Housing: Clearly things aren’t affordable, especially on the average salary in town. Creating more supply is great, and I’m all for that. As chair of the Banff Housing corporation I’m actively involved in the municipality creating lower cost housing. But we also need to look at reducing demand, among other options. (See staffing below, for some thoughts on that.) It also includes difficult conversations about real estate prices and what we can do to lower them across the board, even though this can affect peoples’ finances as many people treat their house as an investment as well as a place to live. Keeping prices low however, is the key to affordability.

Governance: Being a town councillor is about more than ideas, it's about being able to listen, synthesize information and make decisions for the whole, even when it's not in my self interest. I have over 15 years of governance experience in national and international organizations and read governance books for fun. I’ve dealt with budgets from the tens of thousands to the tens of millions and am comfortable reading and analyzing financial statements. Banff is still in a pandemic, though looking towards a recovery. I have followed the current council’s work closely, and have relevant governance experience so I don’t need to learn as much on the job, I can get to work right away on moving us forward.

Affordability: If we don’t pay attention to this, even the people who need to live here to support the town won’t be able to afford to do so. If our town is only motivated by (individual) profit, people are constantly looking to charge more and pay less. We need to work together to create structures, and encourage behaviours, that continue to treat people with respect and dignity. This might mean as an individual I make less money in my lifetime, but I’ll get to live in Banff, and not make someone else’s life suck in the process.

Visitation: I totally understand why people want to visit. I like it here so much I’ve made it home, even though it’d be way easier to live elsewhere. I don’t want to tell people they can’t visit, and I even if I did, I don’t know a reasonable way to do it. I do know though, that too many people, with too few services, leads to overcrowding, and a crappy experience, and is hard on the natural environment. We need to continue to look elsewhere for best practices, and also to realize that just because the experience we might be offering isn’t one I might want, doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to others.

Transportation: Getting around is important, and doing so in convenient manner has become an expectation. There are no easy solutions to transportation issues, and what works for me, might not work for you, and that’s okay. Our goal should be to create multiple opportunities for many different situations. Not favouring our preferred way of getting around, but making room for what might work for others as well. To me it’s also about trying to encourage modes of transportation that are favourable to the environment and promote access, sustainability and affordability. I believe a broad, accessible transportation system is important for Banff.

Staffing: Finding people to work in town is not an easy thing, especially now. I want us to try and look at this as an opportunity to see what the future might hold and try and design the future we want, rather than just letting it happen. I believe we should be encouraging and incentivising businesses to look at different business and staffing models that can work with less people living in town. This can include businesses that are able, hiring remote staff for jobs that don’t need to be done on site. Looking at what jobs can be automated, and different ways of delivering services. Again, not easy things, and we need to be careful about their effect on the community, but changes like this can make a meaningful difference long term.

Natural Environment: Our natural environment is why we’re here, and the purpose of the national park. Protecting it and sharing it should be our main focus. Making top dollar might need to take a step back so that nature can take priority, and we need to be okay with that. Whether or not we are, federal legislation forces that reality on us and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. We can’t expand our footprint even if we want to. But scarcity can bring creativity. I encourage us to see our limits as an opportunity to figure out how to be a thriving community. Let’s set an example for the world.

Community: Community isn’t something that just happens, it’s created and cultivated. I believe that a thriving community contains a diversity of ages, stages, beliefs, and backgrounds. A thriving community also has a diversity of wants and needs. The role of municipal government is to actively listen to all these different voices and create policies and structures that do their best to let everyone thrive. This can look like making sure we have different styles of housing for different segments of the population, seniors, singles, large/extended families, people with mobility issues, people with lower incomes. It’s not all up to the municipality though. All of us need to do our part, even if there’s a personal cost, to create a community where everyone who lives here can feel valued and at home.

Sustainability: In some ways this has become a meaningless word. To me though, it’s still the thread that underlies everything I’m talking about here. Sustainability is about something being able to be done long-term, forever even. It involves potential sacrifices in the present to ensure the future. Sustainability is about thinking beyond myself and making sure everyone and everything is considered in decision-making. Sustainability is hard, and it’s not the way most of us have been taught to think about the world, but thinking sustainably is how we ensure there is a Town of Banff we’re happy to call home in the future.

Taxes: Doing things costs money, and money has to come from somewhere. For municipalities, it mainly comes from taxes. Most people don’t like paying taxes, but they are what provide us with many of the services we like and need, and I do wish we’d be more accepting of that. It’s not an infinite pool however, and Banff is facing a two-fold tax challenge. With revenues down, businesses taxed based on revenues will be contributing less. The province is also requiring a change to the maximum percentage of municipal tax revenue that can come from businesses. Residential tax rates can’t easily absorb all the difference. Hard choices are going to need to be made, remembering that the goal is to provide the best community we can, for the most people, and to do that in the most affordable way possible. Not an easy balance, but an important one.