The mayor’s longtime Svengali, Mike Magee, chief of staff, is morphing into Mike Magee, special adviser. Over four months, as exhausted post-election Official Ottawa decamps to summer quarters, he will be pushing the city’s economic and environment agenda in … um, Official Ottawa.
Whether he returns as a major actor or in a bit part, and whether he finds a new haven or mentee, we will only find out later. Were the mayor not so against resource extraction, one might have called last week’s announcement of the move a pipeline preceding a golden handshake. Let’s be fair, though, and assume this might be for once what it says it is: a buddying-up with the bureaucracy, destination Sunny Ways. And while we are living in the moment of non-facetiousness, let’s also say how important it is that Ottawa hear loudly and clearly the concerns of Vancouver.
Not that our mayor has been a shrinking violet in recent years, kicking Stephen Harper in the slats on pipelines, housing, climate change, homelessness and transit – enough to ensure Harper mostly high tailed into Surrey or the Fraser Valley when he landed at YVR. He was only slightly less visible in the city than the mayor himself.
Six months into a Justin Trudeau government, there are obvious signs of a thaw. While I don’t think our mayor is on speed dial, he is no longer a blocked caller.
Which is not to say all’s rosy. The salivated-over federal largesse for transit and housing is on hold – it’ll most likely come, but much later – and last week’s head-scratcher of a letter on the proposed Kinder Morgan TransMountain twinning easily could have been written to Trudeau’s predecessor.
But back to Magee’s migration.
For some reason – the term democracy comes to mind – we have these people called mayors to represent communities. I don’t see Naheed Nenshi of Calgary, John Tory of Toronto or Denis Coderre of Montreal – each with his own pile-o’-problems for Justin to address – designating a body double.
That the city needs a surrogate suggests either (a) something’s afoot to jeopardize the initiatives, or (b) the mayor hasn’t the inclination or intuition to roll up the sleeves to make the case.
No matter. It will be done.
So, in the interest of being a team player, in the form of public input, some suggestions: The “innovation agenda” is a sci-fi gravy train, the transit infrastructure is a pork barrel of greater immediate value to developer donors than the travelling public, and the affordable housing funds are for housing most unaffordable by all but San Francisco standards.
That money may come, but if you want to help our city, Mr. Interlocutor, learn one acronym and repeat after me: TPP, TPP, TPP, TPP. I can hear the sound of spitting coffee.
Apart from climate change, this administration doesn’t much acknowledge the wider world. Case in point: that harbour of ships hauling Canadian commodities out and the world’s Coach bags, 4K TVs and iPhones in is portrayed from Cambie and 12th as a flotilla of incessant poisons recklessly expelled. The image sells well to the uninformed, and, like Donald Trump, the administration at times loves the poorly educated.
Vancouver was not settled because we are a short drive to Whistler. We are Canada’s largest port city, and our mayor only ever mentions the facilities when he frets about a spill.
But context matters.
A game-changing trading relationship under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would, well beyond any other imminent ingredient, contribute to the city’s standard of living.
The Trudeau government has gone quiet on TPP. It signed but will take time to ratify, presumably to await America’s move. When I talked to Harper about it just before he lost the election, he said Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the pact was posturing in the primaries – she’ll come around, he said. The Donald, well, who the heck knows?
But if Mr. Magee wants to do the city a favour, he can rep TPP first and foremost.
Now that he has spat out his coffee, I can hear him laughing from here.
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
