Category: New Westminster

What’s Coming to New West Council on February 1, 2021

New Westminster City Council is having a Regular Meeting on February 1, 2021, and here are some highlights on what’s on the agenda.

Letter from New Westminster Police Board to New Westminster City Council

Backstory: in December New West City Council requested that the Police Board draft a 2021 budget with a 0% increase, in part to push forward calls for reforming police departments towards different models of providing services that better serve marginalized people in our society. Protests that have been occurring around the world, including those led by Black Lives Matter groups, have brought the inequities and injustices built into policing to the forefront, and this motion is a first step towards righting those wrongs.

The Police Board wrote back to Council, and they essentially said “sorry, but no” and they won’t be cutting their 2021 budget. I fully expect this to spur some lively and spirited discussion. I don’t know what Mayor Cote’s role will be in this discussion, and whether or not he’ll have to recuse himself because he is also the Chair of the Police Board.

There are two options for council to take in response to the letter:

  1. They can accept the letter and tell Finance to incorporate the Police Board’s recommended original budget into the 2021 Budget, or
  2. They can tell the Police Board to fuck off (rather, reject the recommendation) and tell City staff to figure out what the next steps are and what the tax rate implications will be for the 2021 Budget.

I suspect ultimately Council will go with option 1 but I highly doubt it’ll be a unanimous vote.

COVID-19 Pandemic Response – Task Force Updates

New West received “confirmation of approval of its application” for $101k from the federal government (I think that means the City will be receiving that money, or maybe the feds have confirmed they’ve received the application…? Tweet me to let me know!) to set up some food security hubs, along with planning and program coordination services, volunteer recruitment, and training towards improving food security in New West.

City staff are working with faith-based and non-profit organizations to put together a program where precariously housed or homeless individuals can have a shower at the Canada Games Pool, and they’re looking at providing individuals with a basic toiletries set as well, along with bus tickets and towels.

A “Rediscover New West” program will be launched on February 1 to support restaurant and entertainment venues.

The COVID compliance hotline is showing a decrease in calls per day, with 2.2 calls per day in January, mostly about businesses not following COVID-safe procedures.

Council will also be asked to support the New Westminster Digital Inclusion Project by donating 25 decommissioned iPhone 7s to allow at-risk and vulnerable people be able to access digital information more easily.

E-Comm Nominations for 2020-2021

Backstory: E-Comm 911 is the organization that handles 911 services across British Columbia. They have a Board of Directors. Various groups nominate representatives for the E-Comm Board, and New Westminster is part of a small group of municipalities (Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, Belcarra, Coquitlam, and Port Moody) that nominates two candidates. In 2019 Burnaby, PoCo, Belcarra, and Coquitlam all nominated Burnaby councillor Joe Keithley and Coquitlam councillor Brent Asmundson. Port Moody didn’t send in a nomination. New West objected, essentially saying “we don’t need two more white dudes, thanks”.

Through 2020, further motions and discussions happened, and at the end of the day for the 2020-2021 term only Joe Keithley was unanimously nominated, and the other seat will remain open (Coquitlam and Port Moody nominated Brent Asmundson again, Port Coquitlam and New Westminster nominated PoCo councillor Nancy McCurrach).

Development Stuff

A townhouse complex in Queensborough is applying to have half of their resident parking spots be tandem parking, where instead of having two parking spots side-by-side, they’ll be end-to-end so that you have to drive through one to get to the second.

Walmart’s asking for new signs so they can direct people to their online purchase pickup spots.

The City will be keeping Canada Post in business writing to nearly every First Nation in the Lower Mainland, along with the Board of School District 40 (that’s New West!), Burnaby, Coquitlam, TransLink, and the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure about the Sapperton Green development at Braid and Brunette where the Amazon warehouse is.

And the Metro Hall at 759 Carnarvon (across from Ki Sushi) is looking to get a permanent liquor-primary license instead of obtaining a Special Event Permit for nearly every single event they hold there, and in getting the license they’d also require a Zoning Bylaw amendment.

2020 Filming Activity Overview

New Westminster received $730k in permit revenues from filming activity in 2020, even though filming could only happen during seven months due to COVID-19. In 2019 filming permits brought in $795k, so COVID-19 didn’t have a huge impact, but without the restrictions New West probably would have brought in quite a bit more. The City made some fat cash thanks to the Mighty Ducks.

Bill C-213, an Act to enact the Canada Pharmacare Act

“Hey, New Westminster isn’t the Federal government,” you say. You’d be right. But most New Westminster City Councillors have fairly strong relationships with their provincial and federal counterparts (especially now that New West is entirely NDP at those levels), and New Westminster’s Member of Parliament, Peter Julian, is the sponsor of Bill C-213 to allow all Canadians to access prescription drugs without financial or other barriers, in the same way that all Canadians have access to healthcare (but not dental care, which is another area the federal NDP is targeting).

Jaimie McEvoy brought forward a motion asking Council to officially support Bill C-213.

I suspect that there will be discussion by councillors falling over themselves to show how much they support universal pharmacare (Councillor McEvoy will obviously speak to the motion) and unanimous support.

New Westminster Election Prediction Results

The final results are in for the 2020 British Columbia Provincial Election, so let’s see how my predictions fared!

To recap, I made the following predictions:

  • Jennifer Whiteside, NDP: 62%
  • Cyrus Sy, Green: 23%
  • Lorraine Brett, BC Liberal: 13%
  • Everybody else: 2%

And here are the final results:

  • Jennifer Whiteside, NDP: 60.25%
  • Cyrus Sy, Green: 19.02%
  • Lorraine Brett, BC Liberal: 16.26%
  • Everybody else: 4.48%

I guess I didn’t do that badly!

But had I stuck with my original numbers (60 / 21 / 17) I would have been even closer. “Never second-guess yourself” is the lesson here!

As everybody expected, Jennifer Whiteside ran away with the election. As probably everybody expected, Cyrus Sy came second for the Green Party, and Lorraine Brett finished third again.

New Westminster: safe for the NDP and ultimately quite boring when it comes to elections.

New Westminster 2020 Provincial Election Forecast

Hey it’s election time again! And that means I’m going to gaze into my crystal ball and forecast what the numbers are going to look like for the New Westminster electoral district (not the Richmond-Queensborough one!) after all the votes are counted.

Last time around the BC NDP had Judy Darcy running for re-election, the BC Green Party had a strong candidate in Jonina Campbell, and Lorraine Brett ran for the BC Liberals. Ultimately Judy Darcy improved upon her popular vote percentage, beating Jonina Campbell 51.55% to 25.36%. Lorraine Brett picked up 21.27% of the vote.

This time around the overwhelming majority of the drama came before the election, as Judy Darcy announced she would not be running for re-election. Two candidates stepped forward to take her place, Jennifer Whiteside and Ruby Campbell, and Jennifer Whiteside won the nod from the NDP constituency. For the BC Greens, Cyrus Sy put his name forward, as Jonina Campbell is now the Executive Director of the BC Greens. For the BC Liberals, Lorraine Brett decided to run again. Conservatives and Libertarians are also running candidates.

That’s the local flavour. How will it all play out, with the snap election complaints from non-NDP parties, the pandemic raging around us, and the partisan nature of politics we’ve been moving more and more towards in recent years?

My bold prediction is that Jennifer Whiteside and the BC NDP will win New Westminster. That’s no surprise. The BC NDP could run a potted plant and win here. That’s why I said the drama came before the election campaign started, because it was actually the NDP constituency members who were voting on who New Westminster’s next MLA will be, not the voting public in New Westminster.

I predict that the numbers will come down like this, plus-or-minus a couple of percent: Jennifer Whiteside: 62%. Cyrus Sy: 23%. Lorraine Brett: 13%. Everybody else: 2%.

Why did I pick these numbers? Let’s start at the bottom: While people have heard of the BC Conservatives (and maybe some people remember Benny Ogden from the last municipal election), and the leader of the Libertarian party is running in New Westminster, they’re complete non-entities in New Westminster. Between them I don’t see them getting more than 3% of the vote, if that.

I don’t see Lorraine Brett improving her numbers at all. The BC Liberals are circling the drain, and their low polling numbers in BC will only lead to a worsening of their support in New Westminster. That said, there isn’t any other proper right-wing party for right-wing people to vote for, so maybe 20% is about where the floor is for their support. Whatever it is, Lorraine Brett is going to hit it.

Last-minute update: I started writing this post on October 14. Early on October 16 news broke that Lorraine Brett thinks JK Rowling’s transphobic writings are her “best work”. I don’t know what effect this will have on her results, but I’m going to guess that it won’t be that great for her. Correspondingly, I’ve dropped my prediction for her by 4% and given it equally to the NDP and Green. My original numbers were 60%, 21%, and 17%.

Cyrus Sy isn’t as well-known as Jonina Campbell, and the BC Green party hasn’t been polling particularly well on a regional basis. There may be some disaffected NDP voters who would have preferred a candidate with more community ties than Jennifer Whiteside who will swing over to vote Green, but there won’t be more than a handful of them. I think that the 25% that the BC Greens got in 2017 is their ceiling right now. A lesser-known candidate combined with weaker polling for the BC Greens provincially, which means I backed him off to 21% 23%.

And that means whatever left over is for Jennifer Whiteside, which is 60% 62%.

The only thing worth watching in New Westminster is the race for second. My prediction is that the BC Greens come second again, and the BC Liberals finish third.

Is a 39% margin of victory plausible? This year, yes. The NDP is polling well, the Liberals lurch from homophobic candidate to transphobic candidate to misogynistic candidate, and the Greens haven’t had enough time to find their footing under a new leader. New Westminster is a strong NDP riding, and it will definitely be reflected in the results of the 2020 provincial election.

New West Record embraces recycling

The hottest story in New Westminster over the last few months has undoubtedly been the imminent closure of its only city-run recycling centre and the subsequent uproar from the neighbourhoods of Queens Park and Queens Park Lite. Never a stranger to running stories that’ll get the letters flowing, the New West Record has continued to pump the story with articles coming fast and furious. And of course, telling people to “stop with the hyperbole” always works well, right? If that’s not a clever way to get more people riled up, I don’t know what is.

Take this week’s front page article, for example. It’s not online but the title is “Depot closing date pushed into March”. An entire front page article about a simple date change! Clearly The Record is taking recycling seriously.

And there’s more proof of how much they’re getting into recycling with their story reporting on New West’s school board voting record in 2019, which is an obvious recycling of a blog post written by New West councillor Patrick Johnstone just a month earlier!

Congratulations to the New West Record for being a community leader in recycling! ♻️

New West Progressives call for ten-lane recycling centre

The New Westminster Progressives have committed to pursuing a competitive 10-lane recycling centre to replace the ageing, but iconic, New Westminster Recycling Depot, which has served the community for the past 25 years. The new recycling centre would be capable of hosting Provincial and National-level meets, while providing the residents with a usable public recycling component.

The current city council has developed a plan to require New Westminster residents drive to Coquitlam to do their recycling.

NW Progressives city council candidate Paul McNamara has a long-term vision that would see the state-of-the-art recycling centre built and would make New Westminster the go-to city for competitive recycling, which would bring a much-needed economic boost to local businesses.

“The City of New Westminster must actively pursue available provincial and federal funding opportunities such as the federal EcoAction Community Funding Program,” says McNamara. “These larger Provincial and National-level meets have an economic input of between $1-million and $7-million, depending on the size of the event.

“I have met so many long term New West residents who remember the opening of the mid-90s Recycling Depot and the impact it had on the city. It put New West on the map as the place to be.”

Currently, the 4,000 plus competitive recyclers in the Lower Mainland area have to travel to Vancouver Island or Kamloops to compete in Provincial or National events.

“New Westminster can turn this opportunity into a recycling-tourism advantage that will benefit everyone,” says McNamara. “This would be the start of a recycling infrastructure revitalization this city hasn’t seen since 1995.”