With just days to go before Vancouver voters head to the polls, TEAM for a Livable Vancouver mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick sat down with CTV News to go over the key priorities in her party’s platform.
"I do not want to be the last generation of my family that can afford to live here,” she said, recounting how her grandmother had served on the Vancouver Park Board and her father spent three terms as on city council.
Hardwick was elected to city council with the Non-Partisan Association in 2018, but left the party last year after it acclaimed John Coupar as its mayoral candidate without a nomination process.
She is now with TEAM, which has a slate of candidates running for council, park board and school board.
Throughout the campaign, the party has stressed the need for controlling the pace of growth in the city, which Hardwick believes is partially to blame for the cost of homes that are unattainable to many residents.
She believes major developers have too much control over civic politics and thinks anyone who accepts money from their executives should recuse themselves from voting when those companies have business before city council.
Hardwick also says if elected she would reopen the Broadway Plan, a 30-year framework approved by council in June at the end of a three-year process of public consultation and debate.
It calls for 30,000 new homes in the heart of the Broadway corridor, with many of those in high-rises.
"I believe that community-based planning is the solution to producing the density that we need across the city in a responsible way to our residents,” she said, suggesting local residents should have more control over the pace of growth in their neighbourhoods.
Hardwick is not a fan of the SkyTrain extension under construction between Vancouver Community College and Arbutus Street, but acknowledges nothing can be done to stop that portion now.
She says if elected mayor she would work to halt a proposed extension all the way to UBC.
"The real reason for putting the subway out to UBC is to encourage the development of more high-rise towers, which are ultimately more profitable for the developers that are behind them,” Hardwick said.
On reconciliation with Indigenous people, Hardwick believes much of that work is outside the scope of the city’s mandate and should be left to the federal government.
In 2019, Hardwick was the only member of council to vote against accepting a staff report called "City of Reconciliation."
“When I look at the history of what (Indigenous people's) ancestors went through, I feel the pain and I want to be clear about that,” she said. “But as we reconcile, we have to work together going into the future and think about what we can be doing at a civic level.”
Hardwick lives in Kits Point, the former site of a pre-contact, year-round Indigenous village.
Next to that neighbourhood, at the southern end of the Burrard Bridge, the Squamish Nation plans to build 11 towers containing 6,000 rental units on land it reclaimed through a lengthy legal battle.
The city has no say in what can be built there, but Hardwick has questions about a services agreement it signed with the Squamish Nation, which was negotiated behind closed doors and without public consultation.
Pressed on Wednesday about whether she would reopen that agreement in an effort to renegotiate it with public consultation, she was non-committal.
"If opening it means building trust, maybe that's a good idea,” she said. "If we want to talk about reconciliation, should we not be talking to our neighbours instead of just cutting them out of the discussion? I think it's important that consultation be a two-way street. And that has not happened here."
When it comes to challenging incumbent Kennedy Stewart, one of Hardwick’s main rivals is a former NPA colleague.
She said she feels there is enough policy difference between her party’s platform and the one being pitched by Ken Sim’s ABC party that any talk of vote-splitting is unfounded. Sim was the NPA's candidate for mayor in 2018 and finished a close second to Stewart.
She encourages voters to explore those differences carefully before deciding who they think is best suited for the mayor’s office.
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