Interviewed by Megan Lambert.
Since many students will be voting for the first time, what would you describe as the role of municipal politics? What can a mayor actually do?
Well the first thing I would do as mayor as my role as mayor is to listen. People have this erroneous concept that you’re electing a leader. That’s not what the mayor is, or the councillors. They’re elected representatives. They’re not there to lead, they’re there to represent the people, and we’ve kind of moved away from that. And I know I’m a long shot, I know I’m the underdog in this race but you know I’m trying to bring apathy down and I’m trying to get people to realize that you don’t have to be a part of some kind of elite to run, you just have to be a guy who’s honest enough and cares. That’s my role, is to start by listening, and applying the will of the people.
Who do you view as your constituents?
Well, everybody. Everybody’s my constituents, but I really want to concentrate more on the young. I don’t know about Abbotsford, but in Mission the young have been getting a bad deal for a long time. And the reason is simple, they don’t vote. That’s it. The politicians are doing all their best, bending over for the seniors in record numbers, they’re voting. Even though they’re only 15 per cent of the population, and it shows because the average age in Mission is 39, if you can believe. The average age of council is 65. So not only are they out of touch, they’re incredibly out of touch. And they’re pointing to that per cent that don’t go out and vote. So until younger Mission-ites decide to come up with the idea, it’s not going to change anything.
Which I think personally is just a lazy excuse. Seriously, it takes 10 minutes every three years. Every four years. You cannot find 10 minutes every four years, I mean come on, I’m an incredibly busy guy, and I mean incredibly busy guy, I do a university course in biology, plus working, plus a podcast, plus TV show and movies, if I can find time to do this, just this interview like that, that should be enough time for my constituents to tune in the radio, talk to a few councillors once in a while, put an x, [or] if you don’t like that, spoil your ballot. Young people need to come out and vote and do it. Right now the boomers and the older generation are just not listening to the problems and they’re not viewing the problems in the same way the younger generation are.
For the younger generation, climate change, for example. Huge problem. We know it’s all a problem. All the younger generation know it’s a problem. The boomers? They don’t believe in it! They don’t believe in it and those who do just don’t do much about it because it just stops them from getting comfortable. They’re on their way out. So they don’t care as much. They care about being comfortable, but at the same time what you’re doing is you’re taking resources away from kids that are trying to get up there and learn, I mean I was visiting Mission high school not too long ago and I went to see their shop, and it’s atrocious! They have to steal duct tape and newspaper to do projects. There’s one car in a 3 door garage, and you’re supposed to teach 30 students around the engine of that? I mean my high school, and it’s actually not that long ago, our garage was bigger than the Canadian Tire’s! It was huge! And you know we have engine benches and everything. Everything was in there, we had a welding shop, everything. And now these kids are taught nothing, they’ve been gutted to the maximum, all the time. Why? Because they don’t vote, and because the seniors do.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
Well, I’m trying to. There’s a guy I’m getting in touch with and he’s in touch with a lot of youth and I’m trying to get an interview with him. Of course, I always want to talk to, I don’t want to say kids, I want to talk to youth and stuff like that. Essentially it’s word of mouth, right? I didn’t put out signs, no youth looks at signs on the side of the road, it goes against everything we believe in anyway. It’s visual pollution, nobody’s really [convinced] by them, and it just ends up in a landfill. So instead of that I’m doing memes on Facebook, that’s the language they speak. We speak. I say they because I’m probably just an old fart compared to a lot of them, this is the language they speak and that’s how you got to communicate with these youngsters. And I’m hoping the message can get through.
If elected, how would what you want to do as councillor be different from what council is already doing?
The first thing I want to do is put [in] a code of ethics because I’m tired of seeing councillors and mayor bickering like children. You know, 65 and it’s like being back in high school with these people, just want to stuff them in a locker sometimes. I’m an ideas kind of guy. The problem is is that I don’t have the resources or the know how to apply them. So I need to surround myself with these kind of people, and you know if I become mayor that’s a chance for me to do that.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
One of the things is I want to bring internet and wi-fi to all of Mission. Instead of paying Shaw or Rogers or anything like that, Mission itself could become the provider. And by doing that you can get a great price, and you can get internet at a great price because it’s almost like buying bulk in a way. But you can also make a bit of money off of it. You know as well as I do that the internet is a bit like a river, right? When you’re paying Shaw you’re essentially paying Shaw to build a canal from the river to your house, and that’s what you’re paying for. But the river is free. So instead of doing that, what if Mission controlled that canal. You can go to Shaw for example and say, “Look you can get all of Mission, you’ll have all the customers in Mission,” which of course they’ll start salivating, but we want it for that price, and they’ll say “God damn, we just knocked off all the competition in one town?” and they’ll say yes. And it’s been done before! Quebec City’s done it, Regina’s done it, so it’s nothing new, it’s just a question of being able to look where [there’s] a good idea and adapting it to the city.
Another thing to do is why not have the city become its own IPP, Independant Power Producer. BC Hydro right now is looking for a huge amount of electricity. Well what you could do is you could simply use some tax-incentives for people to start putting solar panels all over the place, you start putting solar panels and you collect the electricity, and then you sell it to Hydro. You power what you need in town, and then you sell it to Hydro. You make money. You haven’t taxed anybody, you haven’t raised taxes, but money’s coming in, etc.
What kind of communication will you try to have with the police department?
Well I want to have a very open relationship with all of the departments, not just the police. I know you’re dealing with the RCMP so you’re dealing with kind of another level of government in a way, it’s not like the APD in Abbotsford, but you know the more transparent the communication the better. I don’t understand why people would try to hide these things, I mean, we all live together, I don’t know why we have to do this us vs. them thing, we’re all grown-ups here. I’ve seen a lot of people, they want to get involved, but they’re afraid, they don’t know, so that just speaks about the lack of communication, it’s a failure on the political level.
How will you manage the wishes of the province or private companies vs. the desires of the public?
We all know that politicians at a certain level all work for companies and work for corporations, we all know that. It’s like the big unspoken truth and we don’t want to admit it, it’s almost like we’ve all tripped and fallen on our faces and we just get up and dust ourselves off and keep walking like nothing happened. We know it’s wrong. Like I said, the mayor and the councillors are there to represent the public, and there’s this nasty thing in politics that’s bee going on today that politicians respond to votes, and when the votes are not there they start responding to money. And where the apathy levels are at right now, let’s take Mission for example, 30 per cent turnout. And if you say that about a third of these people voted for the mayor, let’s be fair, like a half, you’re essentially saying that one ninth to one sixth of the population is deciding where the city’s going for the next three or four years. That’s not democracy.
Add to that, companies are coming in and they’re starting to say, “Hey, you know what, you do me a favour and I’ll do you one for your next campaign,” you enter into a lot of issues and you end up with politicians who are more concerned with saving their job, then they are about serving the public interest. That becomes especially more relevant as the politician gets older. Me, for example, I’m just 40 years old. Even if I became mayor and four years from now decided to quit, I’m very young and I’m still okay to go get a job. But when you’re a guy who’s 65 and you’re depending on that salary, you’re much more vulnerable if a company’s coming in and saying, “Hey, I’ll do you a favour, if you do me a favour,” and this is how corruption starts going in.
Our forefathers, at the very beginning, the American forefathers, then the Canadians, had this concept that politics should be done at a part-time level and that gave us two things. That gave us one, you [had to] go work part-time somewhere else to make a living, you’d have to mingle with people, you’re [going to] have a finger on the paws of what’s going on. And two, you were not as vulnerable to this bribery, if I can say that. And I think it had a great benefit, and we’ve moved away from that, but can we ever get back to that? I don’t know, we try, but we don’t know.
I think you have to empower the public. One of the first things I want to do that’s in my platform is propose a participatory budget. Essentially what it means is you take a very small percentage of the budget, let’s say one per cent, or even less than that, it’s a substantial amount of money, you put that aside and instead of going behind closed doors and figuring out the ins and outs and feeding that to the public and saying, “You have to accept it, that’s how we voted, tax raise or not,” you take that one per cent and you say, “Okay, let’s form a committee of citizens, regular citizens from around,” and you give them that money, and you say, “Okay you guys are in charge of that money. You tell me where you want that money to go.” You get the citizens involved into their own budget, into their tax money, so they get involved.
Now if this works very well and I don’t see why it shouldn’t, the next year you do 1.1 per cent, 1.2 per cent, you keep climbing like that so the citizen is more and more involved into making the decisions as to where the money goes. Now by doing that you’re giving the citizens all the power, but the citizen is not stupid. The more the citizen participates, the more they know what they have to do with their money in their town, and they won’t let themselves starve. The balance will happen in itself. The balance doesn’t happen when you have one guy’s interest out of hand versus the entire population. If you led the power into the population, they will balance the interest, the private interest, and province interest on their own. They will do that.
What would you change about the way the city currently uses its agricultural and urban spaces?
Unfortunately to be quite honest I’m not exactly sure how to answer that, because I’m not within City Hall, I haven’t seen the books, I don’t know. I’m not afraid to say that. Mission has this unique little identity, and unfortunately the powers that be are very much interested in only developing the place more and more and more. Now there’s nothing wrong with development if it’s done right. But the way they’re doing it they’re essentially trying to make it into Abbotsford #2. That’s a problem, because you’re just another city. You’re much better to work off of what the city has.
Mission is one of those last, unspoiled bastions in the Valley. It has unique features, but it also has unique interests. There’s a huge amount of intellectuals and artists in Mission, they’re just hidden! They don’t come out. And unfortunately they don’t seem to come out to vote either. And I’m hoping to change that eventually down the road. If not now.
But if you build on the strength of the city, you make it proud of its own identity, then it doesn’t have to become just a paved concrete shopping centre from as far as the eye can see. Which unfortunately seems to be happening in Abbotsford. I want to turn Mission more towards how unique it is, and maybe [City Hall] should be developing more touristy things, more environmental things, more science-based things. Education-based things. Not simply shopping.
The great example I use for that is a couple years ago before the current council — they brought in a Walmart. At the time I went to see the mayor, who was James Atebe, and I told James I said, “James, I don’t like your project. It’s a big box store, environmentally speaking they just wreck everything.” “You know it’s green,” he says. Nobody says you love nature like a huge concrete building with air conditioning, kind of a temple of disposable consumerism. That really doesn’t say anything green. But if you really must put a building like that here in Mission, make it something Abbotsford doesn’t have. At the time they were more concerned about people leaving Mission to shop in Abbotsford. Well why don’t you make it an Ikea store, make a Toys “R” Us store, a huge Chapters, something Abbotsford doesn’t have. Draw the people from Abbotsford, from Maple Ridge here. Because by trying to mimic them you haven’t really done anything, you’ve stemmed the flow. There’s some people that have learned to shop at the Mission Walmart, but now [Abbotsford has] a super Walmart so you have the same problem, right? And this is a problem when you always think about developing and mimicking the other city. You have to be able to develop your own identity as a little town. And Mission still has that chance to do that.
Many people do not vote because they say they never see real positive change started at a local government level. How do you address that without resorting to unrealistic promises?
That’s what I’m addressing right now, I mean like I said I’m the underdog here. I’m running against four seasoned politicians, I’m just a Joe Schmo. And this is what I want to show you people. I want to show that you don’t have to be part of the business elite to try to run the city. You don’t have to do the circuit, you know, school trustee, and then you go for councillor, you know, the career politicians. And then you become, you know, you don’t have to do that. You just have to be a person who cares. And the people that don’t vote, I could use the old cliche that if you don’t vote you can’t complain, that’s an old cliche, but how do these people expect things to change if they don’t vote. Do they expect there’s going to be some bloody revolution tomorrow here in Canada, and everybody’s going to go in anarchy for a year or so, and after that some utopia’s going to emerge? No! If you want things to change, put your mouth where your money is, and go out there and do something. Even if it’s just volunteering. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you certainly have no right to come and criticize people like me who are trying to do things. And god know I’ve been getting a lot of heck like that over Facebook and email.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
