Rents continue to rise, home ownership is a fantasy for many and random assaults on citizens have reached almost five per day, an unheard of trend in the 34 years Police Chief Adam Palmer has been a cop.
All of this has happened under the watch of Mayor Kennedy Stewart.
Is it all his fault?
Hardly, but the mayor knows citizens need a political scapegoat.
Stewart will be the first to say that senior governments have a role to play in turning some of these issues around, particularly related to housing, homelessness and overdose deaths.
Funds for extending the Broadway subway to the University of B.C. also have to come from senior governments.
At the municipal level, the city has responded to the frenetic real estate market with an empty homes tax. To address homelessness, the city has added up to $30 million to secure homes and shelter for people.
It was the mayor’s idea to triple the empty homes tax, it was his idea to unlock the $30 million for homelessness and it was his idea to formally push for decriminalization of small amounts of illicit drugs.
He has also said many times recently — at news conferences and in a state of the city address to the Greater Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Board of Trade — that he alone secured $1 billion in funds from senior governments for up to 10,000 units of housing.
As he heads into his last calendar year as mayor before the October 2022 election, Stewart sat down with this reporter at city hall Wednesday to discuss some of these issues and others in a year-end interview.
The following is a condensed and edited version of some of the conversation, with a focus on taxes, the overdose death crisis and another possible bid for the Winter Olympics in 2030.
For the better part of a year, you told citizens that you didn’t want a property tax hike for 2022 to be higher than five per cent. In the budget vote last week, the tax hike agreed upon by you and five other councillors was 6.35 per cent. How do you explain that to the public?
Well, first, I'll say I'm really proud of the budget. I think we hit a good balance there. It allows us to keep moving on housing. Our processing times [for building permits and licences] are speeding up and that takes investment. Then there’s all our investments in social housing. But really, the focus of it was climate change and public safety. The average homeowner will pay an extra 100 bucks a year. So that's really the question: Is that investment worth it? And I would say yes. If you look at public sentiment, public safety was I think the theme of this budget. We fully funded the police, which included the arbitration decision [for police wage increases], which was a lot higher than we budgeted for.
One per cent of that property tax hike was connected to a new climate tax. You said it should generate $9 million per year. Why add another tax for people when the cost of living continues to rise?
I talked to Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun about what happened to his city [with the flood] and surrounding cities like Merritt. Climate change mitigation is essential. So $9 million a year of new investments into both mitigation and emissions reductions would bring things like electric vehicle chargers and the retrofitting of community centres. So when we have heat domes in the future, people have a place to go.
I think many people were confused when Green Party Coun. Adriane Carr introduced the climate tax amendment at the budget debate. You told me the previous week that you would be introducing it. What happened there?
It was a chairing thing.
A chairing thing?
Yeah. So when I chair a meeting, I actually can't enter debates. So I'd already ceded the chair once to councillor [Melissa] De Genova when I introduced changes to the police budget. It just gets to be too much to chair and do the amendments at the same time. So I was really grateful councillor Carr did that.
But you must have known that would happen when it came time to introduce your climate tax amendment. Some people might say this is just politics, and you didn’t want to wear this tax and instead had a Green Party councillor do the work for you.
No, not at all. I’m really proud of it. I'm glad councillor Carr did it. She explained it very well and it passed. I stand beside this 100 per cent. I know from my days in Ottawa [as an MP], that no one ever really remembers who introduces what, it's just that it gets done.
When you include the 6.35 per cent tax hike for next year, property taxes have cumulatively gone up almost 30 per cent since you were elected mayor in October 2018. How do you explain that increase to the public?
We listen to what people want to invest in and we invest in it. Again, this budget equates to $100 a year for the average homeowner whose home values are just around $1.8 to $2 million. We spend over a million dollars a day here in policing, and it's almost entirely labour-based. Wages are going up faster than inflation.
The BC Coroners Service released another report last week on the number of people who have died from overdoses. More than 1,700 people died between January and October. You’ve formally asked for decriminalization, but the federal government doesn’t seem to be interested. What more can you do?
Decriminalization is the main thing we can do as a city. For a safe supply of drugs, we can work with partners but there's not much we can do other than provide space. It's really up to the doctors and the federal and provincial governments on that one. But the decriminalization application would be held by the city.
At this table, I had a two-hour discussion with Carolyn Bennett, the incoming federal minister of mental health and addictions. I said you've got to act on this. I was assured that she's not a minister that says no. I told her we've had this [application in to Health Canada] since July. We’ve had some good conversations, but I told her you just have to sign the bottom [of the application]. We are ready to go. And the most important thing with our application is it has the support of the medical community and the police.
Last week, you joined Whistler Mayor Jack Crompton and four Indigenous nations — the Lilwat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh — in signing a memorandum of understanding for a possible bid to bring the Winter Olympics here in 2030. Is that bid going to happen?
For me, the announcement was really important for reconciliation. The fact that it’s an Indigenous-led exploration is what was key for me and Whistler Mayor Jack Crompton. We both love it and happy to sign on as partners. But it's four plus two, right? It's four nations inviting two municipalities, whereas in the past it was the other way around. So reconciliation is the important part for me, and then as partners we’ll decide whether to go forward on a bid.
There will be a formal vote here in council sometime next year. I'll come to council with a recommendation as to whether we go forward or not. Now that we've signed this [agreement] with the nations, the Canadian Olympic Committee and Paralympic Committee can actually do a feasibility study, which they're doing right now, which will tell us what the costs would be. I didn't vote for the last one in the referendum. So I have a healthy skepticism here. It has to make sense for the city. That will be decided by council. That's not a decision that I make alone.
So you don’t see another plebiscite coming like the one to decide the 2010 Winter Olympics?
Saying that we want a plebiscite now would basically say we can't do it. It's such a compressed time period [before the bid deadline]. However, the nations will make their own decision, and they may have different community decision-making processes, and I think that's important.
