When Mark Sager was last mayor, water was free and we paid for music.
Jean Chrétien was at 24 Sussex, Bill Clinton was in the White House, The Spice Girls were huge, and a whopping 1.5 million Canadian households had internet service, gambling it would amount to something.
They say in life that you can never go back. Case in point: Doug McCallum in Surrey.
But you can try. Case in point again: Doug McCallum in Surrey.
Sager, District of West Vancouver mayor from 1990 to 1996, tried his first comeback in the weeks before the 2018 election and fell a starting NFL lineup short of victory votes.
On Saturday, no contest. He and a slate of four chosen ones (Peter Lambur, Sharon Thompson, Linda Watt and Scott Snider) replicated what Ken Sim and his ABC slate did in Vancouver: a sweep and the reins to govern.
How he uses his reins in his reign will be his style’s telling signature, because Sager’s pledge to “work toward consensus” is a lovely to-do but by no means a mandatory must-do. Returning councillor Nora Gambioli and former councillor Christine Cassidy need not be courted, but let’s hope.
The turnover this election on council was far from sleepy and reflected the profound municipal change provincially in Vancouver, Surrey, Victoria, Kelowna, Cranbrook and White Rock. Conventional wisdom is that people were tired of the performances and prepared to take risks. It’s likely more that they had been tired of taking risks in their local governments and just wanted a back-to-basics administration again. They shifted away from left-leaning leadership in many locales. The prevailing economic winds call for that.
What’s ahead for West Vancouver can only be a guess. In 2018 we hadn’t learned of the coronavirus; today we can’t wait to forget about it. There is no crisis issue upon this incoming government, but there are a few tricky roads just over the hill.
The first one might surprise: health care. Our system is much more broken than it at first appears. We can’t get enough young people to sign on to take care of enough old people. Our wait times are figuratively and literally killing people. And the local impact isn’t lost on municipal leaders, even if it’s a provincial jurisdiction, so they’ve started to apply the heat and will need to turn it up on Victoria, which of course is turning it up on Ottawa. The next four years will further prove the mess we’re in and mayors and councils will need to participate to ensure communities get efficient and relevant resources in place
Of course, heat conducts in each direction, and the housing heat started in Ottawa, is flowing through Victoria, and is going to hit communities to build, build, build. The NDP government is clear that plans and permitting need to accelerate or it will intervene constitutionally to do so. This is not an idle threat, because in its struggle to retain power, this housing gambit secures many of the NDP’s ridings in the province. Sager and his team are eager to get the Ambleside and Taylor Way local area plans completed, so that ought to help.
Affordability is never not an issue any longer, and notably absent from the campaign were commitments to ease the taxpayer burden. We’re amidst a permitting backlog, our infrastructure is comparably expensive thanks to geography, and we lack the commercial tax base to relent on property taxes, but this is not a time for expansive public spending.
Traffic is something to complain about and rarely something to be fixed, but this council needs to be serious about sustainable mobility in a way it hasn’t, particularly as an effort on addressing affordability. Sager wants a last- and first-mile mini-bus service to and from homes. (I’d give serious consideration to free rush-hour public transit as a pilot project.)
Before anything, though, some family therapy on its own working dynamic. In the last council, personal fissures paralyzed any progress on policy priorities, with a cold energy in the room and on Zoom. Their laconic meetings need a longer consent agenda and a shorter duration.
Please, the public deserves a performance with more than occasional seven-part harmony.
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV as well as vice-president, editorial, Glacier Media Group, the North Shore News’ parent company. He is also a West Vancouverite.
