The environment and affordable housing were perhaps the biggest themes surrounding Mayor Karen Elliott’s first year in office.
With her at the helm, council implemented some high-profile measures, such as the recent plastics reduction and the declaration of the climate emergency.
Elliott has also made some big promises concerning affordable housing, vowing to create 125 new affordable housing units in town by the time her first term finishes in 2022.
She’s also said she would grow the local economy and increase neighbourhood connectivity.
At the beginning of her tenure, Elliott made an emotional pledge to better relations with the Squamish Nation.
There have also been tests. For instance, the new council was met with protests that filled municipal hall during deliberations on a camping bylaw that many feared would ban vanlife in town. Discussions regarding the regulation of Airbnb-type rentals have also been met with resistance. Student climate strikes have urged local politicians to do more to stop climate change, and housing affordability remains an ever-present issue.
Looking back at it all, The Chief sat down with the mayor on Dec. 13 to discuss her first year leading a council filled mostly with newly-elected politicians.
The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Compared with being a councillor, how does being mayor change your perspective?
KE: When you sit as mayor, you don’t have that much more authority or power than any other sitting councillor. The difference is that you get to set the agenda, and you are the official spokesperson for the community, and I think it’s that role that has shifted my perspective from being a councillor. You represent the whole community, not just your own views.
Q: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments so far this year?
KE: Under the climate piece, we declared
a climate emergency, and this 2020 budget is reflecting that. Our climate leadership team is in place, and they’ll be reporting out early in 2020. Under the housing piece, Buckley Avenue just got its development permit, so we’ll be breaking ground on that building. Ground broke on the seniors’ rental housing building. Under One Roof is coming together beautifully — that was approved under the last council.
In terms of the local economy, I think what I’m most proud of is that our staff has
been laying the groundwork for supporting growth. So we have an amazing project going on right now to understand what our land needs are in terms of employment lands so we can match that with our expected population growth, because we know about 26% of our population is commuting to the city. But to do that, businesses that are already here need to see where the land will be and the space will be, whether it’s office, commercial or industrial.
Finally, around community connectivity, I think of some of the work we’re doing around resiliency planning around potential major disasters. Also, our neighbourhood planning has started with the Loggers Lane East and we’ll be seeing information about that in the new year.
And we’re continuing to invest in active transportation. The one thing I regret is not getting regional transit off the ground. Sometimes, those lobbying efforts do take time, and we’re not letting up.
Q: This has been a pretty agreeable council. Most votes seem to have been unanimous. How do you keep it together?
KE: There’s a lot of people in this council who are willing to listen and willing to not get stuck in a position. So I do see people taking information that they’ve heard from their colleagues. But also, again, remember a lot the work that’s come before us is related to our strategic plan. And we’re very aligned on that plan. That was a very collaborative effort.
We also haven’t dealt with very many rezonings this year. That was very much the work of the last council — some big controversial rezoning projects. And as a result of that, most of time, we’re dealing with the development permits coming out of that, and they’re quite prescribed based on our development permit areas, so there’s not that same opportunity for divisive perspectives.
I think what’s coming in 2020 is our first look at the zoning bylaw rewrite, and I think there’s going to be some challenging topics in there, but we don’t have anyone on council who’s going to bang the table. They’re all quite calm and thoughtful people.
Q: Is there a lot of ‘party discipline’ going on before each meeting? Is that how you get votes to pass?
KE: No. There are very strict rules. Once you have four of us together, technically, that’s an official meeting — that’s quorum. And so we’re very careful not to move business forward. One of the things I love about working in local government — I know some of the big cities have parties, but here’s it’s seven independent people.
I don’t muster support. It’s not uncommon for councillors to ask each other their perspectives in advance. But there’s never this sort of sense of, ‘Oh OK, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.’
Q: Do you worry that this tendency to vote unanimously is leading to some voices that represent the community being lost, because everyone’s so agreeable?
KE: We’re not sitting in front of the numbers showing how many times there was a consensus vote versus how many times people voted against. I certainly know people have voted against different parts of policies. We’ve had a few 6-1 votes, we’ve had a few 4-3 votes.
I think one of the things that all levels of government struggle with is finding the diversity to get people to stand from diverse communities for elected office. A lot of people don’t see the appeal of being an elected politician. But I do feel we have some of those diverse views on council. We have some younger members of council. The age demographic has skewed younger to better reflect our community this time. There is a bit of gender diversity. I’m not sure there is a lot of cultural diversity, but that being said, when I sit down with my colleagues, I see six people who think deeply about the decisions in front of them.
Q: What are Squamish’s biggest needs at this point?
KE: There’s a couple of things that are weighing on my mind as we enter 2020. Affordable housing, childcare and healthcare, for example, which are not really the mandate of local government, and yet we see the stress and the struggle and the pain that’s caused by some of the lack of investment by senior levels of government in these areas.
And so, it’s really trying to find our place in supporting and improving those things without overstepping and getting into the jurisdiction of the province.
Some people feel that we’re not doing enough, but, also, I have one way of raising money — and that is property tax — and so I can’t possibly fill the gap that the province and the feds need to fill here, because people would not like what it does to their property tax.
I think what’s missing for me is: what does a community look like in 2030 when it’s reduced its carbon emissions by 50%? And what does it look like by 2050 when it’s zero? I don’t think we’ve created for our community a compelling story about what also changes when you have a carbon-free community. There are health benefits. There are quality of life benefits.
RECONCILIATION
Q: I remember during the last meeting of the previous council you made it clear that reconciliation with the Nation was a top priority. What is the relationship between the District and Squamish Nation? How often do you meet?
KE: We’re very fortunate that under the leadership of the last council, we really started to build a much more solid relationship with the Nation. I meet monthly with some of the Nation council members and their chief administrative officer for the valley to continue to build that relationship. We’ve tasked our chief administrative officer with making sure our organization understands the impact of colonialism and looks for ways that we can redefine that relationship.
So, for us, we can start to see the changes in how we do business. More consultation around our diking system — people may see that as just infrastructure, but that is an opportunity for reconciliation. Those dikes were put in without any deep consultation at the time.
They had an impact on the land, on access to water and on ecosystems that Squamish Nation would’ve been using at the time, so the eagle-viewing dike near the WaterShed has been a game-changer and will set a standard going forward. We did procurement with the design company alongside the Nation. Both the Nation and ourselves have been consulting with the community to understand the values that are important to that and the solutions that are coming forward.
We are having a conversation that isn’t just about keeping the dike where it is and just making it stronger. We’re looking at a number of different ways to look at this asset. It’s not just about safety, but there is a reconciliation piece that could come along with that.
Q: What would you consider your biggest accomplishments with the Nation as mayor?
KE: I think that would need to be defined by them. I don’t want to presume what my impact has been on the Nation. But I can say my work and relationship with the Nation is driven by my own personal experience.
My younger sister is First Nations, and I grew up watching the discrimination that she experienced. Despite being a member of a white family, she is also a survivor of the 60s Scoop, which my family has been coming to terms with.
We thought we were providing her with a better life. It didn’t dawn on us that no one had made the effort to keep her connected with her family or extended family. So, to me, I think my work with the Nation is informed by my knowledge of some of that lived experience because I saw it in my own family. The privilege I had being a white person walking through the world was very different from hers.
ENVIRONMENT
Q: Declaring a climate emergency is a big symbolic step, but what tangible accomplishments have resulted from this?
KE: It’s interesting you call it a symbolic gesture because I see it as a very important practical gesture. Most climate emergency declarations don’t just stop at saying, ‘Yeah, we have an emergency and we should do something about it.’ They come with a resolution that’s got very specific action items.
One of those was having a revised community action plan to understand greenhouse gas emissions, and understanding those bold policy moves we need to make in the short term. That is happening.
We had a goal to know our greenhouse gas emissions by the end of this year. I do believe staff have that in hand. We’ll roll it out to the community after the holiday season and start to engage with the community with what those results are.
And we’ve struck a climate leadership team of experts to help us understand what those bold moves are. Many of us believe that it is this term in office where we really need to set the foundation of policy change to hit 2030 goals. We don’t want to miss that window.
We’ve set aside contingency funds in the 2020 budget to make sure we can fund those initiatives, even though we don’t know what they are yet.
The single-use items bylaw came forward, and, unfortunately, we couldn’t go for a full plastic checkout bag ban, because the court case in Victoria requires us to get provincial permission to do that. So, we decided that we’d focus on the first level of the whole reduce, reuse, recycle, and that first one is refuse.
We’ve made a new staff position to make sure we can get our big commercial, industrial, institutional creators of garbage to start shifting their ways.
The biggest bang for our buck is to finally get all of our businesses to start diverting organics away from the landfill and separating their garbage.
Q: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change target is to cut Carbon pollution by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. A municipality doesn’t have direct control over emissions, and the goal here is to reduce the emissions in Squamish in line with IPCC targets — which are massive. How can Squamish meet those goals?
KE: There are target areas municipalities can look at. One is transportation. That’s probably going to account for half of our footprint — single-use vehicles [people driving alone in the car]. So, the solution to that is more active transportation [like cycling and walking], way more transit and building the infrastructure that makes it easier for people to do that.
We know the game-changer is frequency of transit, so we need to get to that 10-minute frequency, and regional transit becomes a huge part of that.
Connected to that is making sure there are jobs here for people who live here, which is why that’s such a fundamental pillar of our strategic plan.
The other is how people heat their homes. And so, looking at ways we can encourage other builders to leave fossil fuel infrastructure out of their builds.
And making sure we’re putting the incentives in, so people will build more and more efficient homes.
Right now, if you go to Step 5 of the Step Code, you go to the front of our development line. [The Step Code is the province’s measure for building energy-efficient facilities. Ranging from one to five, the fifth step represents the most energy-efficient home that can be built today.] There are developers building passive multi-family homes that are taking advantage of that, and we’d like to see that become the norm.
Waste is the other one. Our landfill just off-gases methane right now. We made a decision a couple of months ago that we’re going to flare the landfill, which, actually, when we crunch the numbers, is going to drop our emissions substantially within years.
Q: Regarding the municipality’s upcoming carbon emission plan, the consultant, the Whistler Centre for Sustainability said the plan it will create for the District will have a lot of limitations like large industry, embodied energy, forestry, ocean activity — these are outside the scope of the plan.
When you’re trying to cut emissions by 50% and there are that many things outside of the scope, how do you make that work?
KE: It’s a really good question. Some of it is that we simply don’t have measurement systems in place, and, often we rely on the province to sort of set a standard about how those things we measured, so the province is working on that through their Clean B.C. plan.
One of the reasons our council got involved in the Supreme Court case regarding carbon pricing as an intervener is that one of the pieces that we want clarity on is a tax versus a regulatory charge. And that will be important, because within our jurisdiction, we can put in place regulatory charges, but we want clarity from the courts about what is deemed a regulatory charge.
Because, can we ask local businesses to report on their own greenhouses gases? Do I have that jurisdiction to ask about that sort of thing?
I do feel as good corporate citizens, that all of our big emitters should be reporting out. Even if I can’t mandate it. You know, we have someone from Squamish Terminals sitting on our climate leadership team — they do want to be good corporate citizens. I feel like Woodfibre should be talking about how they plan over their 40-year mandate to get closer to carbon neutral.
I don’t understand why I’ve signed the climate action charter, and I have to make my operations carbon neutral, so I can access some of my funding from the province, but other private industries don’t. That’s always been a challenge for me.
Q: Regarding the plastics reduction bylaw, many still think that banning plastic bags would’ve been the preferable outcome. What do you tell those people?
KE: I’d love to ban it too. But I don’t have that jurisdiction and I don’t believe the province will provide the permission in the short term.
They are consulting on this issue now, subsequent to that court case in Victoria. [The B.C. Court of Appeal has ruled the city’s ban on plastic bags was unlawful because it did not ask for permission from the Minister of Environment.]
Q: Even if it’s not a full-on ban, there’s a little bit of vulnerability there. Do you worry about a court challenge to the District’s plastic reduction?
KE: I’m not worried in particular about that. I think we’re working within our jurisdiction and I think this is something our community wants.
I would’ve liked for it to be even stronger, but I think in the short term, we’re doing the right thing. We’re starting with education and getting people to change their overall habits when they go to a store.
Q: At this point, a lot of the conversation about Woodfibre has been whether this project should be stopped, or whether it deserves to go through. Given how many permits it now has, I’m wondering if perhaps we should start shifting the conversation to ‘how do we get ready’? Is the District getting ready for the project’s arrival? If so, how?
KE: We are getting ready. We’re engaging with both Fortis and Woodfibre on their management plans that they’re mandated to create before construction. Ultimately, at the end of the day, whether they proceed, it’s up to Woodfibre, and they haven’t made that final decision yet.
We have brought on a staff person that’s being funded by those companies to support the work that’s going on. I feel like we’re getting ready, and we’re asking the questions we need to ask.
I think Woodfibre is struggling to provide us with the answers we need a lot of the time to fully understand the impact of where their workforce happens, where Fortis’ workforce happens. I would expect both those companies should be engaging more regularly and openly with our public about what their plans are.
It’s up to them to be good corporate citizens in our community. It’s not up to me to be the one that’s out front and talking about their projects. I think we’re doing our homework at the District. We’re trying to represent and make sure they have the least negative impact on our community as possible if they go forward. But we are well into the planning work. It is taking up time, that’s for sure.
THE ECONOMY
Q: Most of the work on developing the economy has been around collecting data. You’ve accumulated a lot of information, but what can be done with it? What tangible results can you point to?
KE: The sector strategy and plan, I think, the community will see in early in 2020. And also our data project about employment lands and updating our Employment Lands Strategy, and then seeing that reflected in our zoning bylaw. Economic officer Kate Mulligan is working very closely with planning to make sure those two projects are aligned. I’m not sure if people know how important it is to protect land for employment. As our population grows, we can’t just keep building houses or we will be just a bedroom community. One thing that distinguishes us as a community is that there are large employers here, and we need more of them.
Q: What can the municipality do to bring companies here that otherwise wouldn’t come? Are there incentives?
KE: For me, Squamish offers something many other communities can’t. One, we have an amazing lifestyle. We still have land available — which is not available in the Lower Mainland. We have access to a deep-water port that is connected to world markets,
It’s also connected to the interior and the rest of North America. We have a highway system and a rail system. So, that’s essential.
We have a growing ecosystem of companies in recreation technologies and cleantech, which are two areas we want to focus on, that are building off our core or enabling industries such as forestry.
Do we need to provide financial incentives? I don’t know. To me that isn’t the front of mind, I think what we can provide is the certainty of our vision as a community where want we go. I think people do want to be part of a community that wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. I think they do want to be part of a community that’s got a plan for how it wants to grow.
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
Q: In terms of affordable housing, how do you plan on addressing that?
KE: Our perpetual affordable housing policy needs to be wrapped and finished off. The affordable housing governance piece is making sure we have a governance model to not only manage the affordable units that are coming in through community amenity contributions, but also can search out the next opportunities. And I think for us, it’s remembering we have to build housing across the whole affordability spectrum. It’s making sure that people at all levels of the income bracket can afford to live here.
Q: Council can approve new affordable housing, but when they get built seems to be entirely up to the developer. Is there anything a municipality can do to speed up the process?
KE: No. Developers always want to get the best price for the product they want to put into the market. They will sit on it until another competitor is finished building or another project gets put on hold and look for the right window. So, we don’t have a lot of control over that.
Q: Buckley was rezoned under the previous council, but you will be counting those as part of the 125 affordable units you promised by the end of your term. What do you say to people who think that might be taking credit for a previous administration’s work?
KE: I think in the same way that a developer can rezone a property and sit on it for 10 years, it was absolutely under our purview to take that forward. It’s a huge challenge to actually get something built and occupied and that takes a lot of effort on our part.
We have driven the momentum on that with BC Housing and Sea to Sky Community Services to make sure it comes to fruition in this term.
Q: Do you think you’re going to hit the 125-unit target you promised?
KE: Everything in that strategic plan is important to me. Part of setting a strategic plan is setting goals that you have to stretch for and reach for. So we might not get everything done on that plan. I would like to get as close as possible. Any amount of progress on the housing front is good progress.
Q: Short term, Airbnb-type rentals tie into this — council asked staff to draft a restrictive bylaw on the matter. But a number of homeowners say they wouldn’t put their suite on the long-term market anyway. Do you feel this will free up enough long-term units to make a difference?
KE: I think our staff and council are quite realistic about how many units might come back into the long-term rental market. I think one of the misperceptions of those running short-term rentals is they think we’re asking them to solve the rental housing problem. We’re not. Not by a long shot. But we do need to regulate that industry. It’s having an impact on our neighbourhoods.
The fact of the matter is it has always been against our bylaws to run short term rentals. It’s taken off. It’s a new business model. I’m a user of Airbnb, so I’m not dissing the fact that they’re there. They provide a service, but they do have an impact on neighbours. They do create parking and neighbourhood conflict. But, also, some are being run very well.
CAMPING AND VANLIFE
Q: This was this council’s first big test. I don’t think any other issue drew out as many people. What was it like facing a crowd like that for first time as mayor?
KE: I think first and foremost — one, it was educational. And I said this from the beginning — there are people living in their vans who are doing it extremely well and you would never know they were there.
Unfortunately, there are people who arrive, especially in our high season, who don’t do it well and are causing problems.
So, I appreciate that people wanted to get engaged in the conversation and work towards solutions.
I want to be very careful that we have the data on each of the different kinds of vanlife populations, and we’re developing solutions that meet the needs of those very different populations [such as people living in vehicles because of poverty, recreational vanlifers, working people who might be able to afford a place but can’t find a room, etc.].
Once you just make it a homogeneous group and treat them in the same way, I think we will not come up with a workable solution.
FINAL REMARKS
Q: What would you like to say to the community before we wrap this up?
KE: What I want people to know is council doesn’t think it has all the answers. We can’t be everywhere, so we do welcome people’s feedback. I would just encourage people to provide that feedback in a way that builds dialogue instead of going on the attack. We know we can’t make everyone happy with all of our decisions. But we do listen. And we are trying to find that middle ground. I would just encourage people to continue to engage with us.
