Mayors Day: Burnaby, Squamish, Abbotsford mayors co-host CKNW

Thursday marked the fourth installment of CKNW’s Mayors Day series.

The monthly series sees three Lower Mainland mayors join CKNW for a two-hour co-hosting stint with your favourite talk radio hosts.

In this installment, Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun, Squamish Mayor Patricia Heintzman and Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan took on co-hosting duties.

The mayors participated in interviews, discussed hot button issues in their communities and took calls from listeners around the region.

LISTEN: Mayors Day – Meet Abbotsford Mayor Henry Braun

With a population of 141,000, Abbotsford sits at the nexus of rural and urban B.C., and like its neighbours in Metro Vancouver, faces significant challenges according to Mayor Henry Braun.

“The two biggest issues is homelessness and the opioid crisis. And I don’t have answers for all of that. We’ve made great progress on the homeless front,”

Braun said he’s proud of how the city has pulled together Fraser Health and BC Housing, along with more than 80 community service providers to establish new supportive housing and recovery programs.

“But we’ve got a long way to go.”

LISTEN: Congestion on Highway 1

“I’ve heard that there’s 10,000 more cars on that freeway. And the cost to the economy is enormous,” said Braun.

Braun pointed to Abbotsford’s gravel industry, which feeds Metro Vancouver construction companies, who he said are forced to make six to seven trips a day.

He cautioned with the potential implementation of mobility pricing on those companies would mean massive new costs which would be passed on to the consumer in the end.

Long thought of as a recreation paradise, the community of Squamish is growing rapidly. With a population of 19,512, it’s seen by many as an attractive bedroom community to Metro Vancouver as home prices in the Lower Mainland soar.

Heintzman said Squamish is dealing with an extension of the housing crisis in Metro Vancouver, and has seen its own housing prices climb dramatically.

She said the challenge for her community is keeping the small town, neighbourhood-friendly, feel while being open to development so that prices don’t rise too rapidly.

“You also don’t want to overbuild, or build stuff that doesn’t fit in with the vernacular of the town,” she said.

“But at the same time you can’t help but grow, because if you don’t it cause other problems. So you want to do it strategically, you want to create those urban centres in the downtown and near the waterfront, but still make sure you’re really accessible to the outdoors.”

Like Abbotsford, Squamish has its own traffic problems. In its case, it’s the Sea to Sky Highway which links Vancouver to Whistler, and cuts right through the community.

Heintzman said the challenge with the road is a mixture of Whistler-bound holiday-makers, locals who know the roads and drive quickly, tourists who’ve never driven a mountain highway before and dangerous joyriders.

She said there have been enough fatalities on the road that she’d like to see a pilot project using a form of photo radar that averages a driver’s speed over distance installed through the Lions Bay area. Heintzman said it’s been done in Scotland with positive results, both in terms of life safety and traffic improvements.

LISTEN: Talking demovictions and land zoning with Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan

Housing issues have been in the forefront in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, which is currently going through a development boom.

City council in the community of 232,000 has taken heat over so-called ‘demovictions’ as it seeks to redevelop the entire Metrotown neighbourhood as a transit-accessible, high density ‘downtown.’

Critics say the plan was enabling the loss of thousands of affordable rental units.

Earlier this month, Burnaby council reversed course — signaling intent to become the first municipality in B.C. to use the province’s new rental-only zoning restrictions, with requirements for developers to build affordable rentals.

“For 28 years we’ve been trying to get that rental zoning to protect that housing,” said Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan.

“No government was willing to affect the tenure of land owners. Neither the provincial Liberal government or the provincial New Democratic government were prepared to enter this field.”

Corrigan insists that until those rules existed, his government was powerless to stop developers. He argued that landowners had every right to demolish rentals and replace it with low-density condos which would be low density, expensive and not contribute any new money to the city for its own housing initiatives.

Pressed on why other Metro Vancouver cities have been able to retain rental while Burnaby lost units, Corrigan said they’d done it at the cost of affordability.

He pointed to cities like Vancouver which have forced developers to build rental, but have ended up with with new units renting for more than $2,500 per month.

LISTEN: Burnaby will be the first city in the province to implement B.C.’s new rental-zoning law

“We weren’t going to solve the problem by giving the developers land in order to build rental housing that wasn’t going to deal with any of the affordability issues,” Corrigan said.

“What we needed was a partner in t he provincial government to provide funding to non-profits so that those non-profits could use that free land and there would be an obligation to have… below market housing.”

The Mayors Day series comes just months before B.C. goes to the polls for municipal elections on Oct. 20.

It’s shaping up to be one of the most competitive elections in recent memory, with nearly half of the region’s mayors not seeking re-election.

Previous Mayors Day co-hosts have included Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, New Westminster Mayor Jonathan Coté, West Vancouver Mayor Michael Smith, Port Coquitlam Mayor Greg Moore, North Vancouver Mayor Richard Walton and Maple Ridge Mayor Nicole Read.

You can find a complete audio selection of previous Mayors Day segments below.