Mayoral Candidates panel

Colleen, I'd like to start with you.

Can

you hear me? Great, thank you.

Well, Vancouver used to be known as the poster child for the livable city.

Going back to 1976 when we had Habitat Forum here, Vancouver stood out as the livable city, meaning balancing housing with infrastructure and creating quality of life for its residents.

And over the decades, we saw that come about through active involvement with neighbourhoods.

right up to 2006 when Vancouver hosted the UN World Forum on Sustainable Cities, again looking at Vancouver as the livable city.

So what Vancouver needs to do is to recover its balance, because over the last couple of decades, it's lost it.

It lost the plot of, instead of focusing on its residents and neighborhoods, focusing on making housing targets which were aspirational and ultimately about revenue streams for the city.

So when I talk about balance, I'm talking about balance in the budget, I'm talking about focusing on the core services that the city is responsible for, but I'm also talking about economic development.

because people go to new places because of jobs and opportunities, not just because we're building more housing.

And we went from a resource to a real estate-based economy, and so it is absolutely existential that we be diversifying our economy to create jobs for future generations.

Am I out of time already? Oh, sorry, that's the 30 seconds.

And then finally, we need safe streets and public spaces.

And this is a matter of not just enforcement, but also of recovery.

We need to be making a pathway to recovery for next generations as well and i'm trying to read the smoke signals here and that means wind it up so it's all about recovering our balance as a city recovering our local democracy and ultimately recognizing that residents matter thank you ken

Great, thank you.

And I'll start by saying, Stu, thank you very much for having us here.

Thank you for joining us.

And I do want to acknowledge everyone up on the stage.

You know, while we may not agree on everything, I think it's fabulous that we have people that are willing to put their name in the hat and try to make this place a better place.

So thank you very much.

Well, look, very briefly, you know, when we started, we thought we would make a lot of changes, and I'll be the first one to admit that we didn't get everything right, and we didn't get everything that we wanted to get accomplished.

In fact, we wanted to achieve maybe

this much and