I’d make a terrible politician.
For one thing, if you read this column you may have noticed I keep confusing my inside voice with my outside voice. You see how that could be a problem.
For another, I’d have to work on that vision thing. “Make America Great Again” is a great slogan. It must be. Against all odds, it got Donald Trump elected. And the Donald and I have something in common: we’re both superannuated rookies and neither of us has any idea what we’re talking about. But that doesn’t seem to be a barrier.
However, “Make North Vancouver Great Again” leaves me cold. For one thing, North Vancouver is already great. And what, exactly, do we mean by “great”? If Trump’s vision of America is any idea ... er, great.
So let’s say Richard Walton decides to throw in the towel before the next election, a little over a year away on Oct. 20, 2018, after more than 16 years as mayor and district councillor. He must be thinking along those lines. Imagine enduring 16 years of weekly council meetings listening to one-issue cranks waste oxygen or proclaiming International Bermuda Shorts Day.
So I figure the mayor’s salary has crept up to more than $100,000 annually and it’s there for the taking – easy money! All I have to do is get elected. I just have to prevent my inside voice from escaping, and come up for a slogan that will keep my outside voice busy.
And I’ve got one: Keep North Vancouver Beautiful.
Right now, you’re thinking. He’s right; he would make a terrible politician. But work with me here. It’s a slogan, not a policy platform. And it’s what the people want – remember; the 2016 Vital Signs survey identified “natural beauty” as the number one thing that people like about North Vancouver. Of course, there are things they don’t like – a shortage of housing and a surplus of traffic being the top two. But the trick, according to this superannuated rookie know-nothing, is to keep our community beautiful while solving its issues.
Of course, people want to live here because it’s so beautiful. I sometimes think we could solve the housing crisis if we just allow more billionaires to build more auto malls on the ocean shore, but that’s just me confusing outside and inside voice again.
Seriously, we need affordable housing; therefore we need density, which is not inherently beautiful. But it’s amazing what you can with the judicious use of greenbelts, trees, landscaping and a light touch. The idea is to create density with an esthetic eye. If it comes down to a developer versus a park, let beauty be your guide. And if that fails, look at the auto mall and do the opposite.
I’m not being entirely fair – the little waterfront park in front of the auto mall is exactly what I’m talking about. Park architects successfully blended landscaping, vacant green space, walking trails and public art to create an island of serenity in the city, even if it does provide an excellent view of a barge.
Then there’s the big NIMBY. Or maybe we should say Not in Our Back Yard (NIOBY?). In this case, our backyard is North Shore mountains. Metro Vancouver has already taken a positive step to keep it beautiful by turning Grouse Mountain into a park. But there’s development pressure all along the mountain range, from Cypress to Seymour, and as they make decisions about mountain development, I advise politicians across the North Shore to be careful and remember their legacy will be visible all the way to White Rock.
If anything threatens to sink the beauty project, it’s traffic. Just look at what’s happening to the verdant Cut, which is being assiduously bulldozed to rationalize the Mountain Highway on-ramp problem. As your next mayor, I applaud the initiative – no one would ever describe the Upper Levels Parking Lot as beautiful, but the challenge is to prevent the Cut from resembling downtown Los Angeles when the work is finished. My pledge: send in the Beauty Patrol with a plan to give Mother Nature a boost once we’re done. Just think of all the landscaping jobs for North Shore daughters and sons.
See? When you follow beauty, everything else falls into place. Call it balance, call it sustainability, but make sure we keep North Vancouver beautiful.
As the poet said: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
He wasn’t much of a politician either.
Journalist and communications consultant Paul Sullivan has been a North Van resident since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Madonna. [email protected].
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