Interviewed by Katie Stobbart
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?
The mayor has two functions. One is a ceremonial function to represent the people, council, at all sorts of functions throughout the city and events that take place. The other one is the mayor is the Chief Executive Officer of the corporation, and in that sense carries out the policies that are directed or approved by council as a whole and that happens during the intervening two weeks between council meetings. So his job is to ensure that council sticks to policy and governance, which is their purview, and staff carries out the policies of council.
Are there any popular misconceptions about the role?
There are some people who think the mayor is not the CEO of the corporation [but] the consensus throughout the province is that the mayor is the CEO and he is the highest authority in the city as an elected mayor. Some people think the CAO, which is the chief administrative officer, is the CEO, and that’s a misconception. I think our current city manager would say he’s not the CEO; he carries out the instructions of council and deals with all staff. The only member that reports to council directly through the mayor is the city manager.
Who do you view as your constituents?
Everyone. And I mean everyone — all the people who call Abbotsford home. That includes being the mayor of special interest groups. That includes the marginalized and the vulnerable. We have a responsibility to all citizens no matter where they are and who they are. We need to treat them all with respect and dignity.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
I make it a habit to get out of City Hall because if you stay there long enough you have a skewed view of the city, and I make it a practice to get out in the community, to talk to people, to go to the highways and byways and coffee shops, to hang out with university students to get their input: what do you want your city to be and to look like? Then you take that information and you start to plan your city in a way that it will become livable and walkable, so people can ride bicycles around town without fear of getting run over. We’re currently not doing that, in my view. So a lot of our young people, when they graduate from university, they leave, because other cities have planned their core better than we have, and I want to change that as mayor.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in politics?
Yes, I’ve been trying to engage — I have a number of university students that are working with me on my campaign, and they’re using their networks. To what extent, I can’t quantify totally, but they say that they’re engaging the students. I came to a planning session here maybe two weeks ago on transit and got to talk to students, so yes I’m trying to engage. But I’m even engaging … I’ve got high school students who can’t wait for the day they can vote. I’m greatly encouraged by that; I think the next generation is going to be more engaged than I’ve seen for a while, and that bodes well for our democracy, because I am concerned with low voter turnout. More voters come out for the provincial or for federal elections [than municipal elections] and it shouldn’t be that way because local government is closest to the people — you would think it would be flipped the other way, that people would really get out and vote for their candidates for local government, because their cities are at stake. I can’t emphasize that enough, and if they’re not engaged they should be. They should find out who the candidates are; what are their positions on this, that, or the other thing; and then make an informed decision about who they want their city to be run by.
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?
I’m not sure that my goals changed; I’m running on the same platform I ran three years ago, I’ve been very engaged, I’ve lived here for 60 years, I’ve been involved with different committees (police board, airport authority, economic development — I chaired that for a number of years) so I didn’t come in naive or without any background and I just got to a place where I thought to effect change that I thought needed to happen, I needed to step up one level which was to go from the committee level to council. I ran on fiscal responsibility; open, transparent government; forward thinking in terms of planning our city in a way that is going to make this more attractive than it is today. I have made progress, but we have a long way to go and so I’m just continuing on with exactly where I started; my goals haven’t changed.
I would say things within that have been tweaked because there were things I learned when I came to City Hall that I wasn’t aware of, because you don’t have the detail. When you get to the council table you get to look at everything and anything, which in some cases was a real eye-opener in some files.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
No, I can’t think that there’s one particular one. I have an overarching philosophy of trying to simplify our bylaws. [On the subject of] enforcement, I don’t like that word. I would like to change it to bylaw compliance; it doesn’t fall quite as hard on somebody’s ears. You know, “enforcement” is like, “Okay, we’re going to beat you up now.” I just came from a meeting where we were talking about this very same thing.
I want to make everything at City Hall more user-friendly and open it to the public so they don’t have to do FOIs [Freedom of Information requests] every time they want to find out what we’re doing with their money. We should be telling our citizens what we’re doing with their money; we shouldn’t make them go through a process that costs them $500 and they get a half-inch binder full of pages, half of which are redacted — to me that’s just crazy.
What ways can that information be made available to the public?
It should be readily available on our website. I’ve criticized this from the time I came: our city website is not very user-friendly. [Regarding] water, there was some information on the P3 referendum years ago that I was looking for on our website. I spent hours on our city website trying to find it, and couldn’t find it. When I was elected, the first thing I did was I went to a couple of staffers who had been there a long time, and I said, “Here’s what I’m looking for. Can you find this for me?” They tried for two hours and they couldn’t find it, but I knew it was there because the city manager had given me a hard copy. So I finally gave them the file number, or the report number, and they punched it in, and sure enough there it was. Just imagine: I am an elected official. I can’t find it, and our staff can’t find it on our website — that should not be. That’s one of the things I want to look at. I want to use infographics way more … you can say in a picture the same thing you can say in 1000 words and people get it. Some people are visual learners; I am. When I see something visually it sticks with me as opposed to when I read it, I sometimes have to read it twice and say, “Well, what did I just read?”
What kind of communication will you try to have with the police department?
As mayor I [would be] chair of the police board. I think the mayor, police chief, and the board have to have a very good relationship. They can’t be at odds with one another. Council has no interaction with the police at all other than once a year when it’s budget time, because the City funds — the budget is about $46 million now — and that is our chance to then ask the chief questions about whatever the priorities are in the budget and why he’s doing this as opposed to that, but you need to have with all of your [departments] (not just police [but] fire, engineering, parks) there’s got to be a team that’s working together and pulling in the same direction and that’s been my history building a corporation that became Canada’s largest privately owned railway construction; you don’t build a big company if you don’t know how to team-build and get everybody motivated to pull in the same direction.
How will you manage the wishes of the province or private companies vs. the desires of the public?
I take the view that the shareholders of this community are its taxpayers and citizens and we need to listen to them more than we have. When it comes to planning and changing whole neighbourhoods by doing something, and the whole neighbourhood is opposed it, I think we need to take a step back and say, “Is this area really ready for this?” I don’t want to impose things on our citizens. The OCP [official community plan] review we’re going through and probably will be finalizing by sometime in September or October next year is a good time for people to get engaged, and I encourage especially university students to get engaged, because the decisions we make next year are going to impact this city for the next 10 to 20 years and I can’t stress it enough: get involved. Tell us how you want your city to look. I don’t want high-rises all over Abbotsford — that’s just crazy. We need to develop a core so that we have people places where people young and old want to be and right now there aren’t that many places… I mean, historic downtown is to some degree one of those places but it is not our downtown, I mean it’s historic, but…
What would you change about the way the city currently uses its agricultural and urban spaces?
We have to protect our ALR, our agricultural lands. That is not a land bank for development. Now, I know that as the city grows there’s pressure put on the ALR, and if we take out land, it should be right on the edge of where the urban area is. There are some areas that are totally off base. I would never want to let the fertile farmland of Matsqui flats and Sumas flats be changed. We cannot lose that; it is the best agricultural land in all of Canada and produces three times as much revenue per acre per hectare than anywhere in Canada and we need to draw a very hard line and say this far but no further and other areas we need to look at the land and some land in the ALR is marginally farmable, and other areas were outside of the ALR and should have been included in 1972 and they weren’t but we can’t do anything about that, but … I’m a very strong supporter. I’m a rancher and live on a 40-acre farm and raise purebred Hertford cattle and so I have an appreciation for agricultural land, and this community has a $1.8 billion agricultural industry and it has taken us through the hard times, through the economic downturns, because it’s always constant. People have to eat.
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 is a problem: low voter turnout. I do have an idea of why that is and I think it’s because people have become frustrated that their voices are not being heard and so they give up and they say, “What’s the use of getting engaged — I’ve gone six times and they don’t listen, and worse yet, they won’t listen to a whole group,” and so people disengage and in the process (we have lots of examples of this) government officials have done some really stupid things. Then the public loses trust in its institutions and its leaders, and that should not be.
Politicians don’t have a stellar reputation when asked by the public how you grade them. By and large they don’t trust us, and I think that’s sad because there are a lot of people who go there for the right reasons, but the system and the pressure to conform is enormous, and I’ve been kind of a non-conformist. I’m a free thinker and I’ve come to some different conclusions than some of my colleagues over the three years. I think one of the biggest dangers in government is something I call group-think (well, it’s not my term) where everybody’s voting the same way and not everybody actually agrees, but the peer pressure comes in: “Well, gee, I might look like an idiot if I say this bothers me and I think we need to have a second look at this.” I think if we start to do that we can rebuild the trust, if we hold government to account. I’ve tried to be open and transparent in everything I’ve done; I’ve posted all my expenses online for the whole term I’ve been here; you can see exactly what I did with your tax dollars. I think as we model that, people will begin to regain some of that trust, and in the process I think you’ll see the voter turnout go up.
Are there strategies you can use to avoid or combat “group-think?”
Yes, and one of them is you have to get to the place where your employees (city staff) are not afraid to voice contrary opinions. You cannot hold a club over their head from a senior manager and say, “If you don’t toe the line here, your job is at stake.” I’ve seen people lose their jobs in my term because they spoke up. In particular in the finance department; a senior manager agreed with my stance on a particular situation and voiced that publicly in a committee meeting … I felt bad that I had said enough, that the person was confronted with either turning their back on everything they believed or agreeing with what I had said, because it was true, and she stood up and said, “Yes, councillor Braun is correct.” Two months later she was out of a job, and I felt bad about that. We can’t have that. I just actually put a blog post up on whistle-blower protection. I asked for that two years ago. The mayor has not brought that back to the agenda, so we have one but it’s so watered down it’s meaningless. The motion was to pattern it after City of Surrey — they have good whistle-blower protection. That will help employees to stand up and say, “this shouldn’t be happening” or “I don’t agree,” and to give them a voice.
Is there anything else you want to comment on?
I’ve been criticized for voting against the transit service from Chilliwack to Langley and I’ve been portrayed being [against] students having the ability to come to the university, which isn’t true. The reason I was opposed to it is that we have four jurisdictions that are being served by that bus: Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Mission students are going here, and are going to Langley. It seems to me that if we’re having a four-jurisdiction transit service we should be having four jurisdictions at the table and we only have two, and I don’t think that’s fair to the taxpayers of Abbotsford, and it has nothing to do with being against the students.
Now, I also was concerned about our existing transit system because it needs to be revamped and I’ve tried very hard in my three-year term a member of the Joint Transit Commission to bring about change with BC Transit, but we have not made the progress that I think we should have, and so I think, should we not fix our own transit system, the existing one first, before we move to a second one? I do want to get that on the record.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
