolutely ridiculous. So I think we need to again engage our students and say, “Where do you need to go from,” obviously we know where you need to go to, but where is that place you need to come from, and how can we establish transit around that area. How can we make it better? Because I believe that a lot more people will take it if we actually give them the opportunity and they don’t have to wait an hour or two to go a 20-minute car ride.
Isn’t transit mostly a provincial matter?
It is a provincial matter as well, but we as council, a municipality, we have a voice, and our voice needs to be heard. So we can look to the province and we can look to other cities to see what are they doing right. I’m really familiar with UBC and SFU, the UBC B-line is used like crazy, and if we can engage the people to actually take the bus. An issue like they have in Vancouver where it’s so busy that they have to put up queue lines and so on. I think that actually shows that it’s successful. So we need to lobby provincial government, and even federal for funds because this is an environmental issue as well. Transit gets people out of cars. I can’t say transit is better than cars because it pollutes more, but if my dream were to be had, we would have electric buses that students from here could get to school within half an hour or less. We need to incorporate better planning for transit stations, bus shelters, pull-out areas at the beginning of development and not as an afterthought. We need to have that infrastructure, even if it’s not fully used at this point, we still need to have it because eventually people are going to buy into it, but we need to make it easier for people to buy into it, that’s a challenge, it always is.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
