Interviewed by Michael Scoular.
Since many students will be voting for the first time, what would you describe as the role of municipal politics? What can city councillors actually do?
The role of municipal politics is to look after the business of the taxpayers and citizens of the District of Mission. What councillors can do is: either initiate studies to address the issues that are brought forward for decision, which normally then lead to a staff report which provides analysis, sometimes with a recommendation, or to deal with initiatives that come from citizens or from staff. It is the responsibility of the elected officials on behalf of the citizens to come to majority decisions on all the matters of business, or anything that ends up spending taxpayers’ dollars, including things that deal with supporting non-profit agencies etc.
Who do you view as your constituents?
The citizens. Hopefully, including everyone who would be an eligible voter, but it goes beyond that; it goes, of course, to the youth who are not yet eligible to vote.
How will you receive the views of the entire population instead of just those most active around City Hall?
We have initiated a citizen engagement function. We have a manager of citizen engagement and corporate initiatives, a position that was created on the past council which I served [on]. It came about partly as a recommendation from a core service review that we initiated as a campaign promise in the last election. This position is intended to have a two-way dialogue with the community, and it’s in an early stage of roll-out, so to speak. The community hasn’t yet really plugged into it and their response level is not what we were hoping it would be, but I think it’s been a good start and it has a good potential. But the issue of citizen engagement is a huge issue, it applies pretty much around the world. There’ve been a lot of people who have done a lot of research into that.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
I’m working closely with another councillor, Tony Luck, who is now a candidate for mayor and I’m his campaign manager. We have done a lot of thinking about issues and formulating approach, vision, and policy. One of the initiatives that Tony is advocating, which I am fully behind, is we want to go beyond citizen engagement, we want to move that in to citizen empowerment. The main thing we would hope to do is to have a viable system of referendums that could be done, including online, and a referendum of course has to cover those who are not computer users, but we want to move Mission forward into the 21st century. There’s no reason why a referendum could not be open to youth not yet at the eligible age to vote. As part of that initiative, we want to approach the schools and see if there’s an interest to involve students, because we would hope that if we can involve the youth, then we can have them become more aware of the importance of engaging in civic matters, and get the younger people to be more involved in politics.
So, if you combine reaching out to a younger age group and have online access, we should have a fairly good chance of making progress in [lack of student interest]. Of course, the results of that kind of referendum could only be informational, you can’t change the laws of the province. It should be possible, and timely, to move to something that takes advantage of the information technology and involvement the younger generation has with it to try to engage them.
Why did you choose this time to not run on a slate, and what do you think that sort of organization means for municipal politics?
We have the experience of running with CRMG, and there are many advantages that a slate has. We call ourselves a team rather than a slate, and we try to function as a team. What happened, and it was well documented, the reasons for the resignations of four members. Jenny Stevens and myself we left at the end of last year, Tony Luck resigned about two weeks later. We all made public statements at that time.
[Slates are] a strong political entity. It facilitates campaigning at a level of outreach that is not possible for individual candidates.Tony and I have formed a team and have a publication which we will be distributing in the next couple of days under the title of Mission Going Forward. By pooling our resources we’ve been able to produce these publications to get our message out.
The other advantages of a team, aside from getting an agenda that everyone is committed to, is we all still remain true to our motivations and commitments, and we worked just as well together after resigning as we had before. So, it gives me great confidence that with a clear vision and with good leadership, especially leadership that brings out the strength of the team and ideas of all the members equally, we can effectively establish teamwork in the new council if we are honoured to be re-elected.
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?
Not a lot. The whole council, even those who resigned, remain true to our promises. That was the core of our agenda. The other thing to say is any elected body finds the agenda changes to face the issues that come before them.
We did have as an item the downtown revitalization initiative, and we launched a study and it led to the downtown revitalization plan, and that became a much bigger part of our activity through the course of the term of council. Three years ago when we’d made that commitment, we were committed to evaluating it and seeing where it would go, and it became a bigger focus of our attention.
I also had a personal focus of attention, as co-chair of the Mission water-sewer commission, on the whole issue of a new water source, and I played a major initiative on that, which took a lot of my attention, and produced a lot of very positive results. When I looked at the data for the water usage over the last 10 years it only took me about 10 minutes to realize that there was no imminent problem of shortage that would justify a new water source, even though that was the belief of the Abbotsford staff and they had that referendum on the plan that was to go forward with a $300 million Stave Lake water project. It was defeated by the voters primarily because of their unwillingness to go with the privatization part of the P3 model, but what I identified was that there was no need.
So, I initiated a water study in Mission. The first meeting we had with the Mission water-sewer commission, Abbotsford staff said we still need it by 2016, we’ve got to get on with the job and they wanted Mission to rejoin the partnership to offset the federal funding they lost when the P3 thing was killed. A task force initiated a study and produced a very fine report which our council adopted and put forward to the Abbotsford-Mission water-sewer commission. It took about six months for them to finally agree that we have no need … We would have been looking at borrowing of $50 to 60 million for our part of the project.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
If we are elected and then have the support to move forward with this referendum, I volunteered to be the chair of the task force that would work with others to see what’s possible and how best to do it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
