I want to know what people would do if they themselves were mayor. Like what actionable steps would you take if you were elected to fix the problems plaguing this city? I'm asking because I realized I actually don't know what a city councillor or mayor does all day. If you want to do something do you call a meeting? How do you vote on something and then make it happen? What power does a mayor actually have and how can you wield it to do the job well?
I ran for city council in the 2022 election, so I have some ideas.
More housing
The big challenge is that we have a mismatch between housing and jobs. People don't move around randomly, they move where the jobs are. We have lots of jobs in Metro Vancouver, and not enough housing. So then prices and rents have to rise to unbearable levels so that people will give up and leave, matching those remaining to the limited supply of housing. It's a terrible situation, especially for younger people and renters, but it's bad even for older homeowners - how's the healthcare system going to work when nurses and doctors can't afford to live here?
And then housing being so desperately scarce and expensive is at the root of so many other problems. It results in lower real incomes (after paying for high housing costs there's not much left over). It makes it hard to recruit workers (see the teacher shortage). It's limiting economic growth, since people can't afford to live in one of our most economically productive cities. It has a direct effect on homelessness. (A terrifying quote: "Shelters are gentrifying.")
I'm optimistic that this is a solvable problem. We have people who want to live and work here, and other people who want to build housing for them (high prices and rents are a strong incentive to build more housing). So why hasn't this happened?
There's two key bottlenecks. In short, we regulate new housing like it's a nuclear power plant, and we tax it like it's a gold mine.
(a) Regulatory requirements.
All regulatory requirements (e.g. protecting trees) must be met before housing can be approved. In other words, housing is lower priority than all of them. Enforcing these regulations and negotiating waivers is very labour-intensive and thus expensive, both for city staff and for projects.
Given the desperate shortage of housing, we really need to prioritize regulatory requirements (at the very least, A/B/C), and then identify C and maybe B requirements which can be waived, weakened, or removed entirely. A recent example: the city requires private balconies on high-rises in the Broadway Plan area, and for a mass timber high-rise, this means punching a lot of holes in the building envelope, risking water intrusion.
(b) Taxes on new housing.
The city gets the bulk of its funding from property tax. Problem is, property tax is much more salient than income tax: you get a bill once a year for the full amount. So people are much more aware of property tax than income tax.
So the city ends up charging a lot of taxes on new housing instead. There's a supposedly voluntary charge called a "Community Amenity Contribution", which can be cash or in-kind: total CACs for 2011-2020 were $2.5 billion, or roughly 1/6 of the city's annual operating budget.
In effect, the city is selling permission to build, at very high prices. It's acting as both vendor (selling something) and regulator (deciding what's permitted).
There's a theory that these charges are absorbed by landowners, rather than resulting in higher prices and rents. If you look at the project math, though, what you see is that these charges (like any other cost increase) are first absorbed through lower land prices, but once that's gone (nobody's going to sell for less than the land is worth with its existing building), projects have to wait for prices and rents to rise. In other words, they're paid by homebuyers and renters. And it doesn't just affect new housing, it also affects prices and rents for existing housing, since they compete with each other. Slides with a longer explanation.
To fix this, we need to lower taxes on new housing.
Unfortunately this also means raising property taxes (there's a particular idea called a "land value tax" floating around). Or maybe allowing municipalities to have a local sales tax. A beneficial side-effect of raising property taxes is that it would reduce the attractiveness of Vancouver real estate as an investment, since it would raise the carrying costs.
Everything else
In the wake of Covid, public safety is a major issue. Some thoughts. Policing is a public service, and like all public services, it requires funding and public support.
Public services, e.g. libraries and community centres. They require operational and capital funding.
Shelters and other services for homeless people. Formally this is a provincial responsibility (complex-care housing is particularly important), but the city is inevitably involved. My main thought here is to try to identify different groups rather than just putting everyone together - for example, to have women-only shelters for greater security, or to have high-barrier supportive housing (no drugs or alcohol) for the same reason.
Economic constraints. One example: tourism is a major industry, and we don't have enough hotel spaces (which in turn increases demand for short-term rentals like AirBnB, putting pressure on the rental supply).
Disaster preparedness. For example, we should be doing a highly publicized annual exercise on earthquake preparedness. (This would also have the beneficial side-effect of raising the salience of earthquakes and thus reducing demand for Vancouver real estate.) We should also be prepared for killer heatwaves.
Municipal politicians don't deal directly with foreign policy, but one useful thing to keep in mind is that the first principle of Canadian foreign policy is maintaining national unity. Whenever there's international conflict, it's important to keep the peace at home. That means seeking to calm tensions (appealing to solidarity, we're all Canadians and we're all in this together) rather than inflaming them (like Trump).
Politicians and civil servants
One key thing to keep in mind: Politicians are just people. We elect politicians to tackle big problems, so we tend to think of them as larger than life, but they're subject to all the same constraints that all of us have: time, attention, understanding of policies and projects, ability to absorb verbal and written presentations.
It's also important to understand that when we talk about municipal government, there's really two distinct parts. One is the permanent city staff - the municipal equivalent of the federal or provincial civil service. The other is the elected mayor and council.
City staff are specialists: they've got expertise built up over time, they're the ones who best understand constraints and tradeoffs, and they actually have to implement decisions.
Elected officials are generalists: they're responsible for listening to people, figuring out what people want ("everything! for free! yesterday!"), giving direction to staff, and negotiating with staff to figure out what's actually possible. Plus planning for the next election, so that they don't get thrown out midway through whatever changes they're trying to make.
For a detailed explanation (highly recommended for anyone thinking of running for office or working for government), see Joseph Heath, The Machinery of Government, especially the introduction and first chapter.
The usual metaphor is a horse (the civil service) and a rider (elected officials). But as a friend puts it: "It's like the rider has the attention span of a goldfish, and the lifespan of a fruit fly."
What elected officials actually do
Act as a judge, voting on decisions affecting the city, and weighing the costs and benefits of the decision. (There's lots of reading - don't run for council if you're dyslexic.) This includes the annual budget; city-wide policies; hiring the top levels of the city staff; and a ton of site-by-site rezoning approvals.
Listen to the public. A very important part of the role of any elected official is keeping your ear to the ground, figuring out what's most important to people and what's actually possible. You're invited to a huge number of meetings and community events. You also get hundreds of emails every day. (At the municipal level, those aren't screened by an assistant.)
Talk to the public, through media and social media. This includes speeches, interviews, press releases, and other formal statements.
Communicate with city staff. A lot of this is formal, through written reports, council meetings, and public hearings.
Communicate with other levels of government. Machiavelli describes the three elements of diplomacy as persuasion, compromise, and pressure. By coincidence, these are also the three elements of intergovernmental relations in Canada.