Interviewed by Valerie Franklin.
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?
Well, the city council actually governs. Basically we work with city staff to make sure that everything gets done, like the waterworks, the roads, the public services like parks and rec. Infrastructure — for me, a lot of it is actually the community itself. So people are generally good at different things, and what I specialize in mostly is building community and being a part of the community.
Can you give me an example of how you do that?
I don’t know how much of an explanation you want here, but I’m just going to go for it. When I was 15, I got kicked out of high school and it was kind of rough, so I went to the school for bad kids, but it was actually the best thing that ever happened to me. There I met some amazing teachers that knew how to deal with people in my situation, and they taught me respect above all things, and my family has a business in Mission, it’s been there for 20 years. I started working there when I was 15.
It’s a print shop, so you get all kinds of amazing people that come in there. Business leaders, business people, artists, you name it, we’ve probably had them in there. And we met this one lady when I was 15, her name was Doris Patterson, and she would come in every Saturday, for like a year she came in, and she taught me about art. She was just probably in her 70s, and I just connected with her. I ended up graduating high school and going to the Art Institute of Vancouver just because she was so inspirational, and later on when I was 16, there was another lady named Valerie Hundert, and she was a big part in creating Heritage Park in Mission and it was just weird how all these people came and talked to me like adults. She was always out creating community and stuff like that, and I was like, why do you do that? As a 16-year-old you’re all about yourself, like “I want to do this, I want these clothes,” but she was out there helping people all the time, and she’s like, “Rhett, if you ever want to make change, there’s two ways to do it, and one way is to get out there, get your voice heard, protest if you have to; and two is to be the person in charge making the laws, making the rules.”
When I was in my 20s, I started seeing in Mission, basically youth-oriented [things are] always overlooked. So I joined the Optimist Club, which is an organization that helps kids in the community, so if a kid needs hockey equipment, or a dance group needs some funding to go to a competition, so underprivileged kids, basically any kid, we do lots of different things in the community. And I loved it. At that time, we sponsored events and we’d give out money, and I started thinking, there’s got to be something more we can do, and we started the Junior Optimist Club — you might like this, because basically the whole point was to teach graphic design and journalism. I’m not a great writer, but I combo-ed up with Mission Literacy and they kind of took the writing part and I did the graphic design part, and I led the kids. If they wanted to do something, I would take them to go interview, or take them to go investigate, and so the kids, they made like six, seven magazines, and one time CBC got hold of it and the kids got to go down to the CBC studio and get interviewed by a professional journalist, so it was really amazing. One of the kids in the group will actually be coming to this school, her name’s Veronica … I don’t know if that answers your question.
Who do you view as your constituents?
I have a pretty broad constituency. Overall, I would say young families and people with children or grandchildren. I know in Mission right now there’s some big issues — I think I just have a really wide array of people who support me. I mean, I help the old age pensioners, I get involved in anything I can. I organize Mission Fest, I created and organized Mission Fest, which is one of the biggest festivals in Mission next to Rockin’ River. We block off three blocks of Main Street and basically drop about 20,000 on entertainment for kids, the whole event is completely free. Families can come down, they don’t have to worry about spending any money if they don’t want to. They can, we’d like them to shop at the stores downtown, or the vendors, but there’s no obligation. It’s fun and I love it and it’s not even work, to me, really. That’s the kind of stuff that I like to do.
Are you doing anything to address the lack of student interest in local politics?
Like I said, I volunteer a lot with the youth lounge, and the other day we were down, I was with this lady and we were down delivering flyers to people, and there was this big group of kids, and I went over to them and I was handing out the flyers and talking to them and listening to them, and then I went back over to the lady and she was like, “Why’d you do that? They can’t vote,” and I was like, “They want to be a part of it.” The kids have awesome ideas.
The problem, I think, with apathy is that people don’t talk about politics. They’re afraid of it. Like in my generation, I’m 34, and my parents, they were like, “Oh, you never talk about politics!” And I think that’s where apathy [comes from] — you don’t understand how you can actually help to vote. But education from the beginning would be key, I think, in anything, like homelessness or drug abuse. The teenage years are pretty much the years that kind of build up what you think of the world. Putting people in the right direction, whether it’s voting or becoming a city councillor, or whatever, you’ve got to put that information in their brain and get them in place and get them going. On my website, for younger adults, a lot of them have never voted, even my age. What I’ve done is I’ve created what’s called Team Rhett, and it’s basically a reminder to vote, if you want someone to phone you and say, “Okay, you’re going to need your ID, you’re going to need something with your address, this is where you’re going to vote,” and basically help them vote for the first time, because it’s scary to go out — I think that’s another reason a lot of people don’t vote, is because they’ve never done it before.
If elected, how would what you want to do as councillor be different from what council is already doing? ?
As a city councillor, there’s going to be many different aspects of politics. What I kind of specialize in is, right now, with my age, I’m really in touch with younger people. It’s my passion, families. I notice the direction that the current council is going is not really related to families, even though Mission’s average age is 38. There’s a lot of young families out there and they don’t put the focus into the important things like parks.
Most of Mission’s parks are pretty much dilapidated, falling apart, and there’s just no budget for it. They’re not seeing the importance of treating kids with respect. Safety is another big issue for me. Our emergency staff, I’ve met with them, and they’re adequate but they’re not where they would like to be. I talked to the fire chief, and he says, you know, the city’s safe, but he’s so passionate about overall safety. In Mission, there’s no firemen after 6 p.m. [at the hall]. Even if there was like two guys there at night time that could get the fire truck and then call in the volunteer firefighters … [right now] there’s always a ten-minute delay, twenty-minute delay before they can even get down there.
Our current council, they’re zero per cent tax, they’re all about taxes and nothing else. They’ve cut everything back, even the public service sector, like parks and rec and stuff like that, they got a 10 per cent clawback too, and that’s what kids need, they need these people out there teaching them how to do stuff. There’s a big all-around view from the city workers and the emergency service that Mission’s not as safe as it could be.
Do you have a specific project you want to prioritize or bylaw you want to change?
Recently we had a meth lab in Mission, and it was so big it would have blown up a whole city block. And the City, when the current council got in, they actually — their main reason of getting in last time was to get rid of this thing called Public Safety Inspection Team. And basically what those guys were doing was going around inspecting houses for marijuana grow-ops. And [council] thought it was unlawful, so they got in, they deleted everything to do with that, and in there, there was a bylaw that put all the costs incurred to the property owner of any illegal activity. So that meth lab, if it blew up, the city would have been liable because they didn’t have that bylaw in. And we had to hire hazmat people, ’round the clock, this is all coming out. I don’t know what the tally is … [but it] could buy a lot of nice parks. I don’t know why those guys would never put a new bylaw in place at least to protect the city, but that’s just one thing of the whole safety, right? Anyone can come in and have a meth lab, just put it under someone else’s name and take off. It’s kind of scary, and it’s kind of inviting for people that do that kind of thing.
What we have to do is re-brand, re-market Mission as a tourist destination. I like to call it a destination location. We already have a good base, we have the racetrack which brings in thousands of people every weekend, and we’ve got the abbey, we’ve got the hiking trails — I made a big list. There really is so much potential to do stuff.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
