Interviewed by Megan Lambert.
Since many students will be voting for the first time, what would you describe as the role of municipal politics?
The role of civil politics is we do the unsexy things. We do roads, and sewers, and water, and fire, they’re not really sexy. The thing with civil politics is that local politicians have about 11 per cent of all tax revenue in Canada, [but] they provide over 50 per cent of services to local citizens, and that’s a real challenge for us a lot of the times, so we have a really tough time balancing the needs and the wants of a community, understanding that we have core services to do: water, roads, police, fire, that kind of thing, bylaw enforcement. I think it’s very very important for the average student, the average person, the average citizen, you know, they come home to a clean community.
And how would you describe the mayor’s role?
The role of mayor as I see it is an ambassador to the city. He is to organize council in such a way that meetings are held respectfully, the processes are followed, they’re there as an ambassador to invite people to the community: business investment, immigrants, those kind of things. His role is kind of a figurehead, a father in the community working to bring the community together. His role is to liaison with other business leaders around the community and the province and the country to bring the funding that they need for the programs that they have in the community.
Are there any popular misconceptions about the role?
Yeah, I think a lot of people think that the mayor holds a lot of power, but he’s only one vote on council, he has to sit and listen and collaborate with the rest of the members on council. I think a lot of times we see the mayor as somebody who has this almighty power, as a matter of fact there was a news article, a recent program on CBC recently where they say how little power the mayor actually has, how much the mayor is responsible for, or the perception of what he is responsible for, and how little power he really does have. We work on a weak mayor system, and the mayor, although he’s seen as this big figurehead, he’s got very limited power for what he can do for his local citizens so it’s a challenge for him, absolutely.
Who do you view as your constituents?
Everybody. That’s youth, seniors, working families, mothers, children, everybody is my constituents in Mission. I don’t identify one particular group with another, I like to think that as mayor should be looking at the interest of all his citizens.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
I’m proposing for when I become mayor to have a citizens advisory committee. I want to go into the community and pull some common citizens so we can start getting opinions. I think that for too long we’ve been seen as isolated, that we don’t listen to the people. And that’s happened, and we’ve got to change that. So that would be everybody, one or two business people, a couple of mothers, some youth, some activists, and I don’t mean that as a negative term, I just mean people who are active within the community onto this advisory committee so we can find out what’s going on.
I think sometimes we like to think we know what’s going on, but that’s outdated thinking. I want to be a very open mayor, and I think that the other thing that we could be looking at is a referendum as well. That will help engage the people, because sometimes we have some big projects [with] a lot of controversy, or there’s things that the citizens want but they got to find out how to pay for that.
The other thing too is that we’ve got to get to e-voting and e-democracy within the district. I’m proposing that by 2018, the next election, that Mission will be one of the first municipalities in British Columbia to be voting online. And we hope that will increase voter turnout. There are a lot of the cities that have done that, they’ve gone on and they’ve increased their voter turnout. Not only have they increased their voter turnout but they’ve also had people voting for the first time, people in their 40s and 50s voting for the first time. So I think that’s very important.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
I think we’re talking to as many people as we can, I am talking to a lot of younger people that have been students, and current students. I used to be the chair of the alumni association at the university, I was chair for five years, I stepped aside just over a year ago, and so I was very connected there, knew a lot of students at that time. I think all of us can do a better job of that, connecting with the students, so right now I’d have to say I’m doing not as good of a job as I could.
Why did you choose not to run on a slate this time, and what do you think this means for the organization of municipal politics?
Slates have been given a bad name in Mission.
Politics are becoming very expensive. We’ve got to get the message out, and one of the ways we can do that is by banding together like-minded individuals to get things done. One thing about a slate, you can get a lot more done a lot quicker at times, because people come in with some like-mindedness. I think for efficiency purposes and to try to hold cost down for the individuals to run on council, I think it’s a good way.
I chose not to run on a slate this time because the previous slate, the remnants of the previous slate, I did not agree with them philosophically, and ethically some of the things they’ve done, and how they’ve treated people, and the disrespect they’ve shown around the table … and so I chose not to run this time. We tried to form a team, but because the remnants of the previous CRMG had tainted it so badly by what they saw, the citizens were turned off and the people that we’ve talked to, recognizing that this would be better … didn’t want anything to do with it. CRMG said that I was a poor leader because I couldn’t pull people together to pull a slate together. It had nothing to do with my leadership, they all wanted to run but they were afraid to run as a slate because of what CRMG had done and what they’ve done in the past, and how they’ve treated people and the nonsense they put out in their little paper.
I think eventually there will be slates throughout more communities, there’s one here formed in Abbotsford. I think it’s the way city politics are going, it’s just too expensive, for example, to run for mayor. You’re running [on] $10,000, and a lot of people don’t have the money to do it. To put an effective campaign together as a councillor you’re looking at somewhere around $3-5000. Some people don’t have that, you keep a lot of people out of there, so if I’m running for mayor on my own, I spend between $5-10,000 to get me elected individually, but if I run with six other people and we’ve all put $4000 dollars in, you spread that cost out, so you can do a lot more effective campaigning, a lot more effective advertising on a slate. I think they’re here to stay. They’re going to change, they’re going to morph into something maybe a little differently, you have to look at the success of slates in Surrey, in Vancouver, and Burnaby, and Richmond, and those other communities in there that have slates, and I think it’s just a matter of time before they come out this way and actually solidify in the political process.
How did what you were doing at city council change over the past three years compared to what your initial goals were during the last campaign?
It’s very interesting when you’re a new councillor, you go in there full of vigour and you’ve got all these ideas of what you’re going to do to improve the city and everything like that, and I see some of the new councillors running we’re naïve a lot of the times, we think we’re going to be able to come in there and charge like a bull through the china shop and everything. We’re going to be fiscally responsible and we’re going to do this, and we’re going to do [that].
The biggest challenge when you get in there is it’s not all about you, it’s about the citizens and the community and what they want a lot of the time too. Sometimes citizens do like to be told what to do, and need to do; otherwise we’d have every citizen running for council, no doubt, every citizen running for mayor. They do defer to you to make some of those responsibilities. When we first ran, we ran as a slate back in 2011, we came in with some very specific things we want to do: change the way we do development, give zero [increases in] taxes, approve the budget and streamline systems within City Hall, and tidy up things a little bit there. And we did a lot of those things, but I look now, you cannot sustain a city with zero tax increases, there’s inflation, all of those kinds of things. Having looked at the type of leadership as well, I’m running for mayor myself now because I think leadership is very important … we’ve got to do [things] differently as leaders in the community, be more open, be more respectful, be more dignified, be more professional, those kinds of things, certainly more collaborative and listen to the public. I’ve learned those things over the last three years, so I have learned a lot. Some of the things we probably shouldn’t have done as fast as we did.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
I think that we’ve been looking at downtown revitalization as a big part of that. I think that we want to clean up the downtown, make it a jewel for the city. That’s one of the things I’d like to see done.
I think you’ll interview some candidates and they have all the answers to everything, I’m going to tell you right now I don’t have all of the answers to everything, it’s impossible. I think it’s very important to connect with the community to find out what they want, and it’s very clear when you sit up there in an all-candidates meeting and some of the questions that come in from the audience. My thinking is, “Gee, I’ve never even thought about that before,” they want to do that, and that’s very important.
The other initiative that I want to do is a mayor’s task force on homelessness and social issues. And that sounds really broad, but we have a lot of good people in our community with expertise from around that and I want to pull that together. Some other candidates have suggested that I want to solve this problem in the four years. I’m going to tell you right now that it will not solve the problem in four years; it’s impossible to solve the homeless problem. Mayor Gregor Robinson in Vancouver said that by 2014 he would have solved the problem, he hasn’t. There are just too many variables: for example, funding from the provincial and federal government for housing, and that’s going to be very important. So I want to put together this task force together, somewhat similar to the one they had in Abbotsford, so they are able to look at how we can work on some of these issues. I’m not saying solutions in there, but certainly work and find ways to deal with the problem and the situation.
What kind of communication will you try to have with the police department?
I think we’ve got a pretty good one at the moment, so we would just continue to build on that. We’ve got a new chief of police, so we need to speak with him and find out what our priorities are, and continue to have that dialogue with him. One of the things we failed to do as a council when we were first elected is to go around and meet with all of the department heads and the organization as well as we could have, as well as the staff, so we’re going to spend a lot more [time] to dialogue, to speak to them and to listen to them a lot more, not just with the police department — the fire department, the other departments within city hall as well.
How will you manage the wishes of the province or private companies vs. the desires of the public?
Well, that’s always a challenge because we’re a smaller community, we need some growth, we need to get development, we need to get businesses and industry in our town, so there’s always competing interests within a community. You have people that are really concerned about the environment, you have people who are worried about people with jobs, and you’re worried about most of our citizens’ commute for work. I’ve always erred on the side of listening more.
Some people [have] wanted to discount things like a new subdivision or a new development and they just said, “Nope, we’re not going to do that,” and I don’t want to do that, I want to sit down and talk a little bit more about it, involve the people, listen to what they have to say, proper public hearing, proper information meetings. I think those are really important for developers or anybody to come in [to] be able to present their idea and get info from the public, it’s how the public wants their community moving forward. I think we need to facilitate the ability of developers or interest groups to be able to work with the public on that.
What would you change about the way the city currently uses its agricultural and urban spaces?
We don’t have a lot of agricultural land, it’s very sacred in Mission. So moving land out of the ALR will be very difficult, we don’t want that. Park space, right now we’ve got a great opportunity, West Stave Lake [is] a interpretative forest, and it’s going to be a recreational forest as well. The provincial government along with the district worked at putting Sayers campsite in there, developed that with the First Nations as well. That’s great, we want to do some more parks up there. We worked very hard to get Tim Hortons’ family camp in up there. The wheels of government move slowly, but we’ve got a little lake up there on Dewdney Trunk Road called Mill Pond, and we want to be able to develop that as an entrance way into our interpretive forest as well, fully accessible to people with disabilities, so they can be able to go to that park as well.
The urban spaces are a challenge, there’s no question. I think one of the things that Mission is missing is a bigger variety of housing, I know some of the seniors are complaining they are leaving our community because we don’t have that type of housing they want. They don’t want to be warehoused in these seniors homes, they still want their independence, so I’ve been working hard to find ways of bringing in different housing in for even just the seniors, and research is showing that seniors want to have their own homes. They don’t want two-story homes, they want level-entry homes that they can go and live in, but we don’t have a lot of product on the market like that. I think we’ve kind of backed ourselves in a corner in Mission, we’ve got to be a lot more flexible, we’ve got to look at the OCP [Official Community Plan] and we’ve got to be a lot more flexible to provide the housing our seniors need. Otherwise we’re going to lose all our seniors out of Mission.
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?
Well, I’m glad you asked that question. I think that there are a lot of unrealistic promises given by the politicians. The issues will be the issues, they come and they go, they’re fluid. I’ve got to work with six other people on council to do those. I think sometimes us, as politicians, we build expectations. In the all-candidates debate the other night I said, “I do not have the answers to homelessness,” and I think it’s disingenuous if everybody here has an answer to homelessness. It’s not something the mayor can do. It’s a community issue; it’s a community solution that we have to come up with. So how do we get voters involved in that? I can have all the wonderful ideas, I can have all of the promises in the world, but unless I work with those six other people on council and in the community, none of it’s going to come to fruition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
