Geoff Meggs: Articulate,Experienced City Council Hopeful

As if provided by central casting, a man who identified himself only as “Dean” stopped Geoff Meggs, the clean-cut, articulate, Vision Vancouver City Council candidate, on a sidewalk on Cordova Street near Woodwards, where a reporter was about to take his picture, and tried to sell him a small oil painting.

Dean had bushy hair, a big beard and tattered pants. Meggs walked his bicycle and wore neat pants and a shirt. His yellow biking jacket was balled up in his side bag and he carried his helmet in his hand.

“Not today,” the candidate said.

“How about tomorrow?” Dean shot back with an affable smile and stuck by Meggs’ side.

“We’ll have to see about that tomorrow,” Meggs said, affably.

Dean hung around and watched as a journalist photographed Meggs in front of the Woodwards building. After a minute, Dean put it all together and asked, “Are you running for office?”

“City council,” Meggs said.

“Wanna have your photo taken with a real homeless man?”

A bit of a no-brainer in a race where seemingly every candidate, regardless of party affiliation, has claimed that finding homes for those without them ranks as their number one priority.

The two posed.

Dean told Meggs that legislation in Victoria was going to make it possible for police to arrest the homeless for sleeping in parks. Meggs listened intently and then explained that the opposite was true. The legislation would serve to protect people who needed to pitch their bed on a park bench.

Meggs said he thought it was important legislation and spoke of it respectfully. The two men traded ideas about it for a few minutes. Dean explained that he really didn’t have any money to buy anything to eat. Meggs emptied his pocket. He had only forty-seven cents of change and poured it into the palm of Dean’s hand. “Thanks,” Dean said.

“You’re welcome,” Meggs said. He put on his yellow biking jacket, hopped on his bike and pedaled up Cambie, off to his next appointment.

With a background in journalism, communications and three years as Mayor Larry Campbell’s chief-of-staff on his resume, Meggs has observed politics and government from the inside and out. He has studied policy and politics with a reporter’s eye for context, accuracy and perspective. He brings knowledge, experience to his candidacy and a desire to make change happen from the inside.

“Homelessness is a moral emergency,” Meggs had earlier said over coffee at Brioche. To begin to resolve the problem, he would do an inventory of substandard rooms and invest in making them functional. He would try to get government income assistance payments raised for homeless people so that they could afford to get into homes.

He would push to get the city to donate more buildings and convert them into social housing. As an example of a building that could be converted into social housing, he cited the former Buddhist Temple and Salvation Army building on Hastings Street. He would identify other spaces like this one. He would go to non profit and religious organizations and ask for their help. He would also ask the private sector to contribute solutions, and he would look to the solutions provided by SmartGrowth BC on how to create affordable housing.

“We can’t ask non profits to take this on indefinitely,” Meggs said. “Gregor has said he wants to eliminate homelessness. That’s a huge commitment. I’m going to work shoulder to shoulder with him and the other members to deliver on that promise. We can’t do it alone and we can’t fix it in six weeks. It took us ten years to get here and its going to take time to get to a better spot.”

Meggs, 57, was raised between Toronto and Ottawa, where his father, a broadcaster for CBC worked, moving between the cities every couple of years. His mother, a retired nurse, worked as a homemaker. “She was the anchor that we all revolved around. She took care of everybody,” Meggs said.

He grew up in Willowdale, a suburb full of bungalows, strip malls, and big box stores. By the time Meggs became a teenager, his father was director of radio for CBC. “He was the guy who with some colleagues dreamed up information radio, which was the non commercial radio service,” Meggs said. His father was trained as an Anglican priest, and later did religious programming later after he retired. “He was a good role model for all of us.”

His father’s willingness to take risks within his career influenced Meggs and his siblings to “follow our hearts.”

“My brothers and sisters and I have all done things that were important to us, and had a service aspect to them.”

After college, Meggs joined Canada World Youth, an exchange program that was funded by the government. Meggs, who had never been out of the country previously, went to Malaysia and spent time in villages “doing good deeds and “getting exposed to another part of the world.”

He returned to Canada and joined The Citizen, a community newspaper with a history of fighting for The Annex in Toronto. The newspaper folded and he sent out sixty letters all around Canada, seeking employment with another newspaper. The Albertan (now The Calgary Sun) hired him and he became the oil and gas reporter and was assigned to cover the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. The MacKenzie Valley pipeline was a proposal to tap the natural gas and oil fields under the ice in the Beaufort Sea, Meggs said, and if passed, would have traveled over a thousand miles over permafrost and caribou migration routes. It didn’t pass.

He was then hired by the Canadian Press wire service and moved to Vancouver. When the Fishmermen’s Union recruited him to edit The Fisherman, he took the job. He traveled up and down the coast of BC to cover environmental issues. He covered international trade agreements and First Nations treaties and privatization, all as they related to fishing. “I wrote for years about the whole drive to privatize the ownership of fish, the creation of individual quotas and I’m very critical of the privatization of common resources like that. I think it’s a big mistake.” He also went to Ottawa as a lobbyist for the union.

Meggs moved on to become communications director for The Hospital Employees Union. In 1966, he went to work for Premier Glen Clark as his communications director. When Clark resigned, Meggs started Tideline Communications Company, and later went to work for Larry Campbell as his chief-of-staff. “I had the privilege of working with Larry Campbell and I could see how much could get done. It is possible to get a lot done through city hall.”

After years in as a participant or observer of government and politics, Meggs isn’t taking victory for granted, he said, Gregor Robertson’s popularity, and the Vision Vancouver party’s large numbers notwithstanding.

“People who think Gregor and the Vision Vancouver team are a shoe in don’t understand the challenge we have ahead of us,” he said.

“We have the toughest, most expensive four weeks ahead of us. There’s nothing to be taken for granted here. Gregor is really doing an incredible job and we have a great team, but we need a big, big turnout on November 15, because a lot of good people who support the NPA know exactly how to get out and vote. Good for them, but we need to get our folks out to vote. My message is get out and vote and bring everybody over eighteen with you, your mama, your sister, your brother. Walk, run, crawl, whatever it takes.”

Photos of Vision Vancouver City Council Hopeful Geoff Meggs by Linda Solomon


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