Jordan Bateman is tired. And the media is tired of him, he supposes.
It’s time for a bit of a break.
“My adrenaline has just dropped off,” the president of the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) told Business in Vancouver two weeks after Metro Vancouver’s transportation plebiscite delivered a victory for the No side.
Bateman spent eight months as the face of the No side, railing against TransLink spending and a proposed 0.5% regional sales tax increase that would fund local mayors’ $7.5-billion transportation plan.
“It was such a different campaign,” said the 39-year-old, who has run for Langley Township council three times (winning twice) and dipped his toes in the provincial arena as deputy premier Rich Coleman’s riding president in the mid-2000s.
“This went on for so long. I wrote my first campaign plan the month after the 2013 [provincial] election because the plebiscite could have happened at any time.”
He’s packing it in for a few weeks in August, leaving his non-strata row home in Langley and heading for a coastal cottage in Washington state with his wife and three young children.
There, he’s going to “refresh the quiver” and perhaps begin work on a book covering the No side’s “underdog” campaign.
He pauses briefly outside a coffee shop at downtown Vancouver’s Shaw Tower to contemplate whether there would have been a No victory had the CTF not taken the reins.
“It would have turned out differently,” he said, adding he still doesn’t think the Yes side would have had enough juice to win. The plebiscite ended with just 32% of voters favouring a tax increase.
“But we were a necessary part of this conversation.”
Despite the high public profile he’s gained throughout 2015, Bateman said he’s not interested in a return to elected politics.
“You never say never to anything but it’s not on my agenda,” he said.
His schedule is flexible enough to allow him to pick up his kids from school and watch them compete in horse-riding competitions or hockey games. He also had time to graduate at the top of his class with a master’s degree in leadership at Royal Roads University just before the plebiscite campaign kicked into full gear. Those aren’t activities he sees many elected politicians taking part in.
Meanwhile, he likes talking to his parents about their “kooky” retirement plans to sell their home and cars to travel across North America in an RV for the next three years or so.
Bateman doesn’t see much reason to leave Langley when he retires. He’s lived there since he was 12 and likes the urban amenities within five minutes of pastures filled with horses.
His younger sister, however, has already moved on to New Westminster.
“[She] loves me but rolls her eyes at some of the work I do. We don’t always agree, which is kind of the perfect sibling relationship,” Bateman said.
But talk to people of different political stripes and it’s easy to find more than a few who disagree with Bateman but like him anyway.
“Because he has this sort of relaxed, folksy style, people tended to underestimate him until they really got to know him,” said former Langley Township mayor Kurt Alberts, who served during Bateman’s first term in 2005.
Bateman wasn’t all that interested in politics until local beat reporter Frances Bula spoke to his class while he was studying journalism at Langara College in Vancouver during the mid-1990s.
“She was so passionate about city hall politics, which at the time would seem so foreign to me as a 19-year-old,” Bateman recalled. “She talked about the issues; she talked about how it’s the level of government closest to the people; she talked about how there are personal stories but there are also technical stories and [about] marrying the two. She just made a great case.”
The Langley Advance hired him a year later, putting the cub reporter on the township council beat where he stayed for nearly a decade.
After one earlier failed election campaign, Bateman was on the other side of council chambers by the time he was 29, working with the mayors and councillors he’d covered earlier in his career.
“Jordan in his reporting could be pretty biting,” Alberts said. “He always managed to balance that but ... unlike some of the other reporters who just gave the facts, he actually did a little bit of investigative work, getting to the bottom of things and trying to put it into perspective.”
Alberts, who described Bateman as one of the best councillors Langley Township has ever had, is skeptical of any claims he’s not interested in returning to elected politics.
“He would have a hard time just sitting back and watching things unfold. He’s the kind of person who really has the desire to be part of shaping the community,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if he just went away and wrote a book.”
Other than penning that No book, Bateman says he may also have to let up on TransLink as his regular punching bag for the time being.
After meeting with Transportation Minister Todd Stone in Victoria in mid-July, Bateman said the province seems willing to listen to some of his suggestions to change the transit agency.
Next up, probably in the fall, he’s planning to target medical service plans.
Bateman, meanwhile, insists he’s not anti-government, anti-tax or even anti-transit – an image that is an about-face from the one he fostered as a city councillor during his second term, according to former Langley Township mayor Rick Green, who succeeded Alberts in 2008.
“Jordan is a real conundrum,” Green said. “This is a young kid who had the answers to all the questions. He just didn’t understand the questions.”
The ex-mayor didn’t recall Bateman showing much interest in exploring transit projects like the South Fraser interurban rail the former mayor had been pushing.
And Green said the young politician voted for “virtually every” tax increase while serving on council.
“I am totally supportive of what Jordan’s done on the whole transit thing,” he said.
“I’m in amazement that he’s all of the sudden found, I guess, virtue on the road to Damascus. ...It is totally against what Jordan has ever stood for.”
Anne Roberts, former chair of Langara’s journalism program, recalled Bateman as an earnest student who took his studies seriously.
“Although Jordan, talented as he is and smart as he is, [as a public figure] just took advantage of the way media covers stories,” she said.
Bateman knows reporters look to create balanced stories by interviewing people from all sides of an issue, according to Roberts, who also migrated from journalism to politics as a Vancouver city councillor.
“He became the go-to person for the opposition, and the media just fell into it,” she said.
“It is that that made his profile.”
Bateman said he’s not out to raise his own personal profile. He just wants to fight against government misspending.
“Some people think I’m this wildly ambitious person trying to climb some invisible ladder. But the thing that is important to me ... is the family,” he said.
Since joining the CTF in 2011, he’s viewed taxes as a “sacred trust” between the government and the people. If you don’t pay your taxes, you can be thrown in jail. So, he wondered, why can’t government be held to equal account?
“I’m not anti-tax,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m pro-waste.”
