Councillor Cadman's progress

COPE Councillor David Cadman sat down with Brandi Cowen last week to chat about his priorities for his third term in office, overcoming the city’s homelessness and transit challenges, and preparing for the Olympics.

VO: How is this term different from previous councils that you’ve served on?

Cadman: The first council I served on had a COPE majority and fairly early on it became clear that there were differences within that caucus that began to manifest themselves. That became fairly problematic in that people began to effectively take the discussions that should have occurred at caucus into the council chambers.

A group of people got together and formed Vision prior to the 2005 election. That ended up with a divided progressive vote and we lost. Five of us were still elected in 2005, but we were five against six and those six people basically made all of their decisions in their caucus and came out and simply ran them through council.

VO: What was that like?

Cadman: It was a frustrating second term because none of the ideas, none of the debate had any substance. The decisions had been made behind closed doors and no decision that had not been made behind closed doors was enacted. We could get them very confused with amendments and amendments to amendments and they didn’t know what to do because they hadn’t discussed this behind closed doors.

They found themselves in a very awkward situation. The one I can remember most clearly is when they voted against giving veterans free parking on Remembrance Day. That’s a no brainer.

That’s why I was absolutely clear that when we ran in 2008, we needed to form a progressive coalition and that coalition needed to span the breadth of the progressive movement. Obviously there were compromises made all along.

VO: And this term?

Cadman: Coming into this term, I think there’s been a better working relationship between various parties of that coalition. I think where we have disagreed – and we have disagreed – we’ve tried to disagree respectfully and not use it politically to say, “We’re good, you’re bad.” I think we all understand that going ahead to 2011, holding that broad coalition together is where we all have to be if we don’t want to give power back to the NPA.

I’m very happy with the shelters proposal. I think that’s really good and yes, there are growing pains with it. When we went out and looked for city sites, we didn’t want to load them all into the Downtown Eastside. We wanted to recognize that along Hastings Street there was a whole plethora of young people who needed shelters.

I think we’ve learned from the process of management of those shelters. When you put a lot of young people in a place where they’re coming from outside in for shelter, that works in the wintertime. When you have a come and go policy in the summertime, the tendency may be to create a bit of a party atmosphere. There’s been a push back by the neighbours in the South Granville area, and those are some of the things we need to learn from.

I think where there’s a level of frustration, certainly from my perspective, is that there’s a whole lot of provincial issues where we’re not getting traction. We have 14 housing sites that have been promised and re-promised and at this point, we have yet to see a single one of those under construction.

VO: What are you doing to try and move those forward?

Cadman: There’s obviously a lot of talk going on with [Minister of Housing and Social Development] Coleman, but you can talk until the cows come home. Until he has resources and puts them forward, it’s not going to happen. I thought, quite frankly, that was going to happen in the last administration.

We find ourselves now in the bizarre situation of having 224 units of social housing, which used to be owned by CMHC, which is now owned by the provincial government, sitting up here at Little Mountain and they want to tear it down in the middle of this housing crisis. We’re saying, “This is madness. Why would you want to tear these down when you don’t have a plan to develop this site and in this market, you may not have it for a while and where you’re not constructing any alternatives?”

They say the units are no longer viable and that’s because they’ve gone in and torn out all sorts of infrastructure that was there on the day people moved out.

Also, we’re moving ahead on other issues like bicycling, which I think is important. I think, when you want to be the greenest city, you’ve got to look at places like Copenhagen and say, “That’s the model we need to learn from.” They’re at about 35% of their population bicycling now and they’re going to 50%. That’s where we need to be. Maybe we won’t achieve 50%, but we can do a heck of a lot better than where we are right now, which is 4%. Our bicycle task force has said we need to try and obtain at least 10%.

That means making space to make cyclists feel comfortable. If you want to get somebody who is not comfortable on a bicycle, they’re going to have to feel that they’re not putting their life at risk. That means, in the case of most European cities that have been successful, putting aside dedicated bicycle lanes so that families feel comfortable on them.

We have 93 schools in Vancouver, all of them located in neighbourhoods and yet very, very few children ride their bikes to school. That’s an obvious place where if you’re trying to socialize the next generation into bicycling, that’s where you begin.

So many of our initiatives really depend on change at a young level. For example, when I chaired the committee on transit authority, we introduced the U-Pass. That got a whole group of students at UBC and a whole group of students at Simon Fraser University to use public transit. That program was supposed to be extended to colleges, and yet here we are, five years later, and we still don’t have an inexpensive pass for college and high school students, which would socialize them to use public transit.

VO: What do you think about the suggestion of expanding the U-Pass for all students?

Cadman: I think we should. But again, UBC students used to talk to me and say, “The U-Pass has become the Pass You,” because the 99 would fill up at Commercial and Broadway and roll along Broadway full and wouldn’t be able to pick up any more people.

If people get frustrated with the system as transit users because they can’t get on the system, you’ve actually done yourself a disservice. Then people say, “I tried transit and it didn’t work. I couldn’t get on.”

We’ve got to find the capital to invest. We’ve got a gas tax that is now up to 3.4 cents/liter and that money is not going into public transit. That’s the obvious money that should be going into public transit.

For the life of me, I cannot understand a 1950s policy, which is build more bridges and widen roads, in this day and age. If you look at peak oil, which is coming, if you look at what’s happening with the whole automobile sector, it makes absolutely no sense.

In Europe, the trucking industry shifts the trucks to run at night when there’s plenty of capacity on the roads. That’s their way of making use of the road capacity 24/7, where what we tend to do is build for peak capacity. We have a huge rush hour coming in in the morning and going out, sowe’re going to build for that and expand for that. Ultimately, this is public capital and public goods, and we don’t seem to be able to make that efficient use of public capital and public goods. That’s frustrating.

VO: Do you think European ideas can really translate to Canada, since Canada is so much larger than most European countries?

Cadman: I think they can in our urban areas. Eighty percent of Canadians live in cities, and those cities’ footprints are no larger than a European city’s footprint. What the Europeans have done is really accentuated public transit in the urban areas, and walking and cycling. The Velo-City in Paris, where you can take out a bicycle and ride it for half an hour – those are the kinds of initiatives that really change the way we move around in our cities. That’s the agenda we have to be on as Canadian cities.

It’s harder in cities where you have more inclement weather – Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal – but on the West Coast, Victoria’s the model. Victoria has a much higher cycling population than we do because they put the investment into their cycling trails. Things like the Galloping Goose are really terrific means of moving around Victoria.

All that to say, those are conversations that I can have with all of my Vision colleagues and we’re able to work on a common program to make that happen.

VO: Do you feel that Vision is willing to compromise in areas where you disagree?

Cadman: I think it’s harder for them to compromise because they have a majority and they don’t have to. It’s a matter of persuasive argument and sometimes persuasive argument can carry, but sometimes once the decision has been made about where they’re going, persuasive argument can’t carry. That’s just the nature of majority.

My tendency is to try and talk to people early on and give them a clear indication of where I’m going and why I think it’s the way to go, and hopefully have that permeate into their caucus as a rational decision.

VO: What do you think are the most important issues that have been brought before council so far this term? And let’s set aside the Olympics for a moment.

Cadman: In my opinion, the whole issue of the shelters, the whole issue of bicycling and specifically the Burrard Street Bridge, I think the whole issue of the Greenest City Task Force, I think the way in which we handled the budget…

VO: Is there one particular shelter or homelessness issue that really stands out for you?

Cadman: I think just having the guts to say we’re going to open shelters and have very low barrier shelters because we don’t want anyone to have an excuse to say they’re not going to come in. I think that was a decision that was taken very quickly. Sometimes when you make decisions quickly you haven’t done all the consultations and haven’t understood all of the ramifications.

That’s where we’re now getting the push back from South Granville people saying, “You didn’t talk to us beforehand.” And quite frankly, if we’d talked to them beforehand, they would have said, “We don’t want this in our neighbourhood.” Most people don’t want to acknowledge that homelessness is part of every community in the city. They want it to somehow just go over there.

It tends to go ‘over there’ because if you’re poor, you tend to go to where you can get meals, so there are soup kitchens over there which means that if you don’t want to have to get up and travel long distances, you tend to locate in proximity to them. But in locating in proximity to them, you also tend to locate in proximity to where there’s a large drug culture, to where there are people who are dual diagnosed with mental illness and addicted, and it’s a very difficult place from which to heal yourself.

Some of the stories I’ve heard in visiting the shelters are interesting in the way in which people who were very, very isolated when they came into the shelters, and everyone said, “This is going to be a problem because these people are going to get on each other and there’s going to be real tension in the shelters.” But what’s happened is in fact there’s been a whole social cohesion that’s occurred in those shelters where people help other people who are coming into those shelters understand the ropes and make it work.

What that says to me is that when you’re isolated and trying to survive on the streets on your own, you become a certain character, but when you come into community, you tend to become somebody who operates within that community and tries to help others in that community.

VO: Ideally, if there were no limitations on resources and you could do whatever you think is needed to try and fix the homelessness problem and all the issues surrounding it, what would you do?

Cadman: I think the first thing I would do is get the 14 committed shelters built. Then I would get the committed hotels refurbished. Then I would look to acquire additional space. The city’s got another seven lots sitting out there that we could build on.

The problem is that if you solve a problem in one city, then people say, “Hey, if you get to Vancouver, you may get a home.” So if we don’t solve it nationally, the jurisdictions that seek to solve it become magnets for people who need help. That’s the real problem here. This is a national responsibility, a provincial responsibility that is arriving in municipalities across this country.

The other thing that I would obviously do is I would put a lot more attention on working with young people. Young people have a dispute in the home and an adult says, “Get out,” or they say “I can’t take it, I’m leaving,” and that person is now without means and is out there and prey to all sorts of people who are going to change their life markedly. Whether it’s saying, “Here, try this,” and getting them addicted on a drug, or saying, “Here’s a gift for you, here’s a gift for you, here’s a gift for you. Now you owe me, turn a trick.”

Any society knows that their young people are their most precious resources. These are the people that are going to shape the society of the future and we need to understand that catching these people before they come into these circumstances matters. If they don’t have the opportunities to develop positive role models and positive lifestyles as young people, they will be social problems that we will have to pay for as a society in the future.

We’re way behind right now because since 1993, Canada hasn’t had a social housing policy. We’re way, way behind and you can’t catch this up instantly, but the problem is that once a government gets out of something, it doesn’t go back in.

VO: If you don’t think it’s likely that the federal government will get involved, and that if Vancouver starts solving the homelessness problem, the city will become a magnet, then what do you do?

Cadman: That’s the problem. Not only has the federal government gotten out, but the provincial government has gotten out as well. What that means is that all the problems cascade to the place where they land, which is in the neighbourhoods somewhere across this country.

I think we’ve got to get the federal government back in.

VO: But how do you solve the problem without making Vancouver a magnet?

Cadman: You’ve got to solve it everywhere. We get chastised by other municipalities in this region. They say, “If you didn’t do this, we wouldn’t be attracting these problems.”

We know from the homeless counts that it exists everywhere. It’s concentrated in some places, yes, but it exists everywhere.

Unfortunately, when your sense is that the government is not prepared to do something, then what you ask as a local government is for things that you think the government is liable to support. But with only eight cents on the tax dollar at the local level, 42 cents on the tax dollar at the provincial level and 50 cents on the tax dollar at the federal level, we’re caught between a rock and a hard spot in terms of the kinds of resources that we have. Unfortunately, now what’s happening is that senior levels of government are dipping into that residential tax base, which is all we have, and adding to it for their projects.

So then we get the sense from our residents that we’re raising their taxes locally. They don’t see that it went up that much for a transit levy, it went up that much for a metro levy… You look at the bottom line. We’re overtaxing the residential homeowner and eventually that’s going to lead to a real push back to the point where the services that we provide as a city are going to be much, much more scrutinized.

VO: Are there any issues that you feel are being ignored or marginalized so far by council?

Cadman: No, I don’t think so. I think in a very real sense, we’re dealing with a very broad spectrum.

That said, I think the Olympics is taking an inordinate amount of space and resources. When I look at what we were promised, which is that senior levels of government were going to hold us free of any cost, and when I look at the mounting bills, I think, “Right, okay. Once again, the pledge and the commitment are different.”

We’re finding that when there’s an overrun on a building, we pay, when there’s an overrun on security, we pay, when there’s a need for things that were not anticipated, we pay.

VO: Are you surprised by how much time the Olympics are taking up?

Cadman: No, I think I knew.

Our solution in 2002 when we ran was to say, ‘We’re going to put this to a referendum. If people want it, we’ll do it. If people don’t want it, we won’t do it.’ People wanted it. Sixty-four percent said, “Yep, we want to do it,” but I don’t think they understood how much time and energy it would take.

In point of fact, we won’t get any return from the Olympics, whereas the provincial government, with an influx of 1.4 million people coming here, means sales taxes for everything they buy. We don’t see any of that revenue. There’s a cost outlay for us, but there’s no commensurate revenue stream.

I think we’ve done a good job of looking at a legacy. The Trout Lake facility, the Killarney facility, the Little Mountain facility, the rehab work that’s been done on the Coliseum and the Agrodome, those are all good. Those are all things that I think we would have had to ask the taxpayer to pay for at some point or another. But there’s more expense than that, and it’s that unknown expense that I think we should have anticipated. What have we had to sacrifice in terms of what we might have wanted to do in order to get there for the Olympics?

VO: If there were a referendum held on the Olympics today, do you think there would still be a majority of people in the city who would vote in favour of hosting them?

Cadman: I think there might be a majority, but I think there would be a much tighter majority.

I say there would be a majority because I think all of the vested interests – the media, the tourist industry – they put a lot of money into promoting the referendum. This was not a neutral thing where both the yes and the no side had equal resources. Sixty-four percent was garnered as a consequence of large, large resources being put into a positive Olympic campaign. I think that would be the same case now.

If you were to simply do a poll right now, I think you would find it was a much more nuanced majority – maybe around 53% - but if you actually got into a push again, you’d see all of the media come out and say, “This is great, it will put us on the world stage, blah blah blah,” and people tend to go that way, then. They don’t tend to say, “No no, I don’t want to pay for this.”

I think people have understood that there are costs and there are consequences of this. If you look simply at the disruption along Cambie Street, if you look at the disruption along Granville Street, if you look at the way in which this city has turned itself upside down to be ready for February 2010, all of our priorities are focused on that date.

Photo of Councillor David Cadman by Brandi Cowen