Tag: Politics

2022 in review

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Having a bit of time over the Christmas break to think back about the year that was 2022, I am mostly thinking about a year of strategizing, planning, and bringing teams together like I have never experienced before. It is perhaps ironic then (though being the Alanis generation, I may not really understand irony) that my life path in 2022 was nothing I would have predicted one year ago today. This was not the path I expected, but it was a path I navigated as events occurred. So excuse me if my “Year in Review” post is maybe more self-reflective than community-reflective than is my usual.

December last year was the tail end of a challenging time. The City had weathered the worst of the Pandemic admirably, but was still seeing significant challenges around overlapping regional crises related to homelessness, spiraling housing costs and inflationary pressures, the poisoned drug supply and a regional emergency response system that was just not delivering for those suffering from health crises. There was a lot of bad news locally and planet-wide. People could not be blamed for being in a bit of a funk.

At the same time, there was a lot of talk among folks around the New West council table about who would run again. This became pressing in December, as the new campaign finance rules limit the amount of money candidates can contribute per year for their own campaigns. If you were going to run in 2022, it was a good idea to do a little fundraising in 2021, or at least put your personal maximum donation in the bank before the year end. I was very uncertain about running again for Council, and as I was leaning against it I did zero fundraising in 2021. But I hedged my bets by at least opening the bank account and putting in my personal donation.

It may seem strange for the current Mayor to suggest I was uncertain if I would run for Council again just 12 months ago, but Mayor and Council are two very different jobs and we had a solid Mayor. Council would mean another 4 years of continuing to hold my professional life slightly on the side burner: I was working half time, but my heart was not in it to build my geoscience career like it had been in the past, and the half-time work meant I wasn’t really doing the professional development that my work required if I really wanted to excel. I really enjoyed the work of City Council and the team I was working with, but I had two half time jobs, both needing fuller commitment. Something had to give.

There were also some great candidates who reached out about their interest in running for Council (some who are now elected, some who are not) and when I got into the Councillor job I made a personal commitment to not stay around too long, especially not so long that I block the path for great new candidates who can bring the kind of energy and ideas that motivated me 8 years ago. So, December 2022, I was considering not just whether I wanted another 4 years of Council, but whether I was needed.

Then on the first day of 2022, Mayor Cote surprised me (and many others, I suspect) by announcing he would not be running for re-election. That put the scramble to everything, and resulted in my 2022 being divided into four not perfectly equal quarters. All with the common theme of teambuilding.

The first was mostly discussions with friends, supporters, and political allies to determine if I was the right candidate for Mayor. If I was electable, and if there was a broad enough support base out there to get elected. This also included talking to some other potential Mayoral candidates to determine if I should throw support behind them, if they even wanted the job. There were SWOT analyses, hard personal questions asked, and even values challenged. There was also some soul-seeking and conversations about the type of campaign and vision I wanted to present – positive, optimistic and pragmatic. Is that what people would vote for in 2022?

The second quarter began when I was convinced there was a viable path, but I needed a team and a broader support group to run a winning campaign. Running as an independent (as some friends recommended) was an idea I dismissed through these early stages. I think a Mayor needs a team, a supportive Council who can help get things done. With the wide variety of topics we address on Council, a leader needs a strong team of people with diverse experiences to guide them and support them. I already mentioned there were several great new candidates interested in running for Council; I wanted to work with this team. The work of putting a party together was bigger than me, there were many hands that did much more work than I, but helping in that process informed me further on whether I was ready to do the Mayor job.

It was also about putting together and gaining the support of the volunteer team for the project that is a “campaign”. Many community leaders don’t want to run for election themselves, but want to help like-minded folks get elected. Some provide financial support, some volunteer support, some real party structure organizational support, and many a combination of all three. Just as a Council is a team, a campaign is a team. With a good team, you can worry about being a candidate, and know the logistics are taken care of. Without knowing I had this team behind me, I would not have run, because I would not have been successful.

The third quarter was the campaign itself. Parts of it began as far back as January with that self-reflection, but the really intense campaign period began in the last half of the summer. Doorknocking every night, working with the team to develop platform and communications, fundraising and events. It is non-stop, and it never feels like you are doing enough. And though I had been involved in many campaigns before, supporting others and in running for Council two times: the Mayor campaign was something different.

There were ups and downs during the campaign, a few all-candidate events went great, some not so great. Sometimes I read the media and felt good, sometimes I was frustrated by it (Facebook was a complete shit-show, but that’s another blog altogether). In contrast, the doorknocking and the booth-style direct engagement were almost universally a positive. We had a great team of candidates it was a pleasure to share doorknocking time with, and people of New Westminster were their usual: engaged, interested, friendly, thoughtful, and inspiring. As the campaign went on, it was the doors and the booth (or more, the talking to people at both) that gave me energy every day to do the work, because the campaign overall was exhausting. We also had phenomenal doorknocking weather, and an incredible group of volunteers that brought a little joy every day to what is often an arduous journey. And that attack ad – that is some great scrapbook material!

This makes the fourth quarter the post-election period and the new job. The rest of 2022 was mostly filled with various ways of integrating into the job. This means lots of meetings with senior staff and stakeholders in the community, getting the new Council up to speed on the “State of the City” and some deeper thinking about what the “want-to-do”s and the “need-to-do”s are for the next year, and the next four years. And ow there are evets again, where I am now expected to have a few inspirational (!) words.

The good news is that the State of the City is good. We are in a decent (but not decadent) financial situation considering the chaos of COVID and our very aggressive capital plan, but costs are going up everywhere, and the City is no exception. Thanks to Mayor Cote’s leadership, we are in a good shape on a lot of policy fronts – in recent conversations with regional leaders and new Ministers in the Provincial Government, our leadership in housing policy across the spectrum has been noted repeatedly. Our role in getting PACT rolled out not just here but in other communities is also seen as demonstration of leadership, ad the multi-jurisdictional approach to addressing Downtown challenges is a great work in progress, with more to come. At the same time, the conversations we are having here on active transportation infrastructure sounds like debates from 15 years go in Vancouver, and 5 years ago in Victoria. A medium-sized City can’t be a leader on everything.

2022 also saw a return to one of the things that makes New West such a great place to live: we were back to events. Pride and Car Free Day both rocked Columbia, Fridays on Front were appreciated by significant crowds, Uptown Live and Recovery Day brought thousands to Uptown, and all kinds of different events like PechaKucha and the S&O Anniversary Party and the Mushtari Begum Festival the On Your Block Festival and the Hyack Parade and Play the Parks, etc. etc. There were so many ways for folks to connect again, to build that community spirit that was challenged for two years. It was a fun year.

And this winter, we had a few reminders that the day-to-day work of the city never stops. It has already been a challenging snow removal season, we have had crews working long hours and burning through a lot of salt and diesel to keep up with the changing conditions. The social media feedback has been demonstrative of something…

…admittedly, a bit of a mixed message.

I’m also spending some time this break thinking about how to engage differently in Social Media. Partly because the new job changes how my engagement is read, partly because I simply do not have time to track and respond to social media the way it sometimes desires, and partly because during the election I found judicious use of the “mute” button improved my outlook on the community, what with the anonymous trolls and racists filtered out. But this will be the topic of future posts and further reflection as the social media landscape is rapidly changing. Apparently Mastodon is a thing now?

So, to sum up, thank you to everyone who took part in making New West an exciting, engaged, and proactive community in 2022. There is much good coming in 2023, though I am sure the upcoming budget discussions will be contentious here as in most communities, as cost are going up and the austerity hawks will be making their damaging claims about the need to strip back community services. One of my reads over the break has been Andy Merrifield’s “The New Urban Question”, an exciting review of the impact of neoliberalism on not just the function of “The City”, but on the very nature of citizenship in the new Urban Realm, worldwide. It is an empowering and challenging read, and a reminder that the work we are doing has a purpose, even if the battle has no end.

Happy New Year! See you in Council Chambers – and around town – in 2023!

Poll-by-Poll 2022

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

The full election results are available on the City website, and as I have done in the last couple of goes-around, I like to look at the poll-by-poll results and infer a few things. Of course, others have taken this on and provided their own analysis, but I love to stick to a trend once I start, which in part explains the existence of this blog. Note: after boldly asserting I am NOT a political scientist, everything I write here has to be taken with a grain of salt.

This overlaps with the point that anyone in New West could vote in any polling station. One might assume that people vote in the station closest to their homes (as I did, voting early at City Hall), but there is nothing stopping someone from voting across town, so the geography of voting location is only a feeble proxy for the political leanings of that neighbourhood, which is the thesis of this entire post. Caveat Lector. But it is always fun to conject, so let’s have some fun. (Thanks Canspice for the image:

Starting with the Mayor’s Race, I marked the first place finisher in a poll with dark green, the second place finisher in lighter green. I also bunched the “Special Polls” and “Mail in” together as a single poll, for simplicity:

I finished first in most polls, and second in all the others, with my strongest polls being Downtown and the Brow, where I pulled greater than 50%. Armstrong won handily (~55%) in the two Queensborough polls, which represent about 10% of the overall votes. He also won the closer race in the Howay (Massey Victory Heights) poll. Puchmayr won Connaught Heights, which also happened to be the smallest poll, and the polls around his home in Moody Park generally had Puchmayr ahead of Armstrong in second place. As others have observed, there is a marked difference between multi-family and single-family neighbourhoods.

The Council race provides a bit more insight into how the vote was distributed. Here I shaded the first place finished in darker green, the second place finished in an apple green, and the other top 6 finishers in pale green. I used pale yellow for the three people just below the line, and no shading for the bottom three.

Much like Nadine Nakagawa last election, rookie candidate Ruby Campbell finished first overall by a good gap, and won the most polls. She finished first in 12 of the 19 polls, and second in one more. She “showed” (finished in the top 6) in all polls except (perhaps surprisingly) Herbert Spencer. Daniel Fontaine and Paul Minhas each led three polls, and Jaimie McEvoy was tied with Campbell for the favourite in the special polls, and was overall winner at QayQayt.

As most candidates were running with a party, there were clear trends related to those parties, and reflected somewhat the Mayor’s race. Community First had better results overall in most neighbourhoods, with the notable exceptions of Queensborough (the effect of Ken Armstrong being a Q’boro resident?) and Massey Victory Heights. The Progressives had a surprisingly strong showing at Herbert Spencer, which presumably draws most voters from Glenbrook North (where 3 of their down-ballot candidates reside) and Queens Park, but the same strength didn’t show at Queens Ave Church or Glenbrook Middle which would also presumably draw from Queens Park and Glenbrook. The two successful NWP candidates also had strong showings in Tweedsmuir (the West End) and Skwo:wech (Upper Sapperton), showing their appeal was broader overall this election than last, though again linked to single family neighbourhoods. The fact Queensborough didn’t show up for the one council candidate from Q’boro, when Downtown and the Brow did, will no doubt be the source of much deeper discussion.

And here are the School Board results with dark green for overall winner, apple green for second place, pale green for the rest of the top 7 finishers:

The results were close between the top three finishers, with third place finisher Connelly actually winning more polls (8) outright than Russell or Andres (4 each), who nonetheless had broader appeal across the City. Again, the NWP candidates followed Mayor and Council in having their strongest results in Queensborough and Massey Victory Heights, and Carlsen not able to leverage two first place and a second place finish into enough overall votes to get across the line. Aside from this single anomaly, it is perhaps surprising that party lines were not clearer. You could convince yourself that Connelly’s popularity pulled votes for Carlsen and Dobre in many polls, but it is far from consistent across the table.

Here is an interesting trend. Last election, about 21% of vote was cast at an advance poll. That went up to 27% this election. What’s interesting is in how the advance vote was distributed. Last election Team Cote got a bit more support at the advance than election day polls in comparison to the New West Progressives. This election, NWP candidates got an average of 28% of their vote in the advance polls, CFNW candidates only around 26% on average, with the Mayoral candidates having the biggest spread. See these tables with colour-coding for party affiliation and winners bolded:

Now, 2% isn’t a huge gap, but it is such a consistent trend between parties that it can’t be a coincidence. The prominence of an advance poll in Queensborough (and relative NWP popularity there) is not enough of a vote gap to account for this, so we need to presume something shifted in overall popularity between the first advance polls and the final election day. Community First got more popular as the election went on. The said, if we only counted advance pollsthe results in the end would be pretty much the same. The only difference would have been Carlsen being elected instead of Slinn for the final School Board spot.

Finally, there were 15,923 ballots counted, but 108 of them (0.68%) did not select a Mayor Candidate. If we project that same number of ballots to the Council race, there were 95,538 potential Council votes (6 per ballot), and 81,144 votes marked, or 85%. With School Board and 7 votes per ballot, there were 73,202 out of a possible 111,461 (66%) votes cast.

The Campaign

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

What a wild ride that was.

In early January, I started to ask people if they thought I should run for Mayor, and started noodling about what a run would look like. It took a few months for me to convince myself that there was a viable path, that it would take a strong team, I would need a lot of help putting that team together, but the team was there to be brought together. That work took another 3 months, with conversations and facilitated sessions and the help of many people with experience in organizational development and politics. Bylaws, an AGM, candidate search and nomination process, it was a whirlwind. Then we started knocking on doors and connecting with the broader community, developing platforms, and setting ourselves up for Labour Day, when the real rush begins…

All though the campaign, I found I kept saying the same thing to the candidates: Keep it positive, and do your work. In the good times and the bad times, when we were excited and when we were lagging, when facing conflict or negativity, we just told each other to stay on the positive, and then found some work to do.

There are so many people to thank, and those will be more personal notes than this. I thought for my first post-election blog, I wanted to write a bit about the experience. I’ll follow up with more of a “what’s next” post later. For now, here are my 8 things I learned this campaign:

People are good: I admit to being a bit nervous about door knocking back in June. For a lot of people the last two years have been shitty: locked down and stuck at homes for long periods, shifts in their work and social lives, a lot of anxiety driven by economic uncertainty, concerns about health and family, loss of loved ones, doom scrolling bad news locally and around the world, and clear signs of climate disruption warning us things are not going to get better. I was afraid people were not in a mental space to talk to a hopeful election candidate who shows up at their house.

For the most part, I was wrong. Door knocking was an encouraging experience. People were happy to talk, were looking for reasons to be positive and optimistic. Yes, they had concerns and gripes, but they also had ideas about what we can do better and wanted to hear from candidates that we had ideas for a brighter future. So many people in New West responded to crises and anxiety with hope and optimism about things getting better. Door knocking was uplifting, and I hope the candidates don’t lose that feeling over the next 4 years.

Algorithms are Bad: I shouldn’t have to tell anyone that Facebook is not the real world, but I have never seen a contrast as strong as this election. If the election result was determined by Facebook comments, I had no chance this election, nor did any incumbent in the election. After all, I was called everything from an idiot to a sociopath to a “vampire slug” by people I know in the community. Some of my (alas, inevitably) non-male colleagues faced much worse. And the algorithms assure any time I spend in social media world emphasize and amplified those few voices. The contrast between the vitriol on Facebook and the conversations I had every day with real people in this community was remarkable. I’ll write more about this in the “looking forward” post, but I cannot imagine what value Facebook provides to people interested in engaging with the community. It is a broken interface.

Politics are Parochial: In our doorknocking this time, it was a good reminder of how local many concerns are. Sure climate and COVID and big issues impacting the world right now are getting all the news space, and people want to see us taking serious action on Big Issues. However, when you ask folks about issues on the spot, they can usually physically point at the thing on top of their mind as they stand on their doorstep. A sidewalk in need of repair, the loss of trees, a too-stringent tree bylaw, parking (always parking), a fire hydrant in need of painting, the schedule for glass recycling. The little details of daily life are things that people think about when they think City Hall.

Housing Matters: One big difference this election over previous ones (in my imperfect memory) is that the housing crisis was top of mind for everyone this year, even those comfortably housed in single family neighbourhoods. Previously, you heard a lot about housing security and housing affordability in multi-family and rental buildings, but now the impacts of the ongoing crisis are being felt by everyone – because their kids cannot afford to live in the neighbourhood where they grew up, because rental availability is so low, because it is harder to find employees, because homelessness is more visible than ever. There were other issues this election, but the marked difference in the housing discussion really stood out to me.

Teams: I’m really proud of the team I ran with, and so grateful of the work we did. No-one has ever knocked on as many doors as Community First did during this campaign. Some members faced unique challenges and the other members stood up to support them. The incumbents pulled for the new candidates, and the volunteers and campaign staff were always there to enable the candidates to concentrate on connecting with voters. And when something went sideways – as will inevitably happen when you have 13 stressed candidates and dozens of passionate volunteers interacting with thousands of engaged residents on a tight deadline – we were able to pull together and regroup and get back to the positive, and back to doing the work.

Who knows what works? I am a physical scientist, and a member of Generation X. Both of those characteristics lend me towards wanting to understand how things work. How does [this one thing] get me closer to [the goal]. In a campaign surrounded by political activists, experienced campaigners, and enthusiastic volunteers, you hear a lot of differing opinions about what actually works in pulling the vote: the air game vs the ground game; the lawn sign war; Full Page Ads; viral TikToks (whatever the hell those are). Few people will agree on what is most important and what isn’t, and most of the traditional knowledge is wrapped in confirmation bias, survivorship bias, and anecdata. A local government election with limited media and 13 candidates on a team is also a very different animal that a traditional two- or three-party campaign we are used to with senior government.

I guess there is a thing called “Political Science”, but I have not studied it beyond reading Hunter Thompson books from the 1970s, as I tend to be reading about policy ideas and policy failures, assuming good ideas with predictable outcomes are all people want. But good policy is really hard to meme, and often the electorate is busy, otherwise engaged, or indifferent. So, to our incredible campaign staff, I apologize for every time I took part in the “Lawn signs don’t matter” vs “We are losing the Lawn Sign War!” debate in the office. Thanks for indulging us, letting us vent, then getting us back on track.

Elections are hard: Running for office is an emotional rollercoaster. If you care about the work, about the community, and about the ideals you bring into this, then there is some point in a campaign where it is going to hurt. Maybe low blood sugar and a couple of bad interactions at a door line up and your imposter syndrome hits you and you question why the hell you are doing this. Maybe you get stuck in the spiral of reading your opponent’s messaging (“did they just say that!?”) and Facebook comments (“do people actually believe that!?”) and you have to swallow the irritation because your team keeps telling you to keep it positive. Maybe you know you need to go hit doors or attend an event, when all you want to do this evening is sit down for dinner with your daughter and talk about her first day at school. Having a great team of supporters to pull you through those low points makes it easier, and sometimes we lament the burden taken on by our families and friends in supporting us as candidates. In the end, the positives of working together to build something positive wins out, even if we sometimes need to be reminded of this. A year from now we are going to remember the funny stories from doorknocking, not those low points, but at the moment, they are hard. A campaign office with sugary snacks help.

Losing sucks: I’m heartbroken that my colleagues Chinu and Bereket were not able to get over the top. Maybe I can speculate about the “why” part when I dig into the poll-by-poll results, but for now I am just disappointed and feel badly that our team didn’t do more to help them. Chinu has been an incredible source of calm wisdom and incisive fire at Council, and I have felt honoured to sit with her and learn from her. I was feeling really confident about Bereket from the day I met him about a year ago, he is smart, principled, and was so charming at the doors, while also pulling in an amazing team of volunteers. He was persistently positive, lifting the team every chance he had, and reminding us about Queensborough if we ever let it slip. I know they will both continue to be passionate advocates for their community, it is in their hearts to do this work.

The last week has been a different kind of whirlwind. I am working with my elected colleagues and City Staff to get organized around inauguration (November 7th in Council Chambers, mark your calendar), and getting all of council prepped to do the work. I have chatted with and am planning more meetings with Jonathan, and have also set up some meetings with Mayors from around the region to connect again with those I already know and introduce myself to those I have I haven’t worked with yet. And the invites for events of all types are starting to stream in.

I will hope to find time this weekend to write a bit of a “what’s next” follow up to this, but first things first, to answer the big question here:

Yes, I intend to keep blogging, but it is going to be different. I don’t even know how it will be different yet, because I need to find a new context for this writing. For good or for bad, anything written by the “person wearing the chain” becomes conflated with the “Official position of the City”, and I am aware of my need to separate those two. My council colleagues and staff of the city need to know I am not going to make their work harder through this part of my new-found bully pulpit. There is also the time commitment required to do this that I will need to understand and manage.

But writing this blog has become part of my “process” for understanding and keeping track of what is happening in council business. Somewhere in my University days I learned if I can’t write clearly about it, I clearly don’t understand it. So writing the notes that become this blog are part of how I read and absorb my council package and the reports attached. for now I suggest the presentation may change, the tone may change, but I do intend to keep connecting directly like this as long as it is viable to do so.

So thank you to my regular readers (Hi Mom!), and let’s see where this goes!

Council – Sept 26, 2022

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

In more than 10 years, I don’t think I have gone more than three weeks without blogging, even when I took extended vacations. Sorry folks, it has been busy and this page has dropped in priority over the other engagement and media work I have been doing. Still, I am committed to reporting out every council meeting for the last 8 years, and I’m not stopping now!

The penultimate Council Meeting of the term took us on our annual (excepting COVID disruption) trip to the Queensborough Community Centre, where I was expecting a big turnout, but was surprised to see so few people present.

Nonetheless, we had a full Agenda that started with the following items Moved on Consent:

Appointment of Acting City Clerk
Our City Clerk is seconded to act as our Chief Electoral Officer. This is getting busy, and so for the next three weeks the assistant Clerk is taking over Clerk duties. City Clerk has clearly defined and legislated duties, so we have to officially, through a motion of Council, assign these duties to the Assistant until the Clerk is free again in October.

Budget 2023: User Fees and Rates Review Amendment Bylaws
We reviewed the proposed fee increases for 2023 last meeting, Every department reviews their rates annually, and try to balance three things: Inflationary increases so rate increases are gradual and we don’t get behind on CPI; Reviewing the cost of delivering the service so (ideally – not always) fees cover those costs; and a comparison to fees charged in adjacent communities to make sure the City is not out of touch with what is charged elsewhere. This year staff are recommending most rates and fees go up about 2.4%, to reflect CPI, though some fees are not going up (QtoQ Ferry, Inter Municipal Business Licences, EV charging costs) and some are going up more than 2.4% based on previous policy decisions (e.g. Parking fees are mostly going up to align with the 5-year plan for Parking rates approved by Council after much discussion back in October of 2018).

We reviewed the reports last meeting, allowing staff to prepare the empowering Bylaws. If a Councillor wanted to suggest changes to these Bylaws, last meeting would have been a good time to do that so we could have a fulsome discussion and staff could prepare a response giving Council any extra information they may need (e.g. budget implications) to make a decision. Alternately, they could pull this item from consent and have the discussion now, though staff would be a bit on their heels. Doing it when we are giving the Bylaws three reading later in the meeting can only be interpreted as grandstanding. Ugh. Elections.

City’s Response to the Accessible British Columbia Act
BC has a new Accessibility Act, and will require local governments (and Police and Library Boards) have organizational accessibility plans and accessibility committees, and to develop plans to meet Accessibility Standards for our employees and in service delivery. So we are complying, and staff have given us a bit of a framework of how we will get there.

Infrastructure Canada Active Transportation Fund – Grant Agreement
When Council supported my motion to get staff developing a complete and connected AAA mobility network in the City, they got to work. There is now Federal Government Funds to help pay for this planning work, and we are applying to said grant for one of those grants. Well, we already applied and got approval in principle, but we need to formalize the authorization and delegate the ability to sign a grant agreement. Government.

Manufacture’s Patio Application (Pacific Breeze Winery)
Pacific Breeze is a small winery off Stewardson Way, and they have been operating a small patio during COVID through the temporary measures taken by the City to support these licences. There have been no problems with this operation, so the City is supporting their application with the Province to make this permanent.

Official Community Plan Amendment Section 475 and 476: 501 Fourth Avenue and 408 Fifth Street (Holy Eucharist Cathedral), and 1135 Salter Street – Consultation Report
The Ukrainian Church in Queens Park wants to expand their campus to include some affordable housing and other uses to support their function, which would require an OCP amendment. There is also a property in Queensborough that wants to build residential units that would require an OCP Amendment. We have only seen preliminary plans for both of these, and sent them to the regulatory-required outside agencies and First Nations for consultation before we can consider the OCP amendments further. This report adds 6 more First Nations to the list of those requiring consultation, based on further evaluation by Metro. This report approves the start of that expanded consultation. Both of these projects will also be going through Public Consultation, so more on this to come.

Rezoning Application for Duplex: 376 Keary Street – Preliminary Report
The owner of a single family house in Sapperton wants to build a duplex. This aligns with the OCP, there is no net increase in living units (a laneway house would otherwise be permitted here), no variances, but “duplex” triggers the need for rezoning. This is a preliminary application, so it will go to public consultation, Drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Rezoning, Development Variance Permit, and Development Permit: 114 and 118 Sprice Street – Preliminary Report
The owner of these lots in Queensborough where there are currently two single family homes want to build 10 compact lot single family homes on the largish existing lots. This is a pretty complicated application and an interesting design approach. This is, however, just a preliminary application that will go to public consultation. If you have opinions, let us know.

The following items were Removed from Consent for discussion:

Council Code of Conduct
Our Council has a Code of Conduct, but the Ministry of Municipal Affairs has a new requirement that we “publicly revise” our Code. We have updated ours in review of the development guide provided by the Province and looking at best practices in other communities. This new Code includes a more prescribed method to investigate breaches to the Code, including stricter timelines to investigation and assigning a third party to investigate to put a bit of a fence between Council and the investigation.

This is a good step, but it is not the solution to many of the issues around the region over the last few years when it comes to Council as a respectful workplace. New Westminster has for the most part avoided the worst of this, but I can name a half dozen council colleagues around the region who have been bullied, harassed, and treated in a way that no employer would permit in any other workplace, but do not have the protection of an Employment Standards Act, of an Ombudsperson, or a Union. Updating this Code is a step to better workplace conditions for elected officials, but we still need the Provincial Government to do more.

Introduction of the Local Government Climate Action Program and 2021 Corporate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Update
I might have railed here or there about the end of CARIP, a Provincial funding source to local governments for climate action. The Province heard many local governments (and the organization of which I served as Chair, the Community Energy Association) in the need for a replacement program that all local governments could rely on as base funding for these efforts.

The Best news is that New West will receive just under $300,000 from the CARIP replacement program (Local Government Climate Action Program – LGCAP) in 2022, which is more than twice what we received under CARIP. Similar to CARIP, this program requires some reporting of our efforts to the Province and alignment of our actions with the CleanBC plan – which are things we are already doing in our 7 bold Steps for climate.

This report also outlines our progress toward 2030, 2040, and 2050. Our original targets (compared to the 2010 baseline) were 45% reduction by 2030, 60% by 2040, and net zero by 2050. We also have a Corporate target to be net zero by 2030. As of 2021, we are 29% below baseline, but the curve is definitely bent to the right direction. I’m so proud of the work this council has got done to set bold targets, to empower staff to achieve them, and to get us in a leadership position regionally on this most important of issues. I have heard people suggest New West talks a lot about climate action, but what are they actually doing? Here is the answer; we are getting it done.

Latecomer Agreement for Extended Servicing Costs Related to the Servicing of the Queensborough Special Study Area
This gets a little into the weeds, so hold on. When development happens, it often means we need to build bigger off-side supports for the development. Bigger sewer lines, bigger water lines, bigger pumps for both, roadways, etc. This is usually covered by Development Cost Charges (“DCCs”) – we make the developer pay that cost by charging them per square foot of new density, then when enough developments come along making the increased capacity prudent to build, we use that money to build it.

However, sometimes a large development means capacity needs to be added right away, so we get them to build it right away. But it is also possible that more future development in the area of this first one will mean we want to build that capacity bigger than strictly needed by the first developer, so we don’t have to rebuild it a few years later when the next phase of development happens. One way to manage that is to ask the first developer to build the extra-big capacity, then when the next developer comes along, they can benefit from that expanded capacity. The “latecomer” developer then pays back the first developer for the extra cost of that extra-large capacity that was conveniently built for them.

To do that, we need to agree on what capacity is needed, how it will be built, and how much the Latecomer will pay to tap into that expanded capacity. This requires a legal agreement between the City and first developer. This report is about us developing such an agreement with the company hoping to develop the mixed-us “Eastern Node” neighbourhood in Queensborough. The form of the agreement is laid out by Staff, and Council are asked to approve it. This is a bit unusual for New West because we don’t do much “Greenfield” development, but it is common in other communities.

Permissive Property Tax Exempt Properties for 2023 – Review of Application Result
Some properties don’t pay property tax because they have a statutory exemption set by Provincial Law (Churches, private schools, provincial government agencies, etc.). Others don’t pay property tax, or pay reduced property tax, because the City has determined that there is a community benefit to their being here worthy of reduced taxes. There are some limits to whom we can give this permissive exemption (church accessory buildings, sports clubs, social service providers), and the City has a well written policy to guide new exemptions one we have followed pretty closely in my time on council.

There are several applications for new exemptions this year, three of which were already eligible for Statutory Exemption, and the others that do not meet out policy threshold for new permissive exemption.

Q2 2022 Capital Budget Adjustments
We have started quarterly reporting of our Capital Budget, instead of the previous practice of doing annual updates with occasional ad hoc adjustments as major capital projects proceeded.

As per Local Government regulation, our Capital Budget exists as a 5-year Capital Plan Bylaw, with annual Capital budgets. This means if we want to change the overall budget over 5 years, we need to amend the bylaw, but if we want to move proposed spending from year 1 to year 3, or vice versa, we don’t need to amend the Bylaw, we just need a motion to do so. This gives staff some flexibility to adjust capital planning do deal with minor cost overruns, unexpected savings, or changes in delivery times for different projects – like if we break a truck and need to replace it sooner than expected, or if a construction project gets delayed by supply chain issues.

This quarter, we are adjusting the 2022 Capital Budget by $1.7Million, but are NOT increasing overall spending, but are instead deferring or delaying other projects in the 5 year plan. These changes include:
$0.7M increase in the cost for the Wood Street drainage upgrades;
$0.5M in increased spending on sidewalk repair and replacement;
$0.3M for increased Pier Park fire remediation costs;
$0.2M for expanded scope on some road safety projects.
There is a spreadsheet attached to the report here if you want more details on cost increases and decreases that offset them.

Queensborough Ecological Restoration Project
The little slough on the south end of Ryall Field South and the trail that leads from Ewen at Stanley Street to the Riverfront will see ecological restoration, including refurbishment of the wetlands portions, new trees and native plantings, improves trails and new signage. More than an enhancement of the Perimeter Trail, this will support the ecological network model of our new Biodiversity and Natural Areas Strategy, and the Urban Forest Management Program.

Rezoning Application for Detached Accessory Building: 228 Seventh Street – Preliminary Report
Westminster House wants to expand their existing accessory building for their operation in the Brow of the Hill. I am an almost immediate neighbor, I recused myself from this discussion or decision, as there may be a perceived pecuniary interest.

Update on the Community Action Network Leadership Training Program and the Ethics of Engagement Project
The CAN Leadership Training program has been operating in New West since 2020 to bring people with lived and living experience with homelessness into planning and decision making around municipal efforts to address homelessness and poverty. We now have 16 CAN Leaders in New Westminster who serve on City Advisory Committees, Task Forces and Working Groups.

If you want to know what makes New Westminster innovative, you may want to read this report. It is a great summary of what an inclusive and compassionate City can do to improve people’s lives, and improve the community while we are at it. It is also groundbreaking in how we are expanding Public Engagement to include participatory decision making, and reaching out to residents traditionally not included in Public Engagement efforts.

We then read some Bylaws, including the following Bylaws for Adoption:

Delegation Amendment Bylaw No. 8365, 2022
This Bylaw responds to some recent changes in department structures in Staff, and makes clear who is what delegated authority as required by provincial law. We adopted it.

Zoning Amendment Bylaw (616 and 640 Sixth Street – Text Amendment) No. 8348, 2022
This is the final Bylaw to support the construction of a mixed use, Purpose Built Rental toawer in uptown – the first significant density approved Uptown in a decade, and the first Purpose Built Rental building in longer than that. Council adopted it!

Heritage Revitalization Agreement (108-118 Royal Avenue and 74-82 First Street) Bylaw No. 8339, 2022; Heritage Designation Bylaw (82 First Street) No. 8340, 2022; and Windsor Road Closure, Dedication Removal and Disposition Bylaw No. 8350, 2022.
These Bylaws approve the development of a new 6-8 storey residential building on Royal Ave and the retention and protection of one heritage house on the lot. Council moved ot adopt the Bylaws.

Official Community Plan Amendment (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8088, 2022; Heritage Revitalization Agreement (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) Bylaw No. 8089, 2022; and Heritage Designation Bylaw (514 Carnarvon Street – Holy Trinity Cathedral) No. 8090, 2022.
These Bylaws approve the building of a new Mixed-use tower including public amenity use, rental and market Condos adjacent to the HTC, along with a restoration and preservation plan for the 120+ year old Cathedral itself. Council moved unanimously to adopt.

finally, we had two pieces of New Business

Disposition of Unused 2018 Campaign Funds, Mayor Cote
When we fundraise for campaigns, there are all kinds of rules about how that money is spent. Surplus funds at the end of the campaign can be held in Trust by the City for the candidate to pull out next time they run. If the candidate chooses not to run again, it is unclear where those funds go, except into general revenue in the City. The motion here from the Mayor is to move unspent campaign funds to a charitable cause or scholarship program at the discretion of the departing candidate. I support this, as these funds were either the Candidate’s own money, or that of people who politically supported the Candidate, and the candidate is therefore in the unique position of knowing where their supporters would like to see the money go.

Extreme Heat Event Monitoring Centre Initiative
This late addition to the Agenda was nonetheless notable, in that the City is partnering with Fraser Health and Emergency Management BC on an advanced response to Heat Dome events, a response led by New West Fire and Rescue. The plan is to set up a Heat Response Centre to offer immediate care to less-acute cases at Century House, with LPNs and trained Firefighters providing patient monitoring, relieving the Ambulance Service and Emergency room to address more seriously impacted patients. I like this innovative approach, and the partnerships we are able to leverage across municipal and provincial authorities.

And with that, our Penultimate Meeting is a wrap. Tune in a gain on October 3rd for the final meeting of the term, which will no doubt have some weepy moments for a few members of Council, and a bit of fun to mark the occasion. Now back to the Campaign Trail.

Police Numbers (update!)

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

The topic of policing is coming up across the region in various forms, most of them related to elections. Last week, two non-incumbent people running for Mayor in the two largest Metro Vancouver municipalities are promising to increase the number of police officers to address a perception of increased crime. I have also heard some discussion recently about New West not increasing its police force to keep up with population growth. So I thought it would be good to write a blog that looks at the data, as a precursor to what is likely to be a deeper discussion in the community about policing.

When I say “the data”, I mean the information provided by police themselves and reported to the Province of BC. The Province has a page dedicated to collecting and reporting out all kinds of police information from across the province that you can find here. The part I am most interested in is report linked at the bottom of the page entitled “Police resources in British Columbia, 2020“. It is the most recent and comprehensive comparison of police forces across the province, and though I’ll add data caveats below, it seems like as definitive a source as one can find.

In comparing Metro Vancouver policing, there is one thing that needs to be addressed up front: of the 17 municipalities with more than 5,000 residents, 12 are served by municipal RCMP forces, and 5 are served by Municipal Police. When you dig into details, the service model is actually much more complicated than this, as there are Regional Task Forces that are shared between multiple jurisdictions and may include Muni and RCMP staff, and every city receives some services from some task forces while most also lend staff to these task forces. There are also other forces such as Transit Police and Federal RCMP detachments operating in the region. The overlaps are complex, and the report itself has a lot of text explaining these complications. Read that report if you want those kind of details.

A commonly heard point is that Municipal police cost more, but provide better service and better local accountability. This is the concept behind Mayor McCallum’s argument for establishing a Municipal force in Surrey. There are a couple of ways to look at policing cost, but these two make sense:

The orange points are Municipal forces, the blue are RCMP. You can see the policing cost per capita does tend support the notion that local cops cost a bit more. You also see there is a wide range of per capita costs regardless of the provider – Vancouver and Langley City residents pay almost twice as much as North Vancouver District residents do for police. You can see New West has the lowest costs of any Municipal force, but is still more costly than most RCMP forces. The cost per officer to run the police force does not vary quite as much, and you can see New West is middling-to-high compared to our cohort, but not completely out of scale with the regional average.

This brings us to the number of officers per capita, or (the easier wat to count it) the number of residents per police officer. I think the most interesting way to look at this number is compared to the Case Load. That stat is the number of criminal offences per officer, which is an imperfect but useful proxy for “how busy is the average cop?”

You can see here that New West is about smack dab in the middle of the region in both of these counts. Our numbers are remarkably close to Surrey, which is a very different city with an RCMP force (these stats were collected before the Surrey Municipal police force was set up). You also note that Municipal forces general have fewer people per police (more police per capita) and lower caseloads than RCMP forces, with New West again leaning towards RCMP levels more than fitting in with the Municipal Force cluster.

Of course, this discussion leads to a discussion about growth, and whether the police forces are keeping up with regional population growth. The data here is a again from the BC Government report, including the 2020 population data. I gathered the 2011 population data from another BC Government dataset you can find here if you want check my numbers.

You can see that by percentage of growth over the decade, very few police forces have added members at the rate that population has grown (the dots on or below the blue diagonal lines being the few that did), and two North Shore municipalities have fewer police now than they did in 2011. You will also note that there isn’t a clear divide between RCMP and Muni forces here. It is clear that the increase in Police in New West (going from 108 to 113) has not kept up with the 22% population increase. It is also interesting that Surrey and New West are so far apart in this graph, when they were overlapping in the last – the relationships between officer count, case count, and growth are obviously complex.

So those are the numbers (table form below for those who wish to nit-pick), and I am sure that this kind of data will lead to principled and well informed discussions in the community. I just want to make the point that is often missed in these discussions: City Councils generally do not determine police officer counts. In RCMP-serviced communities, I have no idea how those decisions are made. For a City with a Municipal force, that is the job of the Police Board working with senior policing staff, backed by provincial service standards and based on the unique needs of the community. If you are interested in leading the discussion on police officer counts in New Westminster, your opportunity is now, as the province is currently receiving applications for Police Board members right here in New Westminster. Apply here, the closing date is September 9th.

Finally, it is important to note some data caveats. These are 2020 numbers, the most recent the province has available. The actual number of sworn officers in your community is likely lower than the numbers here, because these stats are “Authorized Force” and assume that all funded positions in the police force are filled. This is rarely true in the best of times, but in the last few years we have had events that made it less true, such as the regional shifts related to Surrey ramping up its Municipal Force and the COVID-related Great Resignation affecting many sectors of the economy. Also, there was a dip in crime in 2020 related to COVID (this is discussed in the report), and though we might presume this dip was systemic and equal across the region, this data neither confirms nor refutes that.

Raw numbers used in the charts above. Sources listed and linked to in the text above.

BONUS CONTENT!

In the comments, a reader suggested comparing Case Loads between 2011 and 2020 would be interesting. The table I downloaded from the province didn’t have case load data from 2011, but you can find CC Case counts in the “Jurisdiction Crime Trends” table on the same page. From that and the Authorized Strength already reported, you can calculate Case Loads from 2011 an 2020. The results are interesting, if a bit unclear. And again, I want to emphasize the 2020 data is likely anomalous due to COVID, so I also did the math comparing 2011 to 2019, which might be the most recent “representative” year. Sorry, the best you get is a table:

So Case Loads are generally down, but there are some municipalities where they went up, some by quite a bit – West Van and Maple ridge share a strange similarity here. You can also see an almost universal drop in 2020, except in White Rock. My first impression is probably that the majority of cases are likely more complex now than they were a decade ago, but once again, you can read form the numbers what you will! I’m just reporting here.

Bad Data. Again.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

The Fraser Institute are up to their old tricks: shabby data gathering resulting in inaccurate results. I’ve demonstrated this before, and even sent them a letter outlining the big mistake they made last time they did this (not coincidentally four years ago, just before the last municipal election), and they have blithely made the same mistake again. So here I am to correct the record. Again.

The Record shingled this story into my social media feeds, and it speaks to this report prepared by the Fraser Institute. The report attempts to compare “spending per capita” and “revenue per capita” across the 17 largest municipalities in Greater Vancouver. I’ve said before, this is not a competition, but on the face of it, this isn’t the worst way to look at whether residents in various municipalities are getting value for their tax dollar. There are a few problems with over-simplification (I’ll talk about those further down), but as a first pass it is an interesting easy-to digest media byte.

The problem is, New Westminster, unlike any of the other 16 municipalities listed, has an electrical utility, and the data used by the FI rolls that Electrical Utility into the overall revenue and spending amount. Residents of every other city pay for electricity, but it is not included in these comparisons. This is not an insignificant difference. New West Electric pulls almost $50 Million in revenue ($622 per capita), and spends more than $40M ($505 per capita) every year.

So, much like I did last time, we can adjust for this significant factor, and shift the FI charts to reflect an apples-to-apples comparison. You see New West, when fairly compared, does not have the second highest spending in the region, but is tied with North Van City for 8th place, firmly in the middle of the pack:

Table from Fraser Institute report, modified to show how New West compares when the $40.6M in annual Electrical Utility spending is removed, allowing a true apples-to-apples comparison with other municipalities that do not have an electrical utility.

And when fairly compared, New West does not have the second highest per capita revenue in the region, but instead tenth, slightly below the regional average:

Table from Fraser Institute report, modified to show how New West compares when the $50 M in annual Electrical Utility revenue is removed, allowing a true apples-to-apples comparison with other municipalities that do not have an electrical utility.

The FI also conflates all revenue sources. This is problematic, because they vary greatly across the region. Municipalities have different fees for services and different ways of managing utilities. Also, as this is a data snapshot for only one year, factors like one-time senior government grants or sale of properties in any given year can really juice the numbers and make apples-to-apples difficult. When fans of FI reports talk about City spending, they are usually worried about taxes, so it is fortunate that the same government database from which the FI draws their numbers breaks down the revenue sources. It is easy to separate out Property Tax revenues from the pile, and compare on a per-capita basis. When you do that, you see New Westminster is one of the (and I totally buried the lede here) lowest-taxed municipalities on a per capita basis in the Lower Mainland:

Comparison of Revenue from Taxation across the lower mainland. Population Estimates same as used in Fraser Institute report cited above, taxation data source is BC Government Schedule 401_2019, column D “Total Own Purpose Taxation and Grants in Lieu”. available here: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/local-governments/facts-framework/statistics/statistics

And in case you are interested, here is that data in tabular form:

Now onto the detail part for those still interested.

I find the lack of adjustment for the electrical utility fascinating, not only because I pointed it out to them last time, but also because they do make and adjustment for the West Vancouver Blue bus system – a single-municipality expense and revenue stream. If you compare the FI data to the government database, you find West Van expenses are actually higher (by $417 per capita for spending and $910 per capita for revenue) than the FI report. They make that adjustment for West Van blue bus, but not for New West Electrical. This seems inconsistent.

Looking at the government database also demonstrates the problem with using snapshot data for one year. Line items in spending like “loss on disposition of assets” sound technocratic, but it is writing off value of assets either destroyed or sold off, and it varies across the region year by year as you might imagine. Add to this annual amortization adjustment, and cities with lots of physical assets (like Vancouver) and those that have invested recently in important infrastructure are disproportionately cast as spendthrifts. On the revenue side, one-time grants for big projects may be counted in this year data, but not reflect overall revenue generation ability. In 2019, Coquitlam sold $60 Million in assets – more than every other municipality combined – but that is not an annual (or sustainable) trend and does not reflect any long-term economic comparison between Coquitlam and any other municipality.

So the comparison is sloppy. And as much as I would like to counter some critics with the table that shows New Westminster spending growth over my time on Council as one of the lowest in the region (and, notably, much lower than the 18% cumulative inflation of the 10 years ), the way the FI presents data is so poorly explained that I don’t even feel good using it to tell a story that makes New West look like the kind of fiscally responsible municipality the FI would allege to support:

Table copied directly from the Fraser Institute report cited above. The only thing I added was the red arrow.

I just want the FI to do be fair, and the local and regional media to do a little bit of preliminary analysis before they credulously print their press release. After years of this kind of sloppy work the FI deserve to be treated with more scrutiny.

Reaching out

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

Hey Folks.

Not much updating going on here. Council is on the summer break but I am busier than I have ever been, because I am running for Mayor. Every day is filled with meetings, scheduled or impromptu, in person and on-line, with campaign team folks, with other candidates, with community stakeholders. I have been helping with platform discussions and writing and design, planning out comms for September, helping coordinate events and fundraising, helping line up volunteers for the work ahead. We have a great team and a lot of tasks, and the Mayor candidate tends to get pulled into a lot more of them. Yesterday I got through 4 of the 7 things on my morning To Do list, today my list is longer. And this note wasn’t even on it…

It can be exasperating at times, barely keeping up, but most evenings (when there isn’t another event) I drop it all at 5:30 or so, and meet a volunteer for a couple of hours of door-knocking. By 8:00 I am recharged and excited again, because meeting people and talking about the city – what we do well, what we need to do better – is just about my favourite thing in the world. People in this community are so positive and forward-looking. It’s joyful work and those conversations are like a breath of fresh air.

I don’t generally use his Blog for campaign stuff. You can find campaign info at my campaign site, at my Facebook site, and of course I’m always Twittering, I only rarely put campaign stuff on here and that won’t change. But I’m talking Campaign on my blog today because I want you to go here right now: communityfirstnw.ca/donate_patrick

There are a lot of people who read this blog who I don’t have other direct contact with. I meet people on the doorstep who tell me they read this and appreciate the work I have done to try to make the work of Council easier to understand and more transparent. It takes a lot of time and I don’t get paid extra to do it, but it is part of the commitment I made when I got elected to Council 8 years ago.

If you are reading this, and have been reading this, you know who I am and what I stand for. At a time when politics is increasingly cynical and polarized, I still believe we can talk through the challenges in our community in an open and transparent way, we can hear different voices and stand behind decision making. We can also change our mind when given new information or better data. We can make this a better City and a better world by doing these things.

If you think this too, and appreciate the work I have done to bring the community into City Hall, then I ask that you donate to my Campaign for Mayor so I can keep doing this work.

Why You? Because new campaign finance rules mean I cannot receive any business or union donations. Nothing from CUPE, nothing from BIA members, nothing from the development companies. Every donation must come from an individual, and no individual can donate more than $1250. I am not even allowed to donate more than $1250 to my own campaign. This means I am not allowed to pay for my own lawn signs, or for a campaign office. I can pay for newspaper ads or pamphlets, but not both. I need those who support me to donate to my campaign, and our team needs to pool funds to get those things done. We need you.

As always, if you have a question or concern, drop me a note. I might not have time for an ASK PAT response right now, but I try to reply to every email I get. Please consider helping me out if you are able, then get back to enjoying the summer. And now I’m off to the New West Farmers Market to judge a Pie Contest. But that’s another blog…

Counting homes

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 2 Comments.

It is 2022, which means 2021 Census data is trickling out. If you are interested in this kind of data, you should probably be over at censusmapper or Mountain Doodles where Jens does cool things with maps and data visualization to make census numbers fun. But before you go, I want to talk a bit more about what the census can tell us about the regional housing situation.

I have written a few blog posts in the past that compare census data to the regional growth trends projects in the Regional Growth Strategy – the master document of regional planning for Metro Vancouver, and the one that all municipal Official Community Plans must align with. In those posts I compared the decade of population growth that the regional government planning folks predicted back in 2011 to the actual population growth shown in the census. Turns out (surprise!) growth is not evenly distributed around the region, and though the overall growth of the region is close to the projection (when you account for census undercount, which is an interesting phenomenon), but there are great regional variations between those communities that met or exceeded their regional growth projections and those that fell far short.

However, the population count is not something cities directly control (despite some fanciful promises candidates may offer). The region grows for many overlapping demographic, economic and socio-political reasons, and cities can either accommodate that growth (by supplying homes, employment spaces, utilities, infrastructure) or choose not to (and face housing price inflation, labour shortages, and failing services). The Regional Growth Strategy also includes projected dwelling counts for every community, and Cities though their policies and practices, have much closer control of this. It also happens that dwelling count is a major factor in housing affordability – the idea that increasing supply puts downward pressure on price is not controversial outside of some Landscape Architecture schools.

The 2021 dwelling count data was recently released by Statistics Canada, and we can now compare the decade-old RGS projected numbers for 2021 to the census numbers for 2021. I’ll start with a table, because I am not the data visualization genius Jens is:

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to see only 5 of 21 municipalities built more housing units than the RGS projected, though some may be surprised to see Vancouver exceed its targets by almost 20,000 units. As is probably expected, North Van City exceeded growth projections by the highest amount proportional to its population, and Delta, New West and White Rock round out the Municipalities that built more housing units that projected (and Richmond was within statistical error of it target). However, during a decade of overlapping housing crises, while everyone agrees the affordability of housing is the primary local government issue, every other Municipality in the Metro Vancouver fell short of the very commitment they made to the region to get new housing built.

Yes, I dropped Anmore and Lions Bay and other small munis that have negligible effect on regional housing supply.

Of course, not all munis are equal in size, nor are all munis equal in their ability to accommodate growth. A significant part of the Regional Growth Strategy is to emphasize new growth near transit and established transportation networks, to increase residential density near work / study / shopping areas to reduce transportation burdens, and to prevent the erosion of the ALR and and the Urban Containment Boundary.  This is why the RGS set different targets for different municipalities, and came up with 2021 targets that every muni could agree to when they signed off on the document.

So I compared the projected increase in dwelling units from 2011 to 2021 to the amount that each municipality exceeded or fell short of the 2021 target based on 2021 census data, and you can see how the growth was not only shared unequally, but how different municipalities had different commitments to the agreed-upon plan. It is here that the two recalcitrant North Shore districts and the Tri-Cities really stand out.

Note this is not total dwelling units, just the increase between 2011 and 2021. It also shows that the apparently-rapid growth of new towers in Burnaby and Coquitlam are not enough to keep up with the demand that was projected in the region a decade ago. And that Sea Bus apparently is the great catalyst to urban growth?

The RGS is being updated right now, the decade-old document projecting to 2040 is being replaced with one projecting to 2050. All of the Municipalities are expected to sign off on it, though there are some rumblings Surrey is going to push back because they felt the other cities were not sufficiently diffident in granting them a major re-draw of the Urban Containment Boundary so they can replace forest with warehouses. One of the concerns raised by New Westminster through that process was that municipal projections/targets are being replaced with sub-regional ones that clump municipalities together, further reducing the accountability local governments have in addressing our serious housing crisis. And with strong anti-growth voices rising regionally during this local government election period, I am less confident that the order of government most able to bring in new supply is going to get the work done.

Hey Mr. Eby; we should talk.

Yes, I’m running.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 6 Comments.

I really love New Westminster, and am really proud of the work that Council and staff have done in the (almost) 8 years since I was first elected. The last two have been especially challenging, but also the most important. We’ve weathered the worst of the pandemic, and it tested the resiliency of our community, residents and businesses alike. But it also showed us the strength of our community. We made it through together by learning new ways to support each other. Now that we are getting back to the momentum we had pre-pandemic, we need to be guided by the lessons we learned  – the importance of teamwork, the value of public services, and the need for listening and compassion.

I think the City is at a critical time, as is the region, and we need a positive, hopeful, vision for where we go as a community.

As a City, we are working through an aggressive capital plan, replacing aging infrastructure like never before. At the same time, we are leading the region on addressing the housing crises (plural) and are taking bold action on climate. We are supporting the arts and renewing our urban forest. We are opening a new page on reconciliation, and creating new forms of public engagement. I don’t want us to lose that momentum, we can’t afford to stop short or turn back.

With my experience on Council, my knowledge of the City, my commitment to listening and opening up government, and with the support of Council incumbents and so many people in the community, I think I am the right person to lead New Westminster during this time.

So I am seeking the Community First New West nomination for Mayor of New Westminster.

If you read this blog, you already know who I am, what I stand for, and how seriously I take this work. During my 8 years on Council, I put so much time and energy into being an accountable and transparent elected official – every vote, every decision, every challenge we faced on Council, I wrote about here, and spoke about publicly. And I have learned from hearing your feedback, from listening to the residents, business owners, service providers and volunteers of this great community. You never stop learning in this job, and you can never stop listening.

So, things may get a little weird around here in the next few weeks, but I am not going to be using this blog site as a campaign site – campaign comms need a copy editor. There will no doubt be some references to elections and platforms and events and such, but my plan is for this to remain my place for writing about the City and the work of Council, at least until the voters make a decision on October 15th. In the meantime, I will have a campaign website here: PJNewwest.ca (just getting started!) and there will be other social media handles and such, but that kind of work will appear after the nomination meeting later this month. And as always, you can e-mail me or hit the Ask Pat button above or stop me on the street and ask me questions. I’d love to chat.

I encourage you to support and follow the website of Community First New West. There looks to be a great slate of School Board and Council candidates seeking nomination with Community First – people with positive visions for New Westminster and track records of work building this community. But those are their stories to tell, not mine.

Off to the races.

3 delegations

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

As I mentioned last blog, we had a few public delegations at Council on Monday that were notable. I don’t often write about public delegations here unless they result in direct Council action, in which case they make it into my regular Council Reports. But anyone can delegate on any topic in New West, so we often don’t know what is coming, and are not prepared to directly address the issue raised in the council meeting. It is also a weirdly pre-election political time, and as such, more of these delegations will be seen in context of October 15th. So with the benefit of a few days of reflection, I might like to look at the points raised.

First, a candidate for Mayor made his first appearance in Council chambers to ask Council to put the 2030 Olympic bid to a referendum of New Westminster residents. I, frankly, did not know how to respond to this request.

For context, there are four First Nations (Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Líl̓wat) putting together a bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics, relying heavily on existing infrastructure built for the 2010 games. They have invited the municipalities of Vancouver and Whistler to enter MOUs to define how they can work together to achieve the bid goals. New Westminster is not a party to those MOUs, we have not (yet) been invited by the host nations to enter those discussions, nor are the details of the bid established enough for us to have an informed conversation about its viability.

So when one suggests residents of New West be engaged in a referendum on this, I am not sure how we would even phrase a question without sounding profoundly colonial and setting back relationships we are respectfully trying to build with those indigenous communities on whose land we live and work, and whose land on which the broader “we” were very comfortable holding our own Olympics a decade ago without (to my knowledge) doing a referendum of Indigenous Peoples. Further, I don’t know how we would operationalize any answer (yes or no) without violating core principles of reconciliation at a time when we are building relationships. So the request was not timely, and was not something I can imagine us putting resources towards right now.

The second delegation was from a long-time Council Watcher reminding us that the Community Charter (Section 118) says a City over 50,000 people should have eight councilors, unless we have a Bylaw saying otherwise. Back in the early 2000’s New West made a decision when the population went over 50K to not add two new councilors. In 2005, the City Council of the time put a non-binding plebiscite question on the ballot, and 70% voted against an increase in council. We have not, in my time at least, had any conversation about revisiting that decision. That was 17 years ago, and now that we are over 80,000 residents, it seems reasonable for a resident to ask whether we should review that decision.

My reflex response is that I just don’t feel the public is in a place today where a strong majority sees “more elected people” as the solution to any problem. Maybe that is cynical, and I could hear an argument that more elected officials results in better and potentially more diverse representation. So am going to stay agnostic on this for now, and just look at the numbers.

There are 19 Municipalities in BC with population over 50,000. Of those, seven have 6 Councilors (37%), twelve have 8 Councilors (63%), and one has 10 Councilors (Vancouver, which has its own Charter, so it doesn’t count here). Here is how they plot in population vs. council count:

Of the seven municipalities in BC with a population larger than 50,000 and six Councilors, four have a larger population than New West (Delta, Chilliwack, Maple Ridge, and the District of North Vancouver) and two are smaller than New West (Port Coquitlam and North Vancouver City). There is one municipality with population smaller than New West with eight Councilors, and that is Prince George (which despite a current spurt in growth, has effectively the same population as it did in the 1990s).

So what I take from this is that New West in not currently anomalous in its number of councilors, but would be one of the smallest municipalities with eight if we made the shift. This, of course, doesn’t mean that the number is perfect, or that the rules the way they are set up is optimal, only that New West seems to be within the category of nominal in regards to Council count. Let the conversation in he community ensue…

Finally, we had a presentation from a representative of the Uptown BIA expressing concern about the proposed Uptown Active Transportation improvements. This followed up on a letter sent to Council by the BIA.

The current plan is the result of lengthy public and user group consultation, and addresses the point that a new High School and major park destination is not well connected to our local or regional active transportation network. Direct-as-possible routes from the Crosstown Greenway on the west (through Moody Park, already built) and east (along 200m/2 blocks of 6th street) were identified as active transportation priorities.

There are some businesses on that block of 6th Street that are concerned about the change, because there will be a reduction in street parking. This is not surprising, as separated safe cycling infrastructure is often anticipated to bring a negative impact to retail areas. This despite there being extensive evidence from around North America and the rest of the world that merchants vastly overestimate the importance of cars as the mode their shoppers use, and that safe cycling infrastructure that displaces curbside parking does not hurt adjacent businesses, and may actually be a positive.*

That said, the updates on 6th Street are going to initially be installed using temporary hardware, similar to the Room to Move installations that occurred primarily Uptown during the Pandemic summers to test out where the balance between pedestrian and car space can be adjusted. Those informed some of the more permanent installations you see now on Sixth Ave where sidewalks are being expanded. The mobility lanes will be separated by more than paint (which is required to make them safe), but in a way that we can make inexpensive changes to iterate the design to make it work better. Part of that evaluation should include impacts on the local businesses, and I hope to continue that conversation with the BIA.

* References from:
New Zealand
Ireland
Toronto
Seattle
New York
Toronto, again
Portland
Los Angeles