A chat with New West mayoral hopeful Patrick Johnstone

We’ve had a chance to take a look at the local platforms, and now it’s time to chat with the three people vying for the job of mayor of New Westminster.

Each mayoral candidate was asked five questions that touched on themes related to diversity and inclusion, housing, construction and city development, and the arts. None of the questions were provided in advance.

This was followed by two questions I had specifically for them, plus a fun question inspired by Twitter user @maybe2mrrow.

These are the full transcriptions of these interviews, with some light editing for clarity.

A variety of voices

RR: The city has a large millennial population (27%); ethnically, 36% of New Westies speak a language other than English or French. Examples include Punjabi, Tagalog, Cantonese and Mandarin.

There appears to be disengagement municipally: of the 52,222 people eligible to vote in 2018, just 28% showed up to the polls—that’s less than the municipal election prior.

If elected, what three things would you do to ensure that City Hall and local politics are a welcoming, diverse, and accessible space for the variety of people who make up the city of New Westminster?

PJ: Wow, that is a big topic. Thank you for that. I mean, open and accessible is something I’ve always been concentrating on through my eight years on council. I’ve been trying to have conversations with the wider community about what happens in City Hall, and I really put an effort into both online and in-person, actually leading conversations in the community—so that people can understand what’s happening—and that’s work I love to do. It’s exciting work for me to do. We also have a public engagement strategy in the city, and I think a major part of that is recognizing we have not done a good job as a city, reaching out to the diversity of our community.

One example we’ve tried this year: election information is available on our website in six different languages, and we’re trying to do more of that work to make sure we’re able to translate materials to people’s languages, that people are more comfortable with. Even if people speak English, sometimes it’s easier to explain complex concepts in their own languages. We have 30 different languages spoken by staff inside city hall. When people are having a language barrier in communications, they can reach out to a staff member, they can come in, act as a translator, and that’s really important work.

And you’re right: it’s not just Tagalog, Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese. They’re the second-most common languages in New Westminster, but there are a lot of people who are speaking Farsi, Swahili, other languages.

The other part is, speaking to anyone under the age of 30 about what’s going on in the city is a continuing challenge. And I try to do [as] much of that as I can on social media. I try to be accessible as I can on social media because that’s where people get information and their news right now. I appreciate the work New West Anchor is doing because, part of the story, over the last eight years on council, there were four weekly newspapers, now there’s only one. So having an online portable that helps to connect with people is really important.

And some of the efforts we had in engagement we were doing very well with our public engagement strategy. Bringing in people to take part in our budgeting process, going out into the street to actually talk—our staff going out and setting up booths in malls and at community events to talk to people. That was great work, but it kind of got set aside a bit by COVID. We have to reboot that work, and we did a lot of great work this summer, and something I’m really passionate about. But that is an ongoing effort.

Housing

RR:  It’s common on some of the Facebook groups and the r/NewWest Reddit thread to see people asking for any leads on a place to rent.

In one instance, someone looking for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a rental budget of $1,600-$1,800 said they go to viewings but are often beaten out by people who make more than them or are coupled up. “I’m starting to feel pretty down,” they said. So, what’s the solution?

PJ: I’m really proud of the work that we have done in the city. We’ve built more purpose rental in the city than in any other city in the Lower Mainland—except in Vancouver, in raw numbers—but we are way ahead of them per capita. Even in raw numbers, we’re ahead of any other municipality in the Lower Mainland on building new purpose-built rental. We’ve also done that without knocking down the most affordable rental we have in the city. The most affordable rental for most people is the house they’re in right now, or the old apartment they’re in right now, and we’ve done it without demovictiting or renovicting those old apartments.

We’d actually brought in really aggressive bylaws to protect people from demoviction and renoviction. I think that’s important work and I wish the rest of the region had kept up with us on this because we may not have been in the rental crisis we are in.

Some of the moves that are coming from David Eby, announced [Sept. 28], are going to protect the existing rentals we have because it is the most affordable rental in the city. And the other side of it is the true affordable housing that the market’s not going to provide, which we need support from BC Housing to get built.

The city has done great work at getting every dollar of BC Housing money available to the city approved in the city, and we’re getting it built in the city. I’m hoping that money increases; I’m hoping we have more opportunities to get that type of housing built, and I believe it’s important.

We also have the next step of people getting into the market, and people starting to try to find their way into the market; young families trying to find housing. And I think that’s the next step: focusing on the missing middle, affordable housing, infill density work. We brought some new changes in with the OCP [Official community plan] in 2017, but we haven’t had a lot of take-up on that type of construction, partly because the market has changed since our 2017 OCP, so it… doesn’t pencil out to build that type of thing.

We need to look at where we are right now and we need to simplify those processes so it’s easier to get those types of places built quickly.

Bureaucratic procedures

RR: All three mayoral candidates agree something has to be done about permit processes and the other bureaucratic red tape at City Hall. What specifically would you do with the assistance of Community First to fix those problems?

PJ: There’s two things in there: in order to explain the processes, and create new, more efficient processes, we need more staff. It’s a bit of a vicious circle; it’s no surprise the city is dealing with staff shortages, every municipality is. So are BC Hydro, BC Ferries, and every organization right now. We’re going through this Great Resignation around COVID, and it’s an interesting time for our community.

I think we are doing the work, but we need to make sure that it’s an inviting place to work, and that we are a city of choice, especially for people in planning and people in engineering. We are a city of choice because we’re doing interesting, new stuff, and a planner can come into New Westminster and do real cutting-edge work on community planning.

Providing that kind of option and a variety of work, not the boring work where you’re a small cog in a big machine. You’re actually our person who gets to actually do different things.

Supporting staff in that work is a major part of making sure we get new staff and retain them. And yes, processes are difficult: I’ve worked inside a city hall and I know that every process we go through at City Hall is there for a reason. It was there because of an issue that was being addressed at the time. The only solution for us right now is to be more lean and more nimble in how we address a lot of these. I like to use the example of our business licence bylaws where we have 160 different types of business licences in the city of New Westminster—that is too many—only 40 for retail. If we create those complexities, for probably very good reason at the time, well there’s always a good time to step back, look at it and say, “What do we actually need to do? What businesses do we have to actually worry about addressing risks related to these businesses? What do we just need to get them in and out of the door really quickly?”

Our economic development department is working on this. They were a group that was really challenged during COVID. They did try to keep businesses in New Westminster informed about what they needed to do during COVID, so they could maintain, they could stay open, they could do their work. We have more business in New Westminster, more licencees in New Westminster now than we did before COVID; we did not lose business in New Westminster, we actually gained them. The department did a really good job of reaching out; they did 3,000 personal contacts of business owners to make sure people knew what they needed to do to stay open, what the health changes were, and what support they might need from the city.

Now that I think we’ve gotten a little bit past the challenges related to health restrictions around COVID, they’re definitely concentrating on that next step, which is simplifying our processes, making it easier for enterprises to set up in New Westminster, and making sure that our codes make sense.

Construction

RR:  It’s not much of a surprise to see construction cones/pylons up when you’re out and about. Admittedly, there’s a lot of infrastructure that’s aging in the city—easiest example to point to is the pipe system along Columbia Street that Metro Vancouver has been working on.

Other examples include the Agnes Greenway and the towers going up along the river.

Such change and required repair is inevitable, but how do you balance the needs of fixing our city’s infrastructure so it’s safe…while also ensuring the ability to travel through the city (walk, ride, bus, etc.) isn’t negatively impacted?

PJ: Thank you for that question. Yes, I have heard about a lot of construction fatigue downtown, and there have been a lot of overlapping projects going on, both new development projects to bring new housing, and projects to support the infrastructure the people who live in downtown need. I hear the fatigue, and I think we’re getting over a bump of it right now. There’s been a couple of very large projects: you mentioned the Metro Vancouver sewer line project, and I think we’re getting over that bump. I think we’re going to be in a better place soon, but that said, there’s a couple of things I think about when I hear about that construction fatigue.

One: I’m concerned—and I raised this at council—I went through a discussion earlier in our council term about how we do evening construction noise variances, and I think we often do construction noise variants to relieve traffic issues at rush hour. We don’t want them to be working during rush hour because it’s going to cause traffic backups for people driving through our city. To me, I think the livability of the people who live in this city is more important than the ability of people, regionally, to drive through our city twice a day at rush hour, I do. So I think we need to rebalance that a little bit, how we allocate those noise variants, those noise construction bylaws, I think we need to balance out a little better with more emphasis on livability.

There’s a second part I want to talk about, which is in our Master Transportation Plan. We prioritize pedestrians and active transportation over cars, but it doesn’t seem like we do that around our construction sites. When we do road closures, when we allow hoarding of construction sites on city sidewalks and close the sidewalk in order for the construction site to go on for a year, that does not tell me that we’re prioritizing pedestrians. We’ve prioritized cars. I want to see us shift the priorities, and how we do that. I don’t want hoarding to take up sidewalks for a year. I want to make sure that our traffic management plans emphasize the safety of vulnerable road users. That’s a piece of work we have to do; it’s baked into the culture and idea of our Master Transportation Plan, I just don’t think we’ve been doing it effectively.

New West Arts

RR: The plan is to fix Massey Theatre to “minimum viability,” so that the building can be safe and operational. Massey repairs have been talked about as far back as 2013. Meantime, 100 Braid St.—aka Braid St. Studios, is still searching for another space to operate in.

These are just two examples, but it speaks to the idea that the arts tend to fall lower on the list of priorities. What would you and your slate do to ensure that artistic spaces and initiatives are properly taken care of?

PJ: We invested in the Anvil Centre, which is an arts and culture hub in downtown, with an incredible New Media Gallery, with public gallery space, with a new theatre. And we partnered with Massey Theatre Society [MTS] to operate that space. I think the Anvil Centre can be a more vibrant hub. There’s some work we can do around the edges to make it a more inviting place, but I think that’s a significant investment we’ve made in the arts.

The new arts strategy is a significant new step forward in making sure that we’re putting local artists forward, and the city is doing its work in supporting local artists. Sometimes we have to be the leader [on issues], and sometimes we just have to be the willing partner, and I think our art strategy is that.

The Massey Theatre was a significant undertaking by the city. It was a significant investment to have an Uptown arts hub, and the work the Massey Theatre is doing activating that space is spectacular. It’s a good example of incredible partnership between the city and people who do that work. Minimum viability is a model where we’re working on the upgrades to the theatre we have to do, and what that means is we took over a 50-year-old building, and we need to make sure it meets current building codes, current seismic codes, fire codes, and it does not. We need to invest that money right away, because this is now a city asset. We have to make sure the building itself meets all codes and is a safe and viable place, and an efficient place to operate.

There will be changes and there already have been changes inside the operation of the building, and that work is really a partnership between us and Massey Theatre Society. They’ve had conversations about grant opportunities they have from both the city and from external agencies and senior governments to help program the space internally. We’ve got to get that building up to where it is so it’s going to be a stable building for the next 25 years or more.

We’ll do that work first, and then we’ll have the “nice-to-have” after negotiations with MTS and understanding what it needs in order to really activate that space. The commitment the city has made to the arts over the last eight years is a significant capital investment and a significant staffing investment. Again, I’m really proud of that work.

Specific questions

RR: We’ll move onto specific questions. I have two for you.  

In the Community First platform, there’s a point about nurturing health equity: secure and improve access to affordable and nutritious food with focus on urban food systems.

I wrote a story about the Greater Vancouver Food Bank’s New West group needing a new space; where they are right now is creating problems in efficient distribution, meaning challenges handing out food. While GVFB has told me it’s not at that point yet where it would have to consider shutting down, it doesn’t want to get there. It’s also mentioned having talked to the city about getting help finding a new space; nothing has come out of that.

What tangible commitments can you and your party offer to ensure you don’t lose partners like the GVFB which helps get nutritious food to a variety of people in the community?

PJ: All of our food banks and multiple organizations that do food banks in New Westminster have been challenged, first by COVID with space, and then in the post-COVID time they’re still challenged with trying to find space to predictably operate. There’s also the food hub operating in Queensborough, which is having the exact same problem. We have staff in the city who have been trying to actively attack this problem and have actively tried to find them proper space to do this. They have specific needs and they need some consistent space.

We can’t keep on moving the food bank around. It’s really hard for people to try to find where their food bank is supposed to be next week if they need that support. And I don’t know what that looks like; honestly, I think if there was an easy answer, we would have already found it. But I think supporting consistent and weather-protected space for the organizations is really important, and it’s something really pressing right now as we’re going into winter.

RR: You’ve talked about how happy you are with the work you’ve done on rental policies, but in a recent council meeting, the topic of below-market housing came up. The first example that comes to mind is Holy Trinity Cathedral, in which Fr. Richard Legget said having no below-market housing in the project was “one of his greatest disappointments as a vicar.”

Why is it seemingly so difficult to introduce below-market housing, and how would you and your slate fill in those gaps?

PJ: A simple reason why Holy Trinity Cathedral [HTC] did not have non-market housing is because BC Housing did not approve the funding to do it. At BC Housing, there are so many requests right now for funding, for new, affordable housing. They can only approve 20% of the applications they get, and unfortunately HTC did not meet that threshold. So we had to make a decision whether we were going to have housing on a SkyTrain [line] with all the heritage conservation benefits and public use benefits that came with that site or not, despite it not having affordable housing in it. I think we made the right decision.

The things we can do—three things I’ll say we can do—one is a continuation of what we’re doing: make sure when people apply for housing money in New Westminster, from BC Housing or from the federal government, that we are sending the signal to the non-profit providers that their projects are going to get approved. That we can give them a clear pathway and timeline to approvals, that they don’t get caught up in approval timeline problems, and so they can be confident that we are going to get the affordable housing built if they get the money to get the affordable housing in the city.

The second part is really land. We are constrained for land, and we’ve already given a couple of pieces of land over to affordable housing providers that they’ve built affordable housing on. But we have a very limited land base in New Westminster. A community trust model is something we’re looking at where we can actually provide a different model of land ownership with the city, can open up more land to affordable housing, and I’m looking forward to doing that work next year.

RR: This is the fun question: there’s a local Twitter user who has been comparing the mayoral candidates’ sock game. If you were elected as mayor, what would be the print on your socks you would wear to your first council meeting as the leader of our city?

(A note that Johnstone tried to show his socks on camera, which appeared to be shades of blue and yellow, but because his Zoom background was blurred, the socks were also blurred.)

RR: Your socks are being blurred out!

PJ: It’ll be a mystery, the mystery socks! Wow, what would be the first print on my first pair? I don’t know, I don’t have time to buy new socks with me now in the election, I don’t have time to buy—listen, the first socks are going to be the first set of socks that are going to come out of the laundry. I don’t have time to go sock shopping—OK, well, despite the fancy colourful socks, I have a penchant for hand-knit wool socks. They are so hard to get, my mom used to make them for me, and they’re just so comfortable.