The plan
Five commitments
I’m a plain-language person by trade, so I’ll keep this plain.
These are five things I actually believe, said in real words, with real specifics. Not slogans. You’ll notice they’re more detailed than what you usually get from a campaign. That’s on purpose. You deserve to know what you’re voting for.
“Half the time they’re in camera because they have to go ask lawyers that work for the city what they can do. You can’t change the rules if you don’t even understand the rules.”
Meaningful work, not just more and bigger
London has one of the highest unemployment rates of any city in Canada. That isn’t fixed by another photo op or a backroom handshake with a few wealthy people. More and bigger is not the same as better.
People aren’t looking for any job. They’re looking for work they can actually build a life on. Pay a rent. Raise a family. Feel some security.
Here’s what a mayor can actually do about it:
- Build the right relationships with employers, with our eyes open. Be reasoned about who we court and why. Chase good jobs, not just headlines.
- Use the mayor’s voice at the province. Push for the things only the province can grant, including a living wage.
- Clean our own house first. The City is one of the biggest employers in town. Right now it has very well-paid people on secure contracts, and very poorly-paid people in precarious work, side by side. If we want to be a shining example of how to treat workers, we have to start with our own.
“We have very well-paid people with very secure contracts, and very poorly-paid people in precarious employment at the same time. We need to clean our own house before we can make the suggestion that we can make things better for other companies.”
A downtown that isn’t rewarded for sitting empty
Too much of our downtown sits empty and boarded up. You can see it. Boarded windows. Buildings left to rot for years while the rest of us walk past.
Right now, in too many cases, leaving a building empty costs the owner almost nothing. We are rewarding the wrong behaviour. That has to end.
Here’s what a mayor can actually do about it:
- Use the law creatively.Where we have the power to charge a vacancy tax, charge it. Where we don’t, push the province hard for the authority.
- Enforce the tools we already have.Fines for boarded-up buildings. Property standards. We don’t always use what’s already on the books.
- Stop the free ride. There has to be an end point. We cannot keep on rewarding owners who leave our city empty.
And here is the heart of it:
“We’re very good at financing police officers to walk around the downtown and police poverty. But we’re not funding people to police wealth.”
Same money. Different job. If we can pay to manage poverty downtown, we can pay to hold the people sitting on empty buildings to account. I want value for that money, and right now I’m not seeing it.
A $100,000 mayor
The mayor of London is paid well over $150,000 a year. On top of that there’s a sizeable office budget.
I’d cut the mayor’s pay toward $100,000.
I know that, on its own, that’s a drop in the bucket of a billion-dollar budget. That isn’t the point. The point is leadership.
“Leadership is not what you do behind the scenes every day. It’s how you live your life all the time.”
You cannot ask people to sacrifice while you take the maximum for yourself. You cannot say “times are tight” from a comfortable chair. Meanwhile council voted to raise councillors’ pay by roughly a third for the next term. The mayor’s salary was not part of that increase. I don’t need that much money. None of us do, when there are people in this city without homes or enough to eat.
Public meetings, every month
One night a month, somewhere different in London. Any resident can come and bring their concerns straight to the mayor. Not a form. Not a phone tree. The actual mayor, in your part of the city, listening.
And then the part that makes it real: I’ll publish what I heard, and what I did about it. So you can hold me to it.
Online, there’s a companion to this. It’s called Ask Bronagh. Same idea, open all the time.
This is what “a City Hall that listens” actually looks like when you mean it.
A City Hall you can understand, and walk into
I teach cities across Canada how to communicate with their residents in plain language. So I take this one personally.
Government shouldn’t be a building you talk at. It should be one you can talk with.
Here’s what a mayor can actually do about it:
- Plain language, everywhere.If a resident can’t understand a notice, a bylaw, or a budget, that’s a failure of the City, not the resident.
- Open the doors. City Hall should feel like it belongs to the people who pay for it, not like somewhere you need permission to enter.
- Know the rules.A lawyer in the big chair who actually understands the law is useful. Too often, decisions get made without anyone being sure we’re even following the rules we wrote.
“A lot of this stuff, I don’t think we’re even doing according to the law. We’re just doing it because we think we understand the law, but we don’t.”
The value underneath the policies
A city is judged by how it treats the people who have the least, not the most. That’s the whole thing. Care comes first. Not money, not status. Those have their place, but they don’t get to be the guiding principle.
“We have to have people who care. Empathy and caring is their number one value. I don’t see the guiding principle of human decency and care reflected in the way we run our institutions, and I don’t think most people do either.”
And one more thing: disagreement doesn’t have to mean contempt. I’ll always treat people with civility, even the ones who don’t extend me the same.
On what actually keeps people safe
I think we owe ourselves an honest conversation about what actually keeps people safe, and whether we’re spending in the ways that do that. I’m open to that discussion. I’d rather have it in the open than pretend it away.
On who funds campaigns
People ask me where I stand on developer money. Here’s the honest answer.
“I don’t care where the money comes from. As long as anybody who wants to donate to me knows that I am not voting a certain way because you donated. You don’t get a favour from me. The decisions I make are based on who I am and what my values are.”
The problem was never the money. It’s the ethics of the politician. You can see that in how someone lives, and how they vote. So judge all of us by our behaviour, not our donor lists. Use your own good judgment. That’s the part no campaign can take away from you.