New West Couns. Fontaine, Minhas to host 'Councillor Cafe'

Fancy a cup of coffee to kickstart a conversation?

It's an initiative Couns. Daniel Fontaine and Paul Minhas are hoping will take off in the new year as the duo launches Councillor Cafe events, with the first one slated to be held on Tuesday, Jan. 10 at the Century House cafeteria. 

"The concept is to try and ensure that City Hall isn't at City Hall, that it's in the neighbourhood and in the community. Coun. Minhas and I sat down, brainstormed to talk about what we could actually do to connect more with people within the community, as opposed to having people always come to City Hall," Fontaine tells The Anchor.

Fontaine says he wanted to give the idea a shot after informally doing this at various New West locations over the past few months. 

"I've been setting up shop at Century House for a couple of hours. I've been testing it a little bit, I've done it at Royal City Centre, and I've been doing in little pop-up spaces around the city," says Fontaine. 

Fontaine and Minhas will host the events, which will include two versions. 

"The Councillor Cafes will have a resident edition, and we're also looking to set up a business edition. On the resident's side, we will be testing—over the next three months—we're going to be doing six different Councillor Cafes," explains Fontaine, who notes that most of the first locations have been set up. They include spots like Century House in Uptown and Take THE Cake in Queensborough.

"We're in the final concept stages of the Councillor Cafe business edition, and we're looking at likely having ones for Downtown [New West], Uptown, we're looking at having one for Queensborough, and a bit more of an invite thing where we invite local businesses to come in."

He's also hoping the event will draw people from various walks of life. 

"We're hoping it'll attract a different age group," says Fontaine, who adds he'd love to see some younger New Westies also get involved in municipal politics. "We want a broad variety of age groups to come; we thought coffee houses would be good... so we're thinking about all the ways to engage the younger crowd, older crowd, different neighbourhoods, different times of the day."

Fontaine says they'll be keeping things simple: bringing their laptops to the location of the day so that they can do some work for a few hours. 

"If people want to come by, they want to just say hi, they want to sit down for a bit and chat about something that's of concern to them, or even if they want to encourage us to bring a motion to council—something that needs to be debated or discussed—we'll be able to do that."

The Anchor asked if the four other councillors—Community First members Tasha Henderson, Jaimie McEvoy, Ruby Campbell, and Nadine Nakagawa—would be at the event.

"They're absolutely invited if they wish to come, so Coun. Minhas and I will be co-hosting it. If they want to drop in, we'd love it if they drop in and pull up a chair and grab a cup of coffee. Anyone is welcome from the community, including our council colleagues," he explained, saying that this is not a New West Progressives event, but an event that he and Minhas are putting together as a pair of city councillors. 

"Whether you're New West Progressives or Community First or nothing, or independent, you're all welcome to come. It's kind of like a mini council office set-up at a coffee shop...I mean, if people want to talk about their partisan stuff, they're more than welcome to. But we primarily are focusing in on city-related issues, city-related policies, stuff that's happening at City Hall, and it's an opportunity for people not to have to go up to City Hall."

As for what kind of coffee Fontaine enjoys? "I'm going to be ultra-Canadian and ultra-boring, but I'm a Timmy's [Tim Horton's] guy. Medium coffee, two creams, and a sweetener," he said, noting that he was looking forward to trying a variety of different coffees at the various locations. 

The full list of dates and times of the Councillor Cafe events will be updated on the NWP's events page as locations are confirmed. They will also appear on the city's calendar.