Common sense solutions and the City of Port Coquitlam, with Mayor Brad West

Greater Vancouver Board of Trade President and CEO, Bridgitte Anderson, is joined by Port Coquitlam Mayor, Brad West, to discuss how the city has been able to streamline municipal permitting processes and attract newcomers.

What is GVPOD - Greater Vancouver's Business Podcast?

GVPOD is the podcast of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. President and CEO Bridgitte Anderson talks to leaders in the business community about the challenges and opportunities they experience, as well as issues impacting our region.

0:00:00.0 BRIDGITTE: Welcome to GVPOD, Greater Vancouver's business podcast, unpacking the challenges and opportunities facing our region. I'm Bridgitte Anderson, President and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. We're continuing our series on regional leadership today with Port Coquitlam. Mayor Brad West. Mayor West, thank you for joining us to...

0:00:21.3 BRAD: Thank you very much for having me.

0:00:23.1 BRIDGITTE: So, let's start with a little of a look back, maybe you became involved in politics as a city councillor in your mid-20s, and then you became the youngest mayor in Port Coquitlam history in 2018. Some may say, why on earth would you choose a path like that at such a young age, but tell me, what was the interest in public office?

0:00:46.4 BRAD: Yeah, sometimes I ask myself that question. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. No, it's been incredibly rewarding. And for me, I really saw serving in elected office as an extension of community involvement, I know often politics, politicians being elected gets degraded as maybe not the most noble of professions anymore, but the way I was raised... My family was very involved in the community in Port Coquitlam, lived in Port Coquitlam my entire life and family had been here for a long time, and we were involved in a number of different community groups and minor sports, hockey and lacrosse and baseball, and serving your community in elected office was always something that was talked about as an extension of that work of being involved in the life of the community it’s another way to serve people to be involved. And so that was sort of the way in which I was raised in. Those conversations were all around me growing up, we knew a number of city councillors as well, because these are not people who you elect and never see, they’re people who coached the hockey team. My sister was involved in Girl Guides, and one of the city councillors was a leader in Girl Guides in Port Coquitlam. I came to know a lot of city councillors, not as people who are on a pedestal, but were people are just like us, and so it always was something that interested me, and then in 2008, when I was first elected as a city councillor, the election in Port Coquitlam saw a number of incumbents, not seek reelection, and I was 23 at the time, and I thought it was a great opportunity to put my name forward and to see someone who was a bit younger or maybe a lot younger come on to council because council had largely been folks who were retired, and I thought that it was important to have another perspective on the council, and so I ran and probably knocked on just about every door in the city and was elected.

0:03:23.4 BRIDGITTE: One of the other things that I think makes you stand apart as mayor is how vocal you are on really a breadth of issues, whether we're talking about housing, whether we're talking about some of the protests that we've seen over the pandemic, and even... You have, on occasion, spoken out on decisions that other municipalities have taken, why are you so vocal, what prompts you to speak out where other mayors maybe choose not to?

0:03:56.2 BRAD: Probably a little bit is just in my DNA to be honest, and I've never shied away from sharing my opinion, and I respect that some people will agree with it, and some people disagree with that, and that's what makes our democracy work is people having different opinions. I have a bit of a dim view of the state of politics generally, it seems to have become very scripted, very robotic almost, and obviously, being an elected official and getting to interact with a lot of elected officials, I often hear them share with me their private views on things “well, I don't think that's right, or they should be doing this”, and I often wonder, you know, why won't you say anything? Particularly on really critical issues that are impacting the quality of life of your residents, and this is where the game of politics gets played.

0:04:56.5 BRIDGITTE: Why do you think that is, Mayor? Because I would tend to agree that a lot of what we see in media and social media is really tamped down, why do you think there's a hesitation for people in public office to be more candid?

0:05:12.6 BRAD: Well, I think that the hesitation comes from not wanting to upset the apple cart, particularly when other levels of government have some of the purse strings at their disposal, it may be a little bit of a unwritten rule that you might get on a list that you don't wanna be on if you are too critical and maybe that will impact you in some way, but more to the point, I think that there's just a real kind of go along to get along attitude in the politics, and that seems to take precedence over being more vocal or being more authentic in terms of your actual views, than I think it should, so it's hard to get every elected official on the couch and play psychoanalyst and figure why it is the way it is, but I just think that in general, the political culture that we have really prioritizes being a good little soldier and doing what you're told and not going and shaking things up too much, and that's... For me, that's just not the way I'm built. And so again, there's pluses and minuses with that, but this is who I am, and I can't pretend to be someone I'm not.

0:06:54.5 BRIDGITTE: Well, the other piece of serving in public office, politics is one piece of that, but policy is another, and it is quite different from politics, so when you look at those policy decisions and some of the issues that your region, your municipality is really grappling with, we've been speaking to some other local mayors and we've been talking about housing and transportation and reconciliation, the cost of doing business. What would you say are some of the biggest issues facing Port Coquitlam right now?

0:07:26.2 BRAD: I think the biggest issue for our residents without question right now is the cost of living, and that is not a specific municipal issue per se, but if you were to ask anyone on the street... What is it that they think about? What are they struggling with? What keeps them up at night? It's gonna be the cost of living, and I can relate because it's the thing that my wife and I talk about all the time.

0:07:56.2 BRIDGITTE: You have a young family, so you're dealing with the same affordability issues as many others.

0:08:01.0 BRAD: For sure. And I think that maybe that's one thing that does set me apart a little bit, and this... There's no slight on my colleagues, it's just the reality of being at a different stage in life, I don't have to ask someone about, hey... What's the real challenge right now? Because I'm experiencing it myself. Childcare is exceedingly expensive. We have a five-year-old and we have a 10-month-old, my wife is on the mat leave right now, we're currently having a conversation and doing the calculation about like, does it make sense for her to go back to work? What will she earn if she goes back to work, versus how much will it cost us to find full-time daycare for... At that point, it would be a one-year-old son. And does it make sense for us as a family. Those are the types of conversations people are having all over the place, and so that cost of living is a real challenge, and it reveals itself in so many different ways, housing, childcare, the cost of doing business. I talked to our small local businesses in Port Coquitlam and the challenges that they're facing as well. So, to me, in this moment, that is the number one concern that's on people's mind.

0:09:24.8 BRIDGITTE: So, what is your approach and your council’s approach to some of these really vexing problems? Like housing and the cost of doing business for particularly small and medium sized businesses.

0:09:37.7 BRAD: So, my general philosophy is that we have to do everything that we can, recognizing that we ourselves will not be able to solve all of these really challenging broad issues that are impacting not just Port Coquitlam but probably every city and community across our country. So, it's like, what can we do? And let's do it, and let's not talk about doing it. Let's actually do it. And so, I'll give you a couple of examples. When it comes to supporting local businesses, we've done, I think have really set ourselves apart and really distinguished ourselves by our approach, and it's really been like a cut through the red tape, keep it simple, and keep a practical approach to a whole number of things, so there's lots of discussion rate about using public space and expanded patios…

0:10:37.6 BRIDGITTE: I’m smiling, because of your comments that you were inviting those Vancouver businesses to come to Port Coquitlam when Vancouver was dealing with some issues around the expanded patio program.

0:10:49.3 BRAD: Hey, a big part of my job is promoting our city, and so I invite any business to come check us out because seriously though, we've taken the approach that we want this to happen in... Not just in theory, and then this is one of the things that I often find in government is like We devise programs that allow for certain things to happen theoretically, but then make them so complicated, so onerous and so expensive that no one can actually execute on them, and so you are right. So you say with a lot of fanfare, you say, Oh, you can do this now in our city, and people are like, Oh, that's great, and then it's always the fine print, right. And I talk to businesses all the time about this, so you get this announcement, you hear, it sounds great, go to try and access it, whether it be a program or maybe support, and this was, I think, a big issue with the supports that other levels of government were announcing during the pandemic as it sounded great, and then it was like it was hell for a business to be able to actually access it because it was so complicated and there was so much fine print, and so just as the patio as an example, we made it one form, it's a one-stop shop, you don't have to talk to 500 different people at the city to get it done, you talk to one person, you fill out one form, there's no fee and off you go, and that's the approach. To me, it's just common sense. It's just like, What is it that you think you are protecting people from by making having a patio so onerous... What is the fear? And I've talked about this, I think the number one killer of good ideas and creativity in our cities is liability, the fear of liability, the fear of risk, and these doomsday scenarios that people conjure up that are very unlikely to happen, but are used as a reason to say no to things. We saw this again, we were... Myself and my friend, Linda Buchanan from the city of North Van, who you spoke to, we often argue about who was the first city to allow drinking in public parks, I think we were within a week of each other, but you know that was something we did in Port Coquitlam and we turned it around and did in two weeks, we didn't have to study it for two years.

0:13:25.7 BRIDGITTE: It makes you wonder why some municipalities take so long to get to decision... Right?

0:13:29.9 BRAD: I just think we are elected to make decisions, and also I've said this too, like if we make the wrong decision on something, it's not beneath me to say, You know what, we tried this, we got it wrong. We're going to adjust. There seems to be just this fear of making decisions, and so let's just rag the puck and do nothing or talk about things for years and years, I think it frustrates the hell out of people, and I think they'd rather you just make a decision. And if you need to adjust, then adjust, but for God sakes, let’s make a decision and get on with things.

0:14:12.7 BRIDGITTE: Certainly what our members are telling us, I think when you say onerous and you talk about some of the red tape, we have 21 municipalities in our region and we have issues that face all of our municipalities, whether we're talking about housing or talking about sustainability, it is increasingly, these are becoming regional issues, how can we foster more collaboration between municipalities to get out of the silos and think as a region?

0:14:44.0 BRAD: This has got be one of the biggest challenges that we have, and at times we've shown the capacity to do it, for instance, on ride-hailing the region was able to come together and come up with a regime that allowed for ride hailing.

0:15:06.1 BRIDGITTE: It took some time, but it's true, the region got there.

0:15:08.6 BRAD: Some time, right. And it took too much time, and just a little plug for our region, or our sub-region, I should say, the Tri-Cities, the rest of the region was kind of stumbling in the dark for a while trying to figure it out, and we actually came together really quickly with Coquitlam and Port Moody and the other, the two villages and said, Okay, we'll do a Tri-Cities one Tri-Cities mobile business license. Done. But eventually, you're right, the region was able to do that, we should be able to do that on way more things. And I wish I could pinpoint why we're not able to get there. I get every city wants to hold on to what it believes is its jurisdiction and authorities, but we gotta start thinking more like our people, our residents think, because I think most people who live in Port Coquitlam go do business in Burnaby and Surrey and Vancouver. Maybe go access a recreation facility somewhere else, because there's a real cool thing that they have in Delta, so they go check that out, our people are not bound by these kind of artificial city boundaries that we have.

0:16:31.5 BRIDGITTE: Even our members are not. And we see that so much through the members of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, that they may operate in a city outside of the city of Vancouver and they live in another municipality, nobody thinks when they get to a certain boundary that they're going into a different municipality.

0:16:48.7 BRAD: Yeah, no, you're totally right. And so there is a lot of work that could be done to harmonize various municipal regulations, particularly when it comes to business. Again, just on the business licensing side of things, requiring multiple business licenses, if you're a trades person, for instance.

0:17:14.8 BRIDGITTE: Adds cost for consumers, it slows down businesses, and when we are trying to attract investment to our region, it is a barrier.

0:17:25.1 BRAD: And on the housing side too, we're not that different, the various cities in our region, but some of the different regulations when it comes to housing, you would think that you might be on a different planet between this city and that city, and so I would like to say that we can kind of organically come together and make this happen. But my honest assessment is, I think this is probably where a level of government like the province needs to force the issue rather than say, Well, we really encourage you to kinda come together and figure it out because the province has been encouraging local government to do that for decades, and it hasn't quite worked so I know there's a lot of discussion right now about what is the problem is gonna do vis à vis local government's powers and authorities with respect to the housing approving development. I think one of the things they should be looking at is, if not encouraging, forcing more harmonization across the region when that comes to the various requirements and regulations, because at least then if you're on the side of things, you know what you're dealing with. There's not this rolling of the dice, uncertainty or surprises because you've crossed the street and you're doing business in a different city and everything all of a sudden it's completely different from where you were, so... I think there's a lot that could be done there. I do think it's gonna take a push rather than a wish.

0:19:14.9 BRIDGITTE: Well, we've got a municipal election coming up, and you have said You're going to run again, I can hear that you're passionate about a number of issues, what are you setting as your biggest priorities for the election?

0:19:30.4 BRAD: I am running again, I'm really looking forward to the election, I'm one of those weird people that do like election campaigns I hear from some colleagues, who are like, Oh, the elections coming... Oh, it's gonna be awful. I don't really do anything different in the election than I do every single day as mayor. I love getting out and talking to people, hearing what they think, getting their feedback, good and bad, and reflecting upon that, so I'm really looking forward to the election campaign. I think for me, it is in large part continuing to see through the vision that I've set with Council in the first term, and that really is around first making Port Coquitlam the best place in the province to raise a family, that that really has been a huge priority of mine, because we have so many young families coming to our community, it's a fast-growing demographic, and so putting families at the forefront of our decision making, and that means investments in playgrounds and amenities and recreation services, and all of those boring things that the municipality is actually responsible for... So I've kind of... The way I've kind of summed that up is our focus has been on getting the basics right, and so that is delivering on our responsibilities as a municipality to our tax payers, and so that has meant significant investment in roads and water, sewer and garbage pickup and recycling in city cleanliness and snow removal, all of again, those things that put together are foundational to how the city operates, how people feel about the city, and so there's gonna continue to be a big focus on that. I've also really made a point of trying to make Port Coquitlam the easiest place in the province to start a business and to create a job, and that has been ongoing work over the last number of years, and we've really made some positive strides to simplifying processes, getting rid of the maze of, go talk to this department, then go talk to that department, and then go talk to that department. One Stop. And that's really paid dividends. We've seen significant employment growth in PoCo over the last couple of years, we've had some very large employers like Saputo, moved to invest hundreds of millions of dollars and state-of-the-art technology bring really well-paying jobs, family supporting jobs with them. And the benefit of that just there's so many spin-offs, not only does it benefit the city in terms of revenue that gets generated, the benefits to our local businesses as those employees go for lunch and do all sorts of other things, it also has meant that there's opportunity for people who live in our city to work in our city, that down on commute, you cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

0:22:53.3 BRAD: I think that there's a lot there, and that's something that I think cities can really start to have more of a focus on, is how do we create those areas within our city that can become home to employers, that can generate employment, that can facilitate all sorts of type of business with light industrial, technology, and at the end of the day, if you're in the business of building a complete community, you can't have everyone leave the city to go to work.

0:23:34.6 BRIDGITTE: You are clearly passionate about Port Coquitlam given your comments about the region and about other levels of government, you're still relatively very young compared to me, do you think you'd ever run provincially or federally, is that door gonna be open?

0:23:56.2 BRAD: I'm not going to give the typical politician answer that would not be in keeping with my approach... Yeah, you said... Honestly, right now, it's something that... It's not on my radar. I have a lot more that I want to accomplish as mayor of Port Coquitlam. And so I'm gonna see that through... I've had different folks approach me different times, and I've said no because I am committed to this work, this is my hometown, I'm raising my family here. Again, there's a lot more that's on my list to check off. In the future... Maybe. It's something that I would think about. The hard part, I think for me will be though, is I do like to think for myself, I’m a pretty independent guy, I don't like to be pigeon-holed into, Okay, you're this or you're that, because... I don't know, I think like a lot of regular people, if I can use that turn... I hold views that probably span the spectrum of different political parties and our politics at the provincial and federal level are very much, Okay, you're in this box, and you're either good or bad, depending on my view, and just the one thing I do find very liberating at the municipal level, at least in Port Coquitlam, there's no political parties, and certainly people have their own leanings, but that stuff comes last, it doesn't come first.

0:26:04.0 BRIDGITTE: So, it sounds like it's a maybe so then maybe what I would do Mayor West is I'll keep this conversation part open and come back to you in the ensuing months and years and see where you're at then. I really enjoyed our conversation today. Thank you, Mayor West for joining us. Fantastic.

0:26:05.0 BRAD: Thank you very much for having me, I'll look forward to continuing it.