Interviewed by Michael Scoular
Since many students will be voting for the first time, what would you describe as the role of municipal politics?
Municipal politics is, if people are going to vote for any level of government, it’s the one they should vote for, because it has the most dramatic impact directly on your life. Imagine what it’d be like if we had really bad roads for instance. Potholes everywhere, all the tires are falling off of your cars, that sort of thing. Policing, fire protection, parks, garbage pick-up, which doesn’t sound like a big deal until it stops being picked up. All of those small things. How we plan a city — so how do you want the U-District to look for instance. All those things are what happens in local government. By far the single most important level of government to vote for, in my opinion.
And how would you describe the mayor’s role?
The role of mayor is to be the spokesperson for the city. In addition to the executive duties that the mayor has, the big thing is to be the figurehead of the city. Technically the CEO, but you also have the city manager. You know, my job is not to manage staff. I talk with the city manager. There’s really only one person mayor and city council can hire or fire, and that would be the city manager. City manager looks after all the day-to-day details, what we do is we say, “Point the ship this way, we’re heading to Bora Bora.” It’s not up to me to tell him how much food to pack. That should be taken care of [by] whoever’s in operations. We provide the general governance model, the plan. Staff looks after all of the details.
Who do you view as your constituents?
Every living resident that lives in the city, whether they can vote or not.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
I probably have been one of the most visible mayors out in the general public in probably decades. George Ferguson used to do that many, many years ago. I guess that’s partly where I picked it up from. But to me it just makes sense that if you bump into people out in the public, you’re going to get a good flavour as to how people think the city is being run, you also run into individual problems with people and you give them the ability — my job is not necessarily to solve the problem, but to help people, guide them to get their problems solved, if that makes sense. Sometimes they just have a garbage complaint. “My garbage man throws my garbage cans around.” It’s something as simple as that. “My neighbour’s got a dog that barks non-stop.” Well we have rules against that. So sometimes they just need to know — they’re not complaints, they’re requests for help. Big difference in how you look at that. So I think being out there is one way.
Then there’s also, now with social media, I will say, respectfully, Twitter is not the best place to have an intelligent discussion because it’s really tough to do that in 140 characters. But, “please provide me a link,” that’s a great idea. And it’s to let people know what the mayor’s doing, what’s going on, what the city’s doing.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in politics?
That’s a tough one because I think a lot of students are really intimidated because they don’t know what to do. And it’s a shame. Politicians make decisions that students are going to have to pay for. Yet, the engagement of students is probably at 10 per cent. If you want to have a voice, if you want to be heard, you need to vote. I’m going to spare the poppy-duty speech, where it’s a duty because people died to give you that right. Most students don’t care, they don’t relate. It’s not until you get older that you realize you’re not immortal. I remember being young, I was never gonna die. I would say definitely there’s a lot more of it behind me than there is ahead. You look at things a little differently.
Students — you know what’s interesting is they could make such a huge impact. You’re passionate about ideas, you’re passionate about the way the world should be. Yet you fall short to actually make a difference. I think because you think your vote doesn’t matter, and also I think because you don’t know who to vote for. I think they think that for instance, with councillors, they need to come up with eight names to vote for. You don’t. It’s one to eight. So if you have that one person you like, vote for the one person. Actually, your vote’s way stronger when you only vote for one. Because every other time you vote for somebody else, you’re actually voting against the very one you want, if you add them all up. Your vote becomes eight times stronger if you only put down one name. Same thing with the school trustees, you don’t have to know them all.
Mayors are the only leaders that we actually vote for directly in Canada. We don’t vote directly for Harper, unless you happen to live in his riding. We don’t vote directly for Christy Clark unless you happen to live in her riding. The party picks their leaders. Mayors are the ones you have direct input in. And I think that there’s a tonne more that students could do to be involved. You don’t even have to vote for mayor if you don’t like either one of those choices, you don’t have to vote for that. But put your name on it. Make your spot on earth matter. I don’t know how to galvanize the youth to vote, other than if you want to be listened to, if you want to be heard, putting a mark on a ballot is pretty much the only way you’re going to have that input. I really think it comes down to intimidation, that they just are scared of making a mistake, so better to do nothing than make a mistake.
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?
Surprisingly, I got most of what I wanted done. I thought that we were spending way too much money in taxes in the wrong places; we delivered a zero per cent tax increase. We were seen as being business-unfriendly. We made a bunch of changes to that. We wanted to find solutions for the Abbotsford Centre. We have saved the taxpayers between $2.2 and 2.7 million a year. We just signed a new contract with Global Spectrum that’s saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And minor hockey actually gets to use the very building that taxpayers are paying for. So I got most of what I wanted done. Are we where I think we really need to be at? No, but the first thing is you got to get your financial house in order. Done.
You can always improve, but we’ve done things people said couldn’t be done, which is to turn things around in one term. Government moves way too slow sometimes, but we really pulled out the stops. Now I believe we need to work and focus on jobs for our economy. I have grandchildren, I don’t want them having to leave to go find work. I want my grandkids and everybody else’s kids to be able to stay here if they want to. If you choose to leave and take a new career, great. Go fulfill your dream. But to be forced to leave because the city wasn’t doing its bit, that just doesn’t sit well with me. So my next term is all about improving the economy of Abbotsford and finding decent-paying jobs so that students can actually afford to get a career here, live here, raise their own families if they choose to.
What would you actually be doing?
If you’re going to rely on the government to actually create a job for you, good luck with that. That’s not what we’re good at. What we’re good at is creating an atmosphere in which businesses can thrive. You become business-friendly. You become competitive with your taxation rates. Canada has done that now where there are a lot of major corporations in the United States. The whole Tim Horton’s, Burger King thing is actually more about Burger King moving its headquarters to Canada because we have such great taxation rates now. There are things that you can do to remove that bureaucracy, such as, when I got here, building permits were almost three months to get. Three months to be able to put a deck off the back of your house. Who thinks three months in advance to put a deck off the back of your house? So by the time you think about it, summer’s now gone. We’re now at three weeks.
The other thing that happened was businesses didn’t know where to move to in Abbotsford because for commercial zoning, for instance, we had 22 different zones. Twenty-two! So you’d literally have one type of business across the street or right beside you, but because their property was zoned differently, you couldn’t do the same thing literally right beside them. You had to go through a rezoning process. Which, it takes six months minimum. We’re working on speeding that up too. So what we did is we condensed all our zones. We went from 22 to six. That provides simplicity and clarity for businesses. It makes it easy for them to either expand, so they don’t end up going to neighbours up the street to set up shop, or they do business wanting to open up in Abbotsford. It also makes it easier for that. That’s how you create jobs. You create that stimulus and you make it easy.
Is there a difference in how you’re trying to encourage business between small business and corporate business in Abbotsford?
That’s where I think people are under a misconception that you can go cater to big huge corporate head offices for instance. They kind of find you. What you do is you put yourself on the map. Our air show puts us on the map. So I don’t think the cities necessarily can do that, although what we have done is we’ve hired an economic development director. Her sole purpose is to help businesses expand. It goes back to when I was a customer in the restaurant business. The easiest customers to get are the ones who are already your customers. It costs a lot of money to get a new customer to come through your front doors, it really does. That’s why advertising and marketing is such a science. So what Abbotsford can do is work on the current businesses we have, and then you also have to let yourself be known to the rest of the world that you’re open for business.
Like, aerospace technology for us is a natural because of the land that we have around the airport. And those are great-paying jobs. There’s not one of those jobs — even to sweep the floor pays a lot of money. And those are jobs that we can work with UFV to produce the kinds of minds that are required to go into the aerospace technology. It’s the fifth-largest type of business in Canada and they’re good jobs, high-skilled jobs. I think you focus on things like that, you figure out what are you good, what are you not good at. We’re never going to be a Whistler. That would require a ski hill, first off. So you have to work with what you have to begin with.
For tourism we’ve gone back to our roots where we used to do a lot of sports tourism, so you would have tournaments and those tournaments come in and they fill up your hotel rooms, and then when they’re here, they’re going to look for something to shop while they’re here, because that’s what people do a lot of the times, and they’re going to go and have a bite to eat in a restaurant and maybe use that to have a little, like the pub across the street there, maybe it’ll start putting in live music because it’ll find that that’s their niche, because that’s what people want to do when they go to a new place, is to have some fun and kick up their heels a little bit. It all starts to feed on itself. And you end up carving out your own little portion of the world.
Why would somebody go to Fort Langley, for instance? Other than the history of the fort itself, they have become the place to go antiquing. So you create, what can we do as a city to create a niche? Chehalis did all their murals, on Vancouver Island. You don’t want to – every city can’t do that or it’s not special, but maybe we become the place for public art or sculptures, or the place where we’re known for mountain biking because we have Sumas Mountain with all its attributes. Or, we have the GranFondo coming for road bicycling. We have it all, we’ve got long flat prairies on Sumas Lake and we’ve got mountains, we literally have it all to have great bicycle venues.
We have huge agriculture. Agriculture itself, as I said, I love all my chicken farmers, but chicken catching doesn’t pay a lot. But what does pay a lot is the maintenance of the equipment. It’s highly automated, especially in the egg industry. It’s highly automated, and a lot of computerization. So building the machines that support agriculture is where you can get your niche at. It makes sense if we’re producing 90 per cent of the province’s eggs that we should be producing the equipment to support that egg industry.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
No, I think what you do is you encourage people to do that and sometimes it just naturally starts to happen. You create an atmosphere where business can thrive. As we densify, for instance, right now transit is an issue. The reason transit is an issue is because we did the typical building of the 1970s and ‘80s where you relied on the car, and you had urban sprawl.
I remember you talking about this before the last election. I guess it’s not the kind of thing you can change in one term.
No, it takes decades to change that. I went to school in Portland, Oregon, and Portland took decades to get their transit sorted out. We are at 11 people per hectare right now. The trigger for decent transit is 12. So we’re close. That’s the bare minimum threshold to make public transit work, and start to work effectively. It really starts to hum when you have 18 or 19 per hectare. Now you’ve got it. Well, the good news for Abbotsford is we can’t spread out much more because of ALR. Abbotsford has a policy that we refuse to allow expansion of ALR for residential purposes. Industry yes. That’s jobs. Not every square inch of farmland is good farmland that’s in the ALR. Hang on a minute, let me rephrase that. Not every square inch of ALR is good farmland. That’s really what I mean. For instance, West Abbotsford industrial park, I voted to send that to the Agricultural Land Commission [ALC] to see whether they thought it was worthy of being excluded. It has rail on one side, it has an industrial park on the other, it has a freeway, so for shipping and receiving — because everything comes in a truck. The very buildings we sit in, the chairs, what we eat, everything comes in a truck. We are a natural port. Look at our — you got an airport, our proximity to Vancouver, our proximity to the United States. We are a natural hub. That’s what we used to be called, was the hub of the Fraser Valley, because we were a natural shipping depot, so to speak. Well, we’ll see what the ALC says. But that would be 4500 jobs and $11 million to the taxation base that we don’t have right now.
You can do a heck of a lot with $11 million. As we start to densify and go up, South Fraser Way for instance, I think today how it looks versus how it’ll look 20 years from now is going to be dramatically different. I think you’re going to see mid-rise condos there where you’ll have shops on the bottom floor and you’ll have, maybe on the second floor you might have professional offices, like lawyers and accountants an things like that, and then on the upper floors you’re going to have where people live, and I can see one day where there’ll be little restaurants for people to sit at, and sit out on the street on a beautiful day. I see it being a much different feel than it is currently. I see it with perhaps a trolley going up and down the middle of the street.
And the model for this is what people have been talking to you about, or things you’ve seen in other cities?
Things I’ve seen in other cities. Denver, I think it’s — might be Denver, Colorado where they’ve done something very similar to that. We’ve also got to remember that we’re only 145,000 people. We’ve got some growing to do. But the good news is that we’re going to continue to densify on our urban core and along our urban streets, and I predict it won’t be that much longer and it’ll be a far more livable, walkable city than it currently is. Take a look at Vancouver, take a look at what happened in Yaletown for instance — that used to be all factories. Vancouver, my great-great-granddaddy was [among] the first settlers there. It was all trees 150 years ago. So that’s what happened to Vancouver in 150 years. It’s not a really long time in the overall scheme of things. I see us in the next 50 years being a much more vibrant metropolitan area.
What kind of communication will you try to have with the police department?
We have a great communication now with the police department. I meet with the police chief on a regular basis. We have, I think, one of the most responsive police departments in British Columbia, if not in Canada. They’re goal task-oriented, so they actually believe they can zero in on a certain type of crime and lower it, and they’ve proved that they can. Actually, New York was the first place to do that. There’s two thoughts on crime. One is that crime is always just going to happen, there’s nothing you can do about it. No matter how many police officers you throw at it, you’re not going to affect the crime rate. New York and Abbotsford and other cities have proven that you can actually make a huge difference in crime if you focus on it. So communication is the easiest thing in the world to start. It’s also the most difficult to continue. So it’s something you constantly have to strive at to work at.
How will you manage the wishes of the province or private companies vs. the desires of the public?
Well, first off, just because you hear things coming from the public doesn’t mean that that’s what the silent majority think. That’s the tricky part in politics, is figuring out if this is what the public really thinks, or whether you just have some really vocal outspoken few that are just creating a bunch of noise. I’m not saying in this case it’d be either way, but that’s the first thing you have to try and sort out: is this a real concern, or is this just a special interest group that’s just really good at making a lot of noise? And then I think you, as I have done, is you have to take and balance what the current needs are, and I will vote for jobs almost every time. You need a tax base in order to pay for the very services that people think we need to pay. In that case, we have found a solution to that, and sometimes you have to wait for the right solution, so I think rather than jumping at the quick fix because you have to. Man, every time I’ve made a lousy decision in my life it’s when I’ve felt as if I was being pressured and had no time to think about it, time and time again.
So I’ve learned it’s better to have thoughtful deliberation and come up with an idea where you have consensus that works for everyone. In this case, take the social housing, we waited six months. Six months to get a business association onside. Six months to avoid a fight. Wouldn’t you rather have a community embrace something because they felt involved in the process and consulted, versus starting something out for the big fight? I think getting a community to embrace something is way better method of going about it. Doesn’t always work. For instance, sometimes when we go through these public hearings we have to consider the needs of an entire city versus the needs of an immediate neighbourhood. And sometimes the immediate neighbourhood loses out. Sometimes they don’t. But sometimes they do, sometimes the immediate neighbourhood is the one that makes the sacrifice.
Would you say that’s what happening with the most recent decision?
Yes and no. I think that in this particular case, it’s, this is where nobody wants one of these things anywhere. We all say we want it. Same thing with density, right? I find it interesting that where we have a bunch of towers currently, there was a proposal to put a bunch of towers beside it, and everybody was upset with it because the green field that was there, they sort of took over as their own personal park. Well, that’s private property. And I find it interesting that we come along and we build our house and then we don’t want anybody else to build around us because it’s going to change our lifestyle. Well, you changed somebody else’s lifestyle before you bought your place. Sometimes it’s tough to balance that. Other times it really will significantly change a neighbourhood and it doesn’t need to.
For instance, one of the neighbourhoods in Abbotsford had larger lots and somebody wanted to put in a bunch of tiny micro-lots and in this case we felt that his was such a dramatic change to the neighbourhood that we needed to respect the wishes of the neighbourhood in that case. It was not a big enough benefit to the city overall versus its neighbourhoods. It’s challenging. You get to really annoy somebody, regardless of how you pick, somebody’s going to be mad at you, and that’s why you need to develop some pretty thick skin to become a politician.
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?
I’ve never promised anything in my life, since I’m not really a typical politician; I ran because I got mad because we weren’t spending our tax dollars appropriately in my opinion. I have a tendency to say it like it is, or at least what I think, and that’s not usual for people. So the apathy part, you know, Einstein says — I believe it was Einstein was quoted in saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome every time. If you’re not going to vote, you’re part of the problem. Quite frankly. If you’re not going to vote, does it give you a right to complain? Some people think not. If you’re not going to vote, how can you expect anything to change? Only 40 per cent of the population votes.
If the students got out and voted en masse, take a look at the curve of how many students there are. Those that are retired will drag a limb to go vote. There’s a reason they’re listened to moreso than students, and I don’t think it’s fair. But students could have a dramatic impact on the outcome of an election; I think it’s a shame that we can’t take a few minutes out of our day to read up on issues that are important to us. I think you could have a stronger voice than you do. Voter apathy is the problem. I’ve always voted, so I’ve never really understood that. It was kind of, I don’t know if I would say beaten into me, but it was definitely impressed upon me that democracy is a privilege and it’s not too much to ask to be part of that process once every four years or three years or however often you end up with a vote. I think students themselves have to get involved and you have to talk to your own age group; you have all this social media now. I think with social media there’s a possibility for change like I’ve never seen before. I think we need to look at ways to vote electronically with an iPhone. The problem with that is we really don’t want some 16-year-old with 50,000 different IDs being able to vote. So we have to figure out a way to use technology … you know the problem is, you kind of need to have a piece of appear in case things go wrong. You would hate for somebody to be able to mess with the machines to win an election fraudulently.
Again, I go back to I think that students need to know they don’t need to necessarily vote for every single person; vote for the ones you passionately agree with. You can vote from one to eight or one to seven candidates on the school board. You know, you just came out of an educational system; I would think you would want to know who your school trustees are and have a say as to what, give them a job review as to how good of a job they did for you. You can leave some points blank, but at least you made your mark and had your say.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
