This week on Beyond the Ballot, we sat down with #Mississauga mayoral candidate Alvin Tedjo to discuss his candidacy and platform. We talked about everything from housing to transportation to crime. He also walked us through the property tax freeze he’s proposing.
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The views expressed in the following programare those of the participants and do not
necessarily reflect the views of SAGA ninesixty AM or its management from the treaty
and traditional territory of the Mississaugas ofthe Credit First Nation. You're listening to
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Beyond the Ballot with Ryan Gurcharn andNoka duck Ru. Welcome to Beyond the
Ballot. I'm your host, RyanGercharn and I'm here with my co host
Noka. Look Welcome, Welcome orwelcome back, Welcome back to another week,
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another election, No same election,but more same election day. It
feels like, oh my god,signs have gone up. It's starting to
feel a little more like Christmas.Christmas mornings coming in June, June tenth.
So if you're planning on voting,that's when you got to vote.
Advanced polls are coming up so youcould vote in those two Noka, what
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was your take this week? Whathappened? So signs are up? That
feels real. It feels like it'sa it's a real election that's happening.
You drive around, you find signshere and there, which is nice.
I like collections signs, not forever, but just straight elections. I'm in
Ward five and there's tons of signsyou have. I know each home has
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at least two or three like counselorsigns up. It's it's it's because honestly,
it's gonna be I still think it'sgonna be a low turnout regardless of
how many signs go up. Yeah, and it really goes to show you
that folks are just letting They're notsaying who they're voting for. They're allowing
a lot of people multiple candidates toput their signs up. So common and
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municipal elections I find because people don'treally have to really pick a particular party,
you know, you find that peoplewill just say yes to multiple candidates
just to make people happy. Andthe politeness that is. Yeah right,
I mean I do. Do youhave your multiple candidates on your lawn?
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I do? I really I do. It's mainly because I want their volunteers
come and you know, yeah,be nice. I even though I don't
totally agree with some of their stances, I still know what because honestly,
there's no other way for them asa candidate. There's no other way to
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become visible and to let other peopleknow you're running other than lawn signs right
now, that's true. Especially rightYeah, there's no media. There's no
like, there's no you know whatI mean, the printed media is now.
I think there's no television. Allfolks have is nine to sixty AM.
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A lot of folks are not listeningto it if they're not driving.
Well, Ryan, I didn't knowyou were that nice. I am certainly
going to come and run in yourward just so I could put my sign
under lawn at people, I willsend volunteers every day to your house to
ask every day for another sign soI can puts fifty signs. Because you
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don't say no, so I don't. I don't. I'm a sucker.
Uh So some people came up withplatforms I saw this week. Right,
We've seen a lot of stuff thisthis week. You know, we had
Alvin who released a housing platform.There's been a couple of debates. There
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was a big housing debate. Carolynis not attending any more debates. That's
interesting, the choice. Yeah,I got a lot of media. She
did one debate and after that thatwas enough. Yeah, basically, and
I mean it's not surprising, tobe honest, it's a she's she's really
ahead in the polls, and whenyou're really ahead in the polls, you
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know, you don't necessarily need theexposure. So sometimes I understand the tactic.
I understand the strategy. You know, you're not don't rock the boat
kind of thing. Yeah, andCarolyn does have a tendency, since you
know she was an MP, tosay things that get a lot of attention
in not the best light for her. So i'm you know, by saying,
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like in the beginning of the provincialelection in twenty twenty two, doug
Ford wasn't very visible because you know, for the same not for the exact
same reason, but you didn't wantto mess up your head in the polls.
Why why you know, message,when you're head in the polls,
you gotta be low key. Notif you're just slightly ahead. No,
no, if you're if you havea sizeable comfortable to your front runner,
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it's not an unheard of strategy that'sright to you know, coast a little.
I'm not saying she's coasting, butit's not an unheard of strategy.
No, no, she was,She's not coasting at all. She's just
switching strategies right Instead, of doingdebates and opening herself up to attacks from
the opposition. It's more I'm guessingshe's focusing. I've seen billboards up,
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I've seen party advertisers up. Ihaven't seen it. And have you seen
anything for anybody but Carolyn? Forthird party advertisers? No, I've only
seen the billboards and I was actuallypretty surprised. I was driving around.
They are everywhere. I don't thinkI've seen that before in the last election
for me, I have I've seenit for a counselor. Yeah, I've
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seen it for one counselor in thepast. That's what I've seen. I
don't know if there's been more,but all I've ever seen is one counselor.
This is sort of new and youknow what it wasn't It isn't the
Gong show. I thought it wasgoing to be so far. No,
his signs are tiny, just likescattered on Yeah. Yeah, So I'm
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disappointed in God, I was expectingmore. The most signs I've seen in
Ward five area that's where I amare the red and blue Carolyn signs,
which makes sense because she was acounselor. Most folks know her and the
other folks are starting to see moresigns for Dippica Dasco and Alvin pop up
in ward five. Now, speakingof Alvin, we have him standing by.
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Uh, We're gonna go over hisplatform. We're gonna drill him on
everything he's putting forth, what hisvision for Mississauga is. So if you
are deciding on who to vote formayor, stay tuned because you're gonna hear
a little bit about his vision fromMississauga and where he wants to see us
in the next two years. Sostay tuned. Right here on Beyond the
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Ballot Newstoksaga nine sixty Am. Streamus live at SAGA nine sixty am dot
CA. You're listening to Beyond theBallot with Ryan Gurcharn and Noka duck Rub
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and welcome back to Beyond the Ballot. I'm your host, Ryan Gurcharn and
Nooka Duck Rub is also here.Noka, how you doing good? How
are you? Ryan? It's beena while well, I mean there was
a break we have it hasn't beenthat long and now that we're back,
we are here with a special candidaterunning for a here of Mississauga. So
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tonight or today rather we have wehave a very special candidate. It's Alvin
ted Show and he is the counselorForward two. He's been the councilor since
the twenty twenty two election, andwe're going to get to know him a
little bit more. We're going tolearn all about his platform. He's been
going out there talking a lot abouthousing, transportation, all sorts of interesting
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stuff, even taxes. So we'regoing to talk more with Alvin about what
he's been up to. What dohe thinks the issues are. Thanks for
joining us, Alvin, Welcome tothe show, Noka Ryan. It's a
pleasure. I'm excited to have thisconversation. And yeah, lots to talk
about, big city for sure,So Alv, let's get right to it.
What do you think are the biggestissues that are facing Mississauga right now
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and you know, for the nextfive years. Yeah, I mean it's
such a challenge right now for peoplewho live in the city. The residents
in the city right now, Ithink are facing a number of crises all
at the same time. They're facingan affordability crisis, there's a housing crisis,
and there's also sort of a securitycrisis. And I'll elaborate on all
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of those. But affordability is youknow, a a fancy word for talking
about how much money people have.How much is sposedly they have and people
are The metric that I like usingis the use of the food bank,
and the use of the food bankhas gone up every single month since the
pandemic started, and we have morepeople using the food bank who have never
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ever ever used the food bank oreven considered using a food bank in the
past. I knock on doors everyday and I'm talking to hundreds thousands of
people I've talked to canvassing across thecity, and I ran into a number
of what you would call, youknow, middle income families who would never
imagine themselves needing a food bank,having gone to the food bank for the
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first time, almost in tears becausethey can't afford groceries and the cost of
gas is too high in terms ofhousing, you know. I moved to
Mississauga when I was four years old. My parents came from the other side
of the world, and they sawMississauga as a place as an opportunity where
they could get an education, theycould start a business, they could buy
home. Most importantly, and whenmy wife and I were deciding where to
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move out raise our family. Wechose missus Osoger for the same reasons,
and we could be close to family, which is so important. You know,
you have kids. How important isit to be close to family?
And I want my kids to beable to do what I did, which
is live in the community that theygrew up in. The way things are
going right now, with the amountof housing that we have, with the
amount of affordability that's available in thecity, that's not possible. Lastly,
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security safety big issue. You needa home, you need a roof over
your head, you need food inyour belly, and you need to feel
safe in your own community right andpeople don't feel safe right now. Number
break ins are going up, thenumber of cars that have been stolen,
We're going to break a record thisyear. We're already on pace for that.
That's not acceptable. We need todo more. And I want to
tack all of those issues. Yeah, for sure. And you talk about
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very real issues. These are veryreal issues that everybody's experiencing, everybody's feeling
it to a certain extent. Let'stalk about housing. You recently released a
housing platform that has significant details,certainly more detail than I've seen from other
candidates tell us about that, howare you going to tackle the housing crisis
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as mayor? I was just goingto say, I'm so excited about this
format because this is really where wecan dive into the details and talk about
what our plan is. And Ilike sare sort of saying we have the
most comprehensive plan. I challenge anybodyto find a more comprehensive plan than the
one that we put out. Youknow, it's ten hundred times longer than
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anyone else's who's out there right now. But it's not just about quantity,
its quality. We've consulted everyone everyonewho has a stake in housing in Mississauga,
from residents to builders, not forprofits, to government to basically unions
and anyone who has input in termsof how we can build more housing.
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And we tackled it from many differentperspectives, many different lenses, and so
I encourage everybody to go to thewebsite alvit dot ca. You'll see everything
there, but if you go slashhousing you'll see specifically our housing plan.
But we want to make it easierto build, and we want to make
it easier to build all kinds ofhousing. But also the right types of
housing. Everybody likes talking about andformer Mayor Crombie used to like talking about
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how many cranes are in the sky. Look how much Mississaua is building as
a way to sort of defend ourposition in terms of how much building we've
done. There's thirty two cranes inthe sky right now. Great, good
number. We're getting some building good. One of them is a purpose built
rental, the other thirty one ourmarket condos. Basically, so we're not
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building enough different kinds of housing.We're not building enough kinds of housing that
people want. So we've created apathway that a different pathway for purpose built
rental. We want a different pathwayand mechanism to approve and allow and quickly
go through the process. For affordablehousing, we need to do that.
For supportive housing, we need toexpand options for shelters. We need more
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of right options that take the applicationprocess out of it right, so it's
easier you just go through site planapproval every step of the way. We've
looked at how different builders would goabout their projects and how we can remove
barriers from that. Some of themare financial. Great, let's remove application
fees. Some of them are land. How do we get more land for
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people who are going to use it. How do we attach affordability when we
give them land. It's really aboutmaking sure we're bringing all the partners to
the table and coming up with asmany ways as possible to get that housing
built as quickly as possible. Sowe're going to have to do a lot.
We're also relying on the provincial andfederal government to do their part as
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well. But it's so important thatwe're basically saying and signaling that there's going
to be a culture change if I'melected mayor in terms of how the city
is going to have a relationship withdevelopment in the city. We're not just
going to be a regulator. We'regoing to be a partner. We're going
to I want to allow six storiesas of right along main streets, similar
to a plan that Toronto is debatingright now. We need to allow higher
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densities around major transit station areas.That makes the most sense. Think about
an area like Cooksville or Poor Credit, where you have multiple transit lines intersecting
with each other in one community threeIn the case of Cooksville, that's not
a place you can limit or shouldlimit heightened density. That should be where
you want the most growth, becausethen you don't have to have parking minimums.
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You can allow people to move intothose communities who can then walk and
have a livable neighborhood to be in. And so yeah, there's so much
more to do, but I'm superexcited about our housing plan and how it
helps us with our other pieces becausemore housing equals more taxpayers, equals lower
taxes. So yeah, I justwant to dive into it a little bit
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more. We hear a lot fromcandidates talking about cutting red tape. You
hear that from province. There's alot of talk about how municipalities have way
too much red tape that somehow hascontributed to the housing crisis. Can you
explain a little bit what that lookslike and why that is and how you'd
go about changing that. Yeah,so different pieces of red tape. Right
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Like when Bill twenty three was introduced, we essentially moved the process of the
various studies that the city asks forand said, you know, we will
start the clock when we consider yourapplication complete. So we're not going to
start that you know, one hundredand twenty day clock until your application is
complete. So we essentially move theprocess upfront to sort of say, all
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the hoops that we want you tojump through, we still want you to
jump through them, but we needto do it upfront. That didn't really
solve the problem, right, Thatdidn't really build more housing faster. What
we need to look at is whatis necessary and what is superfluous, right,
what gets in the way of people'sproposals. So one of the things
I want to get rid of islike an angular plane or a shadow study,
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or floor spaced floorplate maximums or setbacks. I want to look at all
these different pieces and say, whydo we have that, What is the
purpose of that particular policy, anddoes it apply across the board. If
there's something that we want to keep, maybe there's justification to keep it.
If it's essentially there to slow downa project, we need to get rid
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of it. It doesn't make senseto me that we have a floor space
maximum that does not allow for moretwo and three bedroom units. That doesn't
make any sense to me. Whydo we require a wind study on a
townhouse complex for condos? Sure fortownhouses? Doesn't make any sense. So
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there's a lot of that, whydo we require a landscape architect report in
terms of how we're going to showwhere the trees are going to be.
When we're doing a zoning application,we're talking about zoning, We're talking about
the purpose of this land and howdense we want it to be, versus
a site plan which is coming waylater when you're ready to build, when
you would actually tell people this iswhere we want it to be. So
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a number of those things need tomove. That's how we cut a tape.
We're actually talking about removing pieces fromthe process that should not be there
and could be later on, andthen we want to accelerate the process.
That is one hundred percent possible.We've seen other cities do this a lot.
I have the support of the mayorof Gwelf, Cam Guthrie, who
has shown that his city has beenable to reduce his application times and his
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permit times. I think he cutin half two years three years in a
row, from like two years toa year to six months to three months.
So we have examples that we canlearn from and we plan on doing
that. I plan on doing that. Earlier in the beginning, when you
were giving an overview of the housingplatform. You mentioned rentals briefly. I
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was just wondering if you could expandon that. What sort of steps are
are you going to help with rentalsor people renting, because you did talk
about the people buying houses and tryingto free up you know, first time
buy home owners or people who wantto buy houses. But what about folks
who are renting right now? Misasaga'srent's going up a lot quite a bit.
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It's one of the most expensive citiesto rent in. And how are
you planning on tackling that? Yeah, I'll tell you how impossible it is
to rent in the city. Theaverage salary in Mississauga is fifty four thousand
dollars. That's the average. Itmeans half the people make less than that.
The average rent, or the minimumrent really for anyone who's looking for
a new rental in the city isaround twenty two to twenty three hundred dollars
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a month. You calculate that out, that means you're leaving this person who
is renting a one bedroom apartment inthe city of Mississauga one thousand dollars a
month for everything else. They're spendingover two thirds of their income just on
housing, and they're leaving themselves athousand for food, for clothing, for
transportation, for any essentials, notlet alone having fun. We're not even
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talking about that. That's just justsurviving. So that doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't the math doesn't work right, So we need to find more
ways to build more rentals. SoI was talking about purpose built rental,
and what we need to understand asa municipality is that the economics are different
for rentals than they are for condos. Builders for rentals need to have a
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lot of their capital upfront and theyneed to secure that in order to get
the loans in order to get thebuilders in order to get the project going.
They work on different timelines. Condobuilders can wait till money comes in
through people who are putting down paymentsand then the banks kind of work that
way. There's also different economics aroundthat, not just the building but also
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the tenants who are going to bethere. Right, So what we need
to do is we need to makethe project easier for a purpose built rental
builders to build, and so weshould be incentivizing them to do that by
giving them different bonuses. Right,if you want to build a personal rental.
Maybe we'll give you a hype bonusor a density bonus. Maybe we'll
lower your parking minimum or remove italtogether. Maybe we'll remove the piece that
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requires you to have commercial on theground floor because you're square one or you're
across the street from score on andit doesn't make sense for you to do
that. We're not flexible enough asa municipality. I'm including all these things
in my plan to sort of say, these are the things that we should
remove and can remove from the processto make more purpose built rentals. And
we went to the rental community andsaid, how do we get more rentals
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built? And these are some ofthe solutions that they came up with.
That's great. So tell us alittle bit about your transportation plan. I
understand you released something recently about that. Yeah, just a few days ago.
We put out a transit map.Everybody loves a good map, but
really this is a cohesive plan thatall comes together. Right. So you
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need affordability, you need housing,and you need complete communities, and in
order to get around we need togive people options. I think a lot
of people don't realize how important transitis for any city. But if you
look at Toronto's history, and youlook at where Toronto was when they were
the size of Mississauga, when theyhad eight hundred thousand people. You know,
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they already had several streetcar lines,several subways, and then they continue
to grow and expand from there,we're playing ketchup. I say this not
to dispair our previous mayor, butwe need to fix a forty year mistake
where Mississauga turned down on two separateoccasions, a subway extension from Kipling into
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the downtown core of Mississauga forty yearsago and then thirty years ago. We
need to fix that. So partof my plan is actually the whole part
of my plan is to create arapid transit network across the city right in
the north along Darry in the south, along Lake Shore, on the east
along Dixie, and along the westup Aaron Mills, in addition to upgrading
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the Dundas BRT to become an LRTline that would connect from Kipling into the
here Ontario line and then be partof the loop. So you can have
that what transit people like to talkabout, a one bum ride, right,
so you can transfer over at Kiplingand get on a one bum ride
through the downtown core of Mississauga thatwould be revolutionary. It's also it's also
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already built into part into the planet. So as we're building the Dune DASSPRT
now, it's already being outfitted tobe able to be an LRT, so
it wouldn't take that much more tothen upgrade it to an LRT. This
obviously is in addition to you know, the transit Way and the Eglinton Extension
that's going just to the border ofMississauga as well. So the one other
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thing I want to explain around transit, we're building these extra lines. The
reason I'm focusing on buses is becausebuses is something that we can do right
away. It is very easy todraw lines on a map and say I'm
going to build you a subway fromKipling to Aaron Mills. That's a that's
a nice sentiment. I worked inthe Ontario govern when we announced the here
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in Terio Lert back in twenty twelve. It's twelve years later we still haven't
built it. So I don't wantto tell people plans of you know,
these makeup lines that we could drawon a map and not be able to
deliver. I want to make servicebetter immediately. We just did that this
week. Council passed additional fifty seventhousand service hours for my ways to make
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transit better so that we have morebuses, more operators, so we don't
have fewer closed doors because they're full, have more times and more routes.
But the reason brts are the wayto start is because we can do that
immediately too. So we can startwith improving service over the first one hundred
days, investing in more, andthen we can plan out the next couple
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of bus rapid transit lines over thenext couple of years, so we can
have very good transit, reliable transitin the coming years and not decades.
And then we can plan also tosay, you know, yes, okay,
absolutely, I'd love a high speedrail through whatever. But you know
that's we got to start with thatwork. But it's not the it's not
the biggest priority yet right well,speaking about moving Mississauga, we're going to
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move right now from this discussion toa quick commercial break and when we come
back, I want to hear moreabout this transit because I it's I think
the first time I've seen a Canadacome out with like a map and a
plan, and there's just so muchto digest here, So stay tuned right
here on new Stok SAGA nine sixtyam. When we come back, more
of Alvin Tedjo here on newstock SAGGAnine sixty am, No Radio, No
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Problem. Stream is live on SAGAnine sixty am dot cl You're listening to
Beyond the Ballot with Ryan Gerd Charn, Noka Duck Grub and welcome back to
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Beyond the Ballot. I'm here withNoka Duck Grub, co host of Beyond
the Ballot, and we're here withAlvin Tedjo and Alvin. I'm just wondering
you presented recently this new transplant fromMississaga you were talking about just before the
break, trying to eliminate a lotof doors that are you know, full
buses, because I think we areat like a lot of roots are at
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capacity, and you've come up withfour or five basic lines around the city
to get a Mississauga moving to useyour platform motto. I'm just curious what
made you choose a dairy road LakeShore, aaron Nel's Dixie Like, I
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mean, there's a busy, verybusy rosebus so also is like Eglinton and
other places. I know there isa l art b r T on Eglinton.
No, not Eglinton. Sorry.Eglinton does have express roots, but
it's not a br Yes. Yes, yeah, So I'm just wondering why
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did you choose those? What wasthe consultation process? Like, what was
Yeah, it's just I'll leave itup to you. Yeah. We worked
with a number of different transit advisors, worked with some folks in the in
the unions, a number of peopleon the Transit Advisory Committee that I'm on
as well. I'm the vice chairof the Transit Divisory Committee with Joe Hornick
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who helped me with this as well. If you watch YouTube, Reese Martin
r M Transit has been a bigsupporter of mine and advisor in terms of
how we can build practical transit solutionsin the city while planning for the long
term. And so that's where welanded on some of these bus rapid transit
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routes because we said these are theroutes that are needed the most and have
already shown incredible capacity requirements. Dairyis number one. Dairy has gone above
and beyond I think over one hundredand forty percent what it was pre pandemic
numbers. So a lot of peoplelive in the northwest corner of Mississauga and
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a lot of them work in thenortheast corner of Mississauga, and so it's
kind of almost one way. Butthe beauty of it is is that Dairy
has such a wide right of waythat we could quickly build a bus,
rapid transit through Dairy across Dairy andprovide much better service for the people who
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are there. We need bus service, we need transit service to be better
than driving. Right, that's howyou really get people out of their car.
Some people will take it because theycan't afford to drive, and you
know, fifteen percent of the citydoes use transit on a regular basis.
But when you have a world classcity, one of your measurements is are
the people who don't need to taketransit are the ones that do because it's
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better And if we have rapid transitand rapid transit in my definition and the
definition that I understand the city thatwe use at the city is that it's
a bus that would come every tento fifteen minutes. It's the type of
transit that you don't have to thinkabout because you show up and you know
the bus is going to come,right. That's the game changer of service,
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where you get the service level tothat point where you no longer have
to think about when the next busis going to be there, and you
think about a lot of the routesthat we have in the city, like
the one in front of my house. Near my house, it comes every
forty five minutes during the day,and the last time I tried to take
it to work, which is onlya fifteen minute drive from my house to
city Hall, I was five minutesearly, but the bus game six minutes
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early, so I waited another fiftyminutes for the bus, and so it
took me an hour and a halfto get to work. It's a fifteen
minute drive. That's not a reasonablesolution for anybody to take. So when
we talk about transportation, we're talkingabout reliability, frequency, and safety,
right, and so we can deliverthose things, people will have the option
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and understand that they can get totheir destination at a reasonable time at a
reasonable rate, then people will starttaking that option. It's kind of some
planners and urban urbanists call it likea minimum viable network, right so we
need a minimum viable network of rapidtransit, and that means making sure that
you can connect all the corners ofthe city. Right if you think about
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Dundas is going to have rapid transithere, Interior is going to have rapid
transit. Englanton kind of does throughthe transit Way. We can revisit that
and figure out what the best planis. There's talk about extending the Englandson
Crosstown. I don't know that Iwant to jump on a project that's fifteen
years late, but you know,there's certainly ways to look at that.
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But the reason we drew the mapthe way it was is because these are
the roots that have the highest frequencyand have the most ridership, and we
create enough of a grid that peoplecould get around and it's a minimum viable
grid. You could also argue thesame thing for bike lanes and walkability and
trails and all of that, whichI'm also working on too. Let's talk
a little bit about crime. Wehave a lot of crime in the city,
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or I guess we have a lotof one specific type of crime in
the city, which is auto theft. It's something that is very concerning to
residents is very concerning for a lotof people. We hear about it all
the news. Tell us a littlebit about what your plan is to tackle
crime. Yeah, So I alwayssay that there's sort of three levels of
responsibility on crime and on preventing carthefts. There's personal responsibility, and I'm
(30:56):
not blaming victims, but you dohave some person responsibility over your property and
what can you do to prevent itfrom getting stolen. Keep your key safe,
keep them away from the front ofthe door, put them in a
Faraday bag if you if you canget one, get one of those batteries
that replaces and turns off on itsown so you can't copy them. Cover
(31:18):
your vin put a put a putyour car in the garage, put a
club on it. I've seen somepeople with wheel locks as well. But
I also don't want people to thinkthat we're in a police state and you
have to do ten steps to getout of your garage or get out of
your driveway. That's not necessarily forthe other but there is some personal responsibility
that I think all of us needto be educated on and take a little
bit more of. Second is themunicipality, Like what we're most responsible of
(31:41):
in terms of Peel Police, whatis resources making sure that the police have
enough resources. In the last twobudgets, we've given them everything they've asked
for and more, and they've comeup with the largest increases that the police
has seen. We hired one hundredand thirty five new officers, ninety five
new civilian all of this to improvenine one one responses and make sure that
(32:02):
we have more boots on the ground, so to speak. So that's important.
Peel Police, I also will givea lot of credit to because they
have spent a lot of time andeffort and we're at the forefront. Are
at the forefront of carthefs in Canadabecause they saw the problem happening, they
saw the trend, and they've beenresponding. They've brought people together to sort
of say this is the big challenge. And the province wasn't paying attention,
(32:25):
the federal government wasn't paying attention.Peel Region was yelling this is happening.
We need change. So we're doingas much as we can at the region.
And then the third level of responsibilityis the federal government. The federal
government has a number of different leversthat we need them to do. We
can't do this without them. We'retelling them what the challenges and we're telling
(32:46):
them how to fix it. Oneof them is bail reform. The Chief
of Police, Nish, likes totalk about this a lot. But there's
a story of a criminal who stolea car, was caught. By the
way, we catch about forty tofifty percent of the cars that get stolen
and return them. But the otherfifty percenter are leaving the country. But
this person that they caught, theyknow it's catch and release. You bring
(33:07):
them to jail. The next morning, they get a bail hearing, they
get released on bail. The storythat Chief Inish likes to talk about is
there's this one criminal who was releasedand given his tools and he stole a
car from the parking lot of thejail. He was just at like,
how crazy is that. You getcaught for stealing a car, you go
to jail for a night, youwalk out, you're stealing another car.
(33:28):
That's just wild. So bail reformneeds to happen. The federal government can
do that. Second is on theports, most of the cars are getting
stolen and they're getting sent out atthe at the Port of Montreal, there's
two places that we can catch them. One is in the intermodal hub here
in Peel region in Brampton. Theother one is at the port itself.
(33:49):
In Canada, we scan less thanone percent of all the containers leaving the
country. That's not acceptable. Thefederal government can invest a few million dollars,
buys them scanners and make sure thatthey can scan these containers before they
leave. It says potatoes, it'sfull of cars. We're not shipping out
potatoes for Montreal anyway. And thenthe last one is jurisdictional sort of leniency.
(34:16):
We know so many people have airtags in their cars and GPS's and
we know where they are, sowe call the cops and we say,
hey, it's over there, it'son the four to one. It's literally
driving to Quebec right now, orhey it's now at that innermotal hub is
it's getting on a shipping container,go get it. Peel police goes to
the goes to the gate. Theycan't go in. They don't have jurisdiction.
(34:39):
We need the federal government to allowjurisdictional crossover between CP rail, cnrail,
whatever it is, so that wecan continue stopping where it is and
then keep getting them back. Solots to be done, but there is
a plan we are moving forward onit. You'll see a lot more police
officers on the roads nowadays as theyhave just started implementing this new kind of
(35:00):
take back the streets type of policywhere they're going to be doing more patrols.
They're not going to catch people inthe act, but it's going to
do a lot more deterrence. Okay, I want to ask you a question
about the tax freeze, and Iwant to also talk a little bit about
affordability in general, or the affordabilityplan you've put forward. So you are
proposing a tax phrase. You've beengetting a bit of pushback from other candidates
(35:25):
since from some people on Twitter.I've from what I've seen, tell us
about how that would work, andyou know what, you know, what
would that look like? Yeah,I'm so excited to talk about this too.
I mean, one I said atthe top of the show, I
think it's so important that we're concentratingon people's affordability and how do we help
(35:45):
them. You know, the averagetax freeze would save people hundreds of dollars
a year, and we're going todo that over the next two years.
I want to put people's I wantto put pocket money back in people's pockets.
If you don't agree with that,that's your opinion. I challenge you
to find something better that would helppeople. We want to also help older
people's age in place. We havea tax rebate for seniors for low income
(36:09):
seniors. We need to increase thatthreshold so we can help way more seniors
age in place. And we alsoneed to improve the business community here.
We have one hundred thousand businesses inMississauga, despite being the third largest city
in population in Ontario, we havethe second largest economy. That means our
businesses is what keeps us going.That's why we have a larger tax base
in the city Mississauga. I wantto lower their small business taxes by fifteen
(36:30):
percent. So the big one thateverybody likes to talk about is how are
we going to pay for tax feesover the next two years. Great we
had very good time going over thenumbers and we have a very very detailed
costing platform that we've had many expertsgo through, including my friend Joe Hornick,
including the former budget director the Cityof Toronto, including former staff from
(36:52):
the Ministry of Finance, and I'mhappy to share those numbers with anybody who
wants them, because we went throughthe details and there's a lot of details,
but basically, a two year freezeis going to get paid for in
three different ways. One, we'regoing to use the reserve. We have
a tax stabilization reserve. We're notusing all of it. Bramson froze taxes
for four years. I'm talking abouttwo years, and I'm talking about using
(37:14):
twenty percent of our reserve, notone hundred percent. So it's a rainy
day fund and for so many peoplethey're drowning right now. This is what
is for. That's what I'm goingto do with it. Second, we
are going to expand the tax basebecause we are going to build more housing
in this city. When we buildmore housing, when we approve more housing,
we are expanding the tax base andgetting more revenue for the city.
(37:35):
Third, when we build that morehousing, we will hit our housing targets.
When we hit our housing targets,we will get the additional money that's
been promised to us by both theprovincial and federal government. The provincial government
has a thirty two million dollars incentivefor hitting our housing targets. Eighty percent
of our housing targets, we don'teven have to have hit one hundred.
We can hit eighty and we'll stillget thirty two million dollars. We lost
(37:57):
thirty two million dollars this year becausewe only hit thirty nine percent of our
housing targets, and we're on trackto also not hit our housing targets this
year, so that's going to bea big problem federal government. Because of
my motion for four plexus and transitoready into development making sure that we're building
and improving more homes around. Transitgot us one hundred and thirteen million dollars
from the federal government, but that'sbeing done in installments. If we don't
(38:22):
meet our targets, if we don'tshow that we're making progress to building the
housing that we need in the city, they're not giving us the twenty eight
million dollars check next year. That'snot counted in the in the city's numbers.
So when we hit our targets again, we get more money from there.
Lastly, we also still need tofind efficiencies in the city. The
city is a really well run place. It's been a lean organization for a
(38:43):
long time, and we're really goodwith our dollars. We're not going to
be Toronto. We're not going tobe doing what they did and coming in
with a ten percent increase in oneyear. That's not going to happen.
We are going to continue to fundthe infrastructure necessary to continue building more homes
and more transit and everything else weneed in this city. And we're not
going to raid the piggybang while doingit. We're going to do it in
a smart way, in an efficientway, and a way that actually helps
(39:04):
the people on the ground. BeforeI actually started working at the City of
Mississauga in recreation, I was ayouth worker and one of the biggest issues
that we've had, and even nowI have a father of two, is
the Active Assist program that the Cityof Mississaga has doesn't really reach as many
people as it needs to. Andthat's one of the complaints I've been hearing
a lot from parents. I'm wondering, do you have anything in your platform
(39:29):
to address recreation, childcare, anysort of thing like that. Right.
I keep saying, I love talkingabout these things because I'm so passionate about
these things, because these things areso important to me. I also have
three young kids, you know,I've had a lot of challenges in terms
of how do we get more spacefor them, how do we get more
activities for them? And I've gota lot of different plans to do this.
(39:50):
I also work for the city forten years as a lifeguard. Maybe
I saw you at some of theseprojects and programs, but a couple of
things. One on affordability. Iwant to make all skating, drop in
skate and drop in swims free forkids. Let's help families get more kids
into these programs. Second on childcareone. I used to be the vice
president of TARIA Coalition for Better Childcareand I actually started and petitioned and got
(40:14):
the federal government to introduce paternity leaveor an additional six weeks of leave for
the secondary parent who is the nonbirthing parent. And one of my huge
successes in my sort of personal careerlobbying, the government got that for everybody.
Childcare is really important to me.We have a program in the city
in Mississauga where we offer a littlebit of summer care childcare for families that
(40:37):
I want to expand and be availableto everybody so that you have some free
activities for your kids to enroll induring the summer as well. That's just
the tip of it. We gota lot more to do in terms of
how we want to invest in termsof the programming and space availability across the
city Mississauga for families as well asyour seniors. That's wonderful. We've got
a lot of ideas and the prettygood. I like a lot of what
(41:01):
you're saying. So Alvin, tellus more about Alvin. Let's get to
know Alvin a little bit. Nota lot of people know you. You're
fairly new in terms of the youknow, public life of Mississauga. I've
known you for a long time,but you know, I'm one person.
So tell us more about Alvin.What do people What should people know about
(41:23):
Alvin? You know, I grewup here. I love this city.
I want my kids to grow upin the city. I want the city
to be better. I think thecity has a lot of potential. Right
I went to Corpus Christy and MetroAndre elementary schools. I went to Father
Gates High School. I was theyoung Citizen of the Year in Mississauga back
in nineteen ninety eight or whatever.It was, and Hazel gave me this
(41:45):
award and told me, you know, you should run for something one day.
And went away to university at Queen'sfrom my undergrad and political science,
and then to Harvard University for mymaster's degree in Digital Media Designmunications. And
I worked a lot in education,right. I spent a lot of number
of years working in the Ministry ofColleges and Universities, and then worked for
(42:07):
Shardan College here in Mississauga doing governmentand community relations. And then I was
recently at Ryerson or TMU doing strategyand communications as well. But I've always
been an advocate. I've always foughtfor transit and I worked with the Minister
of Transportation to make sure that wegot you know, the here interial line.
I've always been an advocate for families, trying to make sure that we
(42:29):
have childcare spaces and working to helpyou know, moms get back to work
and dads, you know, gettingmore time off, and really trying to
find ways for us to support familiesand here in the community. I want
to see us reach our potential.A lot of people like talking about we're
celebrating fifty years. Well, Iwant to talk about where we're going to
(42:50):
be in one hundred years. Whatdo we need to do now, What
are the steps we need to dotoday, in the next six months,
in the next two years, thenext five years, so that we're in
the place we want to be whenwe hit our one hundredth anniversary, and
I plan on being there for that. So I'm really excited about where we
can go in the future. Ithink if you are interested in politics,
(43:10):
you want to get something done,and so that's my vision. I want
to build a better future for ourcity, and I want to get things
done for our community, and Iwant to work with everyone to do it.
I've worked with all the different counselors. I've had different motions on the
table with everyone. We've done alot in just a couple of years that
I've been elected, and I've workedwith every single one of the councilors on
different motions to build more housing,to get more transit, and to have
(43:35):
more complete communities. And that's whatI'm going to continue doing, hopefully as
mayor, and to have someone whohas that sort of leadership envision to drive
the city where it needs to goin the future. I want to thank
you Alvin that is our time.That was a lot to cover in such
a short time. Good luck andwhen I thank you for taking the time
to talk to us and you know, explaining going to details about this,
(43:57):
So thank you so much. Andwe're going to take a quick break and
come back more of Beyond the Ballot. So stay tuned right here on U
stocks doc at nine sixty am,stream US live at SAGA nine sixty am
(44:19):
dot CA. You're listening to Beyondthe Ballot with Ryan Gurcharn and Noka Duck
Rube and welcome back. Wow thatwe went over affordability, crime, transportation,
(44:46):
housing, He spoke about a lotof things. I hope we were
able to ask them on some ofthe topics that were on your mind.
Nooka, what did you think aboutthat interview just now? I thought it
was great. He's got a lotof ideas, very well thought out,
a lot of details. So yeah, we talked about We talked a lot
(45:07):
about housing, we talked about transportation. The property tax question that people are
always asking about. Uh, heis proposing a property tax phrase. He
did explain that to us and tellus how it's gonna work. And we
talked about crime because that's on everybody'smind. Did you see did you find
(45:27):
anything that stuck out to you,anything you thought, hey, that I
haven't heard from heard about yet.I think the biggest thing was, you
know, he did walk us throughhis uh his plan for for for crime
or safety plan or public safety rather, and he hadn't released that yet,
so I hadn't actually been aware ofthat. But really it's it's interesting to
(45:57):
see the depth of of knowledge andthe depth of the information and detail that
he's put into the platform. That'sfor sure. For sure, I don't
think anybody else has released this detailedplatform. The question I guess would be
is that it is that is thatwhat it takes to is that what people
(46:22):
care about? Well, our voterspaying attention, Well, this is yeah,
so you said it better than Idid. Our voter's paying attention.
And with this resonate, with thislevel detailed resonate, I've seen that he
has a transit map that may theothers may still come out with. I
mean, we still got a fewmore weeks. It's not until June tenth,
(46:45):
and I think maybe a week ora week before no week or two
before advanced polls. So you know, so in the next couple of weeks
we may see more platforms planks comeout on transit and housing. And he
had something about small businesses that Ithought was pretty interesting too, right he
(47:07):
spoke with that, he went overyou know what, I didn't hear into
housing, and I didn't get achance to ask him, so you could
ask him when he comes to yourdoors because he is door knocking. I
didn't hear anything about co op housingor social housing, which is a regional
issue. But he is going tobe a regional counselor too, a regional
vote, so that is something Iforgot to ask. But it was great
(47:31):
having him, and I'm looking forwardto our next candidate that we have next
week. Who is Steven Dasco.That's the one. Okay, Yeah,
we're very excited. We have wehave you covered. We told you we're
going to have you covered when thisstarted. We are bringing all the candidates,
well not every single one of them, but the I guess top five
(47:54):
candidates, top five into polling polling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and
you've seen their signs around now,so you'll know you've got a sense of
like who sort of has a realisticchance of becoming ANX mayor of Mississauga,
and I'm kind of excited. Iwish I really hope you folks who are
listening are planning on going out tovote. I hope this doesn't turn into
(48:17):
a sleeper election, because there aresome great ideas out there. Carolyn had
some good ideas, Alvin had somegood ideas, and I'm pretty sure when
we hear from Dasco next week,he may have a whole different take on
some of this stuff, especially beingthe counselor that he is for the waterfront,
So I'm sure that Yeah, alot of people have been talking about
(48:39):
his area, so we'll see whathe actually has to say. All right,
So with that, we gotta go. It's been fun and we will
will be back next week saying battime, saying bat channel. Until then,
stay safe and get involved, Noradio, no problem. Stream is
(49:15):
live on SAGA ninety sixty am dotc A
The views expressed in the following programare those of the participants and do not
necessarily reflect the views of SAGA ninesixty AM or its management from the treaty
and traditional territory of the Mississaugas ofthe Credit First Nation. You're listening to
(00:25):
Beyond the Ballot with Ryan Gurcharn andNoka duck Ru. Welcome to Beyond the
Ballot. I'm your host, RyanGercharn and I'm here with my co host
Noka. Look Welcome, Welcome orwelcome back, Welcome back to another week,
(00:48):
another election, No same election,but more same election day. It
feels like, oh my god,signs have gone up. It's starting to
feel a little more like Christmas.Christmas mornings coming in June, June tenth.
So if you're planning on voting,that's when you got to vote.
Advanced polls are coming up so youcould vote in those two Noka, what
(01:10):
was your take this week? Whathappened? So signs are up? That
feels real. It feels like it'sa it's a real election that's happening.
You drive around, you find signshere and there, which is nice.
I like collections signs, not forever, but just straight elections. I'm in
Ward five and there's tons of signsyou have. I know each home has
(01:32):
at least two or three like counselorsigns up. It's it's it's because honestly,
it's gonna be I still think it'sgonna be a low turnout regardless of
how many signs go up. Yeah, and it really goes to show you
that folks are just letting They're notsaying who they're voting for. They're allowing
a lot of people multiple candidates toput their signs up. So common and
(01:56):
municipal elections I find because people don'treally have to really pick a particular party,
you know, you find that peoplewill just say yes to multiple candidates
just to make people happy. Andthe politeness that is. Yeah right,
I mean I do. Do youhave your multiple candidates on your lawn?
(02:20):
I do? I really I do. It's mainly because I want their volunteers
come and you know, yeah,be nice. I even though I don't
totally agree with some of their stances, I still know what because honestly,
there's no other way for them asa candidate. There's no other way to
(02:40):
become visible and to let other peopleknow you're running other than lawn signs right
now, that's true. Especially rightYeah, there's no media. There's no
like, there's no you know whatI mean, the printed media is now.
I think there's no television. Allfolks have is nine to sixty AM.
(03:00):
A lot of folks are not listeningto it if they're not driving.
Well, Ryan, I didn't knowyou were that nice. I am certainly
going to come and run in yourward just so I could put my sign
under lawn at people, I willsend volunteers every day to your house to
ask every day for another sign soI can puts fifty signs. Because you
(03:24):
don't say no, so I don't. I don't. I'm a sucker.
Uh So some people came up withplatforms I saw this week. Right,
We've seen a lot of stuff thisthis week. You know, we had
Alvin who released a housing platform.There's been a couple of debates. There
(03:44):
was a big housing debate. Carolynis not attending any more debates. That's
interesting, the choice. Yeah,I got a lot of media. She
did one debate and after that thatwas enough. Yeah, basically, and
I mean it's not surprising, tobe honest, it's a she's she's really
ahead in the polls, and whenyou're really ahead in the polls, you
(04:08):
know, you don't necessarily need theexposure. So sometimes I understand the tactic.
I understand the strategy. You know, you're not don't rock the boat
kind of thing. Yeah, andCarolyn does have a tendency, since you
know she was an MP, tosay things that get a lot of attention
in not the best light for her. So i'm you know, by saying,
(04:30):
like in the beginning of the provincialelection in twenty twenty two, doug
Ford wasn't very visible because you know, for the same not for the exact
same reason, but you didn't wantto mess up your head in the polls.
Why why you know, message,when you're head in the polls,
you gotta be low key. Notif you're just slightly ahead. No,
no, if you're if you havea sizeable comfortable to your front runner,
(04:55):
it's not an unheard of strategy that'sright to you know, coast a little.
I'm not saying she's coasting, butit's not an unheard of strategy.
No, no, she was,She's not coasting at all. She's just
switching strategies right Instead, of doingdebates and opening herself up to attacks from
the opposition. It's more I'm guessingshe's focusing. I've seen billboards up,
(05:16):
I've seen party advertisers up. Ihaven't seen it. And have you seen
anything for anybody but Carolyn? Forthird party advertisers? No, I've only
seen the billboards and I was actuallypretty surprised. I was driving around.
They are everywhere. I don't thinkI've seen that before in the last election
for me, I have I've seenit for a counselor. Yeah, I've
(05:38):
seen it for one counselor in thepast. That's what I've seen. I
don't know if there's been more,but all I've ever seen is one counselor.
This is sort of new and youknow what it wasn't It isn't the
Gong show. I thought it wasgoing to be so far. No,
his signs are tiny, just likescattered on Yeah. Yeah, So I'm
(06:00):
disappointed in God, I was expectingmore. The most signs I've seen in
Ward five area that's where I amare the red and blue Carolyn signs,
which makes sense because she was acounselor. Most folks know her and the
other folks are starting to see moresigns for Dippica Dasco and Alvin pop up
in ward five. Now, speakingof Alvin, we have him standing by.
(06:25):
Uh, We're gonna go over hisplatform. We're gonna drill him on
everything he's putting forth, what hisvision for Mississauga is. So if you
are deciding on who to vote formayor, stay tuned because you're gonna hear
a little bit about his vision fromMississauga and where he wants to see us
in the next two years. Sostay tuned. Right here on Beyond the
(06:45):
Ballot Newstoksaga nine sixty Am. Streamus live at SAGA nine sixty am dot
CA. You're listening to Beyond theBallot with Ryan Gurcharn and Noka duck Rub
(07:20):
and welcome back to Beyond the Ballot. I'm your host, Ryan Gurcharn and
Nooka Duck Rub is also here.Noka, how you doing good? How
are you? Ryan? It's beena while well, I mean there was
a break we have it hasn't beenthat long and now that we're back,
we are here with a special candidaterunning for a here of Mississauga. So
(07:43):
tonight or today rather we have wehave a very special candidate. It's Alvin
ted Show and he is the counselorForward two. He's been the councilor since
the twenty twenty two election, andwe're going to get to know him a
little bit more. We're going tolearn all about his platform. He's been
going out there talking a lot abouthousing, transportation, all sorts of interesting
(08:07):
stuff, even taxes. So we'regoing to talk more with Alvin about what
he's been up to. What dohe thinks the issues are. Thanks for
joining us, Alvin, Welcome tothe show, Noka Ryan. It's a
pleasure. I'm excited to have thisconversation. And yeah, lots to talk
about, big city for sure,So Alv, let's get right to it.
What do you think are the biggestissues that are facing Mississauga right now
(08:31):
and you know, for the nextfive years. Yeah, I mean it's
such a challenge right now for peoplewho live in the city. The residents
in the city right now, Ithink are facing a number of crises all
at the same time. They're facingan affordability crisis, there's a housing crisis,
and there's also sort of a securitycrisis. And I'll elaborate on all
(08:52):
of those. But affordability is youknow, a a fancy word for talking
about how much money people have.How much is sposedly they have and people
are The metric that I like usingis the use of the food bank,
and the use of the food bankhas gone up every single month since the
pandemic started, and we have morepeople using the food bank who have never
(09:15):
ever ever used the food bank oreven considered using a food bank in the
past. I knock on doors everyday and I'm talking to hundreds thousands of
people I've talked to canvassing across thecity, and I ran into a number
of what you would call, youknow, middle income families who would never
imagine themselves needing a food bank,having gone to the food bank for the
(09:37):
first time, almost in tears becausethey can't afford groceries and the cost of
gas is too high in terms ofhousing, you know. I moved to
Mississauga when I was four years old. My parents came from the other side
of the world, and they sawMississauga as a place as an opportunity where
they could get an education, theycould start a business, they could buy
home. Most importantly, and whenmy wife and I were deciding where to
(10:00):
move out raise our family. Wechose missus Osoger for the same reasons,
and we could be close to family, which is so important. You know,
you have kids. How important isit to be close to family?
And I want my kids to beable to do what I did, which
is live in the community that theygrew up in. The way things are
going right now, with the amountof housing that we have, with the
amount of affordability that's available in thecity, that's not possible. Lastly,
(10:22):
security safety big issue. You needa home, you need a roof over
your head, you need food inyour belly, and you need to feel
safe in your own community right andpeople don't feel safe right now. Number
break ins are going up, thenumber of cars that have been stolen,
We're going to break a record thisyear. We're already on pace for that.
That's not acceptable. We need todo more. And I want to
tack all of those issues. Yeah, for sure. And you talk about
(10:46):
very real issues. These are veryreal issues that everybody's experiencing, everybody's feeling
it to a certain extent. Let'stalk about housing. You recently released a
housing platform that has significant details,certainly more detail than I've seen from other
candidates tell us about that, howare you going to tackle the housing crisis
(11:07):
as mayor? I was just goingto say, I'm so excited about this
format because this is really where wecan dive into the details and talk about
what our plan is. And Ilike sare sort of saying we have the
most comprehensive plan. I challenge anybodyto find a more comprehensive plan than the
one that we put out. Youknow, it's ten hundred times longer than
(11:28):
anyone else's who's out there right now. But it's not just about quantity,
its quality. We've consulted everyone everyonewho has a stake in housing in Mississauga,
from residents to builders, not forprofits, to government to basically unions
and anyone who has input in termsof how we can build more housing.
(11:48):
And we tackled it from many differentperspectives, many different lenses, and so
I encourage everybody to go to thewebsite alvit dot ca. You'll see everything
there, but if you go slashhousing you'll see specifically our housing plan.
But we want to make it easierto build, and we want to make
it easier to build all kinds ofhousing. But also the right types of
housing. Everybody likes talking about andformer Mayor Crombie used to like talking about
(12:09):
how many cranes are in the sky. Look how much Mississaua is building as
a way to sort of defend ourposition in terms of how much building we've
done. There's thirty two cranes inthe sky right now. Great, good
number. We're getting some building good. One of them is a purpose built
rental, the other thirty one ourmarket condos. Basically, so we're not
(12:33):
building enough different kinds of housing.We're not building enough kinds of housing that
people want. So we've created apathway that a different pathway for purpose built
rental. We want a different pathwayand mechanism to approve and allow and quickly
go through the process. For affordablehousing, we need to do that.
For supportive housing, we need toexpand options for shelters. We need more
(13:00):
of right options that take the applicationprocess out of it right, so it's
easier you just go through site planapproval every step of the way. We've
looked at how different builders would goabout their projects and how we can remove
barriers from that. Some of themare financial. Great, let's remove application
fees. Some of them are land. How do we get more land for
(13:20):
people who are going to use it. How do we attach affordability when we
give them land. It's really aboutmaking sure we're bringing all the partners to
the table and coming up with asmany ways as possible to get that housing
built as quickly as possible. Sowe're going to have to do a lot.
We're also relying on the provincial andfederal government to do their part as
(13:41):
well. But it's so important thatwe're basically saying and signaling that there's going
to be a culture change if I'melected mayor in terms of how the city
is going to have a relationship withdevelopment in the city. We're not just
going to be a regulator. We'regoing to be a partner. We're going
to I want to allow six storiesas of right along main streets, similar
to a plan that Toronto is debatingright now. We need to allow higher
(14:03):
densities around major transit station areas.That makes the most sense. Think about
an area like Cooksville or Poor Credit, where you have multiple transit lines intersecting
with each other in one community threeIn the case of Cooksville, that's not
a place you can limit or shouldlimit heightened density. That should be where
you want the most growth, becausethen you don't have to have parking minimums.
(14:26):
You can allow people to move intothose communities who can then walk and
have a livable neighborhood to be in. And so yeah, there's so much
more to do, but I'm superexcited about our housing plan and how it
helps us with our other pieces becausemore housing equals more taxpayers, equals lower
taxes. So yeah, I justwant to dive into it a little bit
(14:48):
more. We hear a lot fromcandidates talking about cutting red tape. You
hear that from province. There's alot of talk about how municipalities have way
too much red tape that somehow hascontributed to the housing crisis. Can you
explain a little bit what that lookslike and why that is and how you'd
go about changing that. Yeah,so different pieces of red tape. Right
(15:13):
Like when Bill twenty three was introduced, we essentially moved the process of the
various studies that the city asks forand said, you know, we will
start the clock when we consider yourapplication complete. So we're not going to
start that you know, one hundredand twenty day clock until your application is
complete. So we essentially move theprocess upfront to sort of say, all
(15:35):
the hoops that we want you tojump through, we still want you to
jump through them, but we needto do it upfront. That didn't really
solve the problem, right, Thatdidn't really build more housing faster. What
we need to look at is whatis necessary and what is superfluous, right,
what gets in the way of people'sproposals. So one of the things
I want to get rid of islike an angular plane or a shadow study,
(15:58):
or floor spaced floorplate maximums or setbacks. I want to look at all
these different pieces and say, whydo we have that, What is the
purpose of that particular policy, anddoes it apply across the board. If
there's something that we want to keep, maybe there's justification to keep it.
If it's essentially there to slow downa project, we need to get rid
(16:19):
of it. It doesn't make senseto me that we have a floor space
maximum that does not allow for moretwo and three bedroom units. That doesn't
make any sense to me. Whydo we require a wind study on a
townhouse complex for condos? Sure fortownhouses? Doesn't make any sense. So
(16:40):
there's a lot of that, whydo we require a landscape architect report in
terms of how we're going to showwhere the trees are going to be.
When we're doing a zoning application,we're talking about zoning, We're talking about
the purpose of this land and howdense we want it to be, versus
a site plan which is coming waylater when you're ready to build, when
you would actually tell people this iswhere we want it to be. So
(17:03):
a number of those things need tomove. That's how we cut a tape.
We're actually talking about removing pieces fromthe process that should not be there
and could be later on, andthen we want to accelerate the process.
That is one hundred percent possible.We've seen other cities do this a lot.
I have the support of the mayorof Gwelf, Cam Guthrie, who
has shown that his city has beenable to reduce his application times and his
(17:27):
permit times. I think he cutin half two years three years in a
row, from like two years toa year to six months to three months.
So we have examples that we canlearn from and we plan on doing
that. I plan on doing that. Earlier in the beginning, when you
were giving an overview of the housingplatform. You mentioned rentals briefly. I
(17:47):
was just wondering if you could expandon that. What sort of steps are
are you going to help with rentalsor people renting, because you did talk
about the people buying houses and tryingto free up you know, first time
buy home owners or people who wantto buy houses. But what about folks
who are renting right now? Misasaga'srent's going up a lot quite a bit.
(18:07):
It's one of the most expensive citiesto rent in. And how are
you planning on tackling that? Yeah, I'll tell you how impossible it is
to rent in the city. Theaverage salary in Mississauga is fifty four thousand
dollars. That's the average. Itmeans half the people make less than that.
The average rent, or the minimumrent really for anyone who's looking for
a new rental in the city isaround twenty two to twenty three hundred dollars
(18:30):
a month. You calculate that out, that means you're leaving this person who
is renting a one bedroom apartment inthe city of Mississauga one thousand dollars a
month for everything else. They're spendingover two thirds of their income just on
housing, and they're leaving themselves athousand for food, for clothing, for
transportation, for any essentials, notlet alone having fun. We're not even
(18:53):
talking about that. That's just justsurviving. So that doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't the math doesn't work right, So we need to find more
ways to build more rentals. SoI was talking about purpose built rental,
and what we need to understand asa municipality is that the economics are different
for rentals than they are for condos. Builders for rentals need to have a
(19:15):
lot of their capital upfront and theyneed to secure that in order to get
the loans in order to get thebuilders in order to get the project going.
They work on different timelines. Condobuilders can wait till money comes in
through people who are putting down paymentsand then the banks kind of work that
way. There's also different economics aroundthat, not just the building but also
(19:37):
the tenants who are going to bethere. Right, So what we need
to do is we need to makethe project easier for a purpose built rental
builders to build, and so weshould be incentivizing them to do that by
giving them different bonuses. Right,if you want to build a personal rental.
Maybe we'll give you a hype bonusor a density bonus. Maybe we'll
lower your parking minimum or remove italtogether. Maybe we'll remove the piece that
(20:00):
requires you to have commercial on theground floor because you're square one or you're
across the street from score on andit doesn't make sense for you to do
that. We're not flexible enough asa municipality. I'm including all these things
in my plan to sort of say, these are the things that we should
remove and can remove from the processto make more purpose built rentals. And
we went to the rental community andsaid, how do we get more rentals
(20:22):
built? And these are some ofthe solutions that they came up with.
That's great. So tell us alittle bit about your transportation plan. I
understand you released something recently about that. Yeah, just a few days ago.
We put out a transit map.Everybody loves a good map, but
really this is a cohesive plan thatall comes together. Right. So you
(20:42):
need affordability, you need housing,and you need complete communities, and in
order to get around we need togive people options. I think a lot
of people don't realize how important transitis for any city. But if you
look at Toronto's history, and youlook at where Toronto was when they were
the size of Mississauga, when theyhad eight hundred thousand people. You know,
(21:04):
they already had several streetcar lines,several subways, and then they continue
to grow and expand from there,we're playing ketchup. I say this not
to dispair our previous mayor, butwe need to fix a forty year mistake
where Mississauga turned down on two separateoccasions, a subway extension from Kipling into
(21:26):
the downtown core of Mississauga forty yearsago and then thirty years ago. We
need to fix that. So partof my plan is actually the whole part
of my plan is to create arapid transit network across the city right in
the north along Darry in the south, along Lake Shore, on the east
along Dixie, and along the westup Aaron Mills, in addition to upgrading
(21:51):
the Dundas BRT to become an LRTline that would connect from Kipling into the
here Ontario line and then be partof the loop. So you can have
that what transit people like to talkabout, a one bum ride, right,
so you can transfer over at Kiplingand get on a one bum ride
through the downtown core of Mississauga thatwould be revolutionary. It's also it's also
(22:15):
already built into part into the planet. So as we're building the Dune DASSPRT
now, it's already being outfitted tobe able to be an LRT, so
it wouldn't take that much more tothen upgrade it to an LRT. This
obviously is in addition to you know, the transit Way and the Eglinton Extension
that's going just to the border ofMississauga as well. So the one other
(22:37):
thing I want to explain around transit, we're building these extra lines. The
reason I'm focusing on buses is becausebuses is something that we can do right
away. It is very easy todraw lines on a map and say I'm
going to build you a subway fromKipling to Aaron Mills. That's a that's
a nice sentiment. I worked inthe Ontario govern when we announced the here
(23:00):
in Terio Lert back in twenty twelve. It's twelve years later we still haven't
built it. So I don't wantto tell people plans of you know,
these makeup lines that we could drawon a map and not be able to
deliver. I want to make servicebetter immediately. We just did that this
week. Council passed additional fifty seventhousand service hours for my ways to make
(23:25):
transit better so that we have morebuses, more operators, so we don't
have fewer closed doors because they're full, have more times and more routes.
But the reason brts are the wayto start is because we can do that
immediately too. So we can startwith improving service over the first one hundred
days, investing in more, andthen we can plan out the next couple
(23:45):
of bus rapid transit lines over thenext couple of years, so we can
have very good transit, reliable transitin the coming years and not decades.
And then we can plan also tosay, you know, yes, okay,
absolutely, I'd love a high speedrail through whatever. But you know
that's we got to start with thatwork. But it's not the it's not
the biggest priority yet right well,speaking about moving Mississauga, we're going to
(24:10):
move right now from this discussion toa quick commercial break and when we come
back, I want to hear moreabout this transit because I it's I think
the first time I've seen a Canadacome out with like a map and a
plan, and there's just so muchto digest here, So stay tuned right
here on new Stok SAGA nine sixtyam. When we come back, more
of Alvin Tedjo here on newstock SAGGAnine sixty am, No Radio, No
(24:47):
Problem. Stream is live on SAGAnine sixty am dot cl You're listening to
Beyond the Ballot with Ryan Gerd Charn, Noka Duck Grub and welcome back to
(25:15):
Beyond the Ballot. I'm here withNoka Duck Grub, co host of Beyond
the Ballot, and we're here withAlvin Tedjo and Alvin. I'm just wondering
you presented recently this new transplant fromMississaga you were talking about just before the
break, trying to eliminate a lotof doors that are you know, full
buses, because I think we areat like a lot of roots are at
(25:38):
capacity, and you've come up withfour or five basic lines around the city
to get a Mississauga moving to useyour platform motto. I'm just curious what
made you choose a dairy road LakeShore, aaron Nel's Dixie Like, I
(25:59):
mean, there's a busy, verybusy rosebus so also is like Eglinton and
other places. I know there isa l art b r T on Eglinton.
No, not Eglinton. Sorry.Eglinton does have express roots, but
it's not a br Yes. Yes, yeah, So I'm just wondering why
(26:19):
did you choose those? What wasthe consultation process? Like, what was
Yeah, it's just I'll leave itup to you. Yeah. We worked
with a number of different transit advisors, worked with some folks in the in
the unions, a number of peopleon the Transit Advisory Committee that I'm on
as well. I'm the vice chairof the Transit Divisory Committee with Joe Hornick
(26:41):
who helped me with this as well. If you watch YouTube, Reese Martin
r M Transit has been a bigsupporter of mine and advisor in terms of
how we can build practical transit solutionsin the city while planning for the long
term. And so that's where welanded on some of these bus rapid transit
(27:03):
routes because we said these are theroutes that are needed the most and have
already shown incredible capacity requirements. Dairyis number one. Dairy has gone above
and beyond I think over one hundredand forty percent what it was pre pandemic
numbers. So a lot of peoplelive in the northwest corner of Mississauga and
(27:27):
a lot of them work in thenortheast corner of Mississauga, and so it's
kind of almost one way. Butthe beauty of it is is that Dairy
has such a wide right of waythat we could quickly build a bus,
rapid transit through Dairy across Dairy andprovide much better service for the people who
(27:51):
are there. We need bus service, we need transit service to be better
than driving. Right, that's howyou really get people out of their car.
Some people will take it because theycan't afford to drive, and you
know, fifteen percent of the citydoes use transit on a regular basis.
But when you have a world classcity, one of your measurements is are
the people who don't need to taketransit are the ones that do because it's
(28:15):
better And if we have rapid transitand rapid transit in my definition and the
definition that I understand the city thatwe use at the city is that it's
a bus that would come every tento fifteen minutes. It's the type of
transit that you don't have to thinkabout because you show up and you know
the bus is going to come,right. That's the game changer of service,
(28:36):
where you get the service level tothat point where you no longer have
to think about when the next busis going to be there, and you
think about a lot of the routesthat we have in the city, like
the one in front of my house. Near my house, it comes every
forty five minutes during the day,and the last time I tried to take
it to work, which is onlya fifteen minute drive from my house to
city Hall, I was five minutesearly, but the bus game six minutes
(29:00):
early, so I waited another fiftyminutes for the bus, and so it
took me an hour and a halfto get to work. It's a fifteen
minute drive. That's not a reasonablesolution for anybody to take. So when
we talk about transportation, we're talkingabout reliability, frequency, and safety,
right, and so we can deliverthose things, people will have the option
(29:25):
and understand that they can get totheir destination at a reasonable time at a
reasonable rate, then people will starttaking that option. It's kind of some
planners and urban urbanists call it likea minimum viable network, right so we
need a minimum viable network of rapidtransit, and that means making sure that
you can connect all the corners ofthe city. Right if you think about
(29:45):
Dundas is going to have rapid transithere, Interior is going to have rapid
transit. Englanton kind of does throughthe transit Way. We can revisit that
and figure out what the best planis. There's talk about extending the Englandson
Crosstown. I don't know that Iwant to jump on a project that's fifteen
years late, but you know,there's certainly ways to look at that.
(30:07):
But the reason we drew the mapthe way it was is because these are
the roots that have the highest frequencyand have the most ridership, and we
create enough of a grid that peoplecould get around and it's a minimum viable
grid. You could also argue thesame thing for bike lanes and walkability and
trails and all of that, whichI'm also working on too. Let's talk
a little bit about crime. Wehave a lot of crime in the city,
(30:29):
or I guess we have a lotof one specific type of crime in
the city, which is auto theft. It's something that is very concerning to
residents is very concerning for a lotof people. We hear about it all
the news. Tell us a littlebit about what your plan is to tackle
crime. Yeah, So I alwayssay that there's sort of three levels of
responsibility on crime and on preventing carthefts. There's personal responsibility, and I'm
(30:56):
not blaming victims, but you dohave some person responsibility over your property and
what can you do to prevent itfrom getting stolen. Keep your key safe,
keep them away from the front ofthe door, put them in a
Faraday bag if you if you canget one, get one of those batteries
that replaces and turns off on itsown so you can't copy them. Cover
(31:18):
your vin put a put a putyour car in the garage, put a
club on it. I've seen somepeople with wheel locks as well. But
I also don't want people to thinkthat we're in a police state and you
have to do ten steps to getout of your garage or get out of
your driveway. That's not necessarily forthe other but there is some personal responsibility
that I think all of us needto be educated on and take a little
bit more of. Second is themunicipality, Like what we're most responsible of
(31:41):
in terms of Peel Police, whatis resources making sure that the police have
enough resources. In the last twobudgets, we've given them everything they've asked
for and more, and they've comeup with the largest increases that the police
has seen. We hired one hundredand thirty five new officers, ninety five
new civilian all of this to improvenine one one responses and make sure that
(32:02):
we have more boots on the ground, so to speak. So that's important.
Peel Police, I also will givea lot of credit to because they
have spent a lot of time andeffort and we're at the forefront. Are
at the forefront of carthefs in Canadabecause they saw the problem happening, they
saw the trend, and they've beenresponding. They've brought people together to sort
of say this is the big challenge. And the province wasn't paying attention,
(32:25):
the federal government wasn't paying attention.Peel Region was yelling this is happening.
We need change. So we're doingas much as we can at the region.
And then the third level of responsibilityis the federal government. The federal
government has a number of different leversthat we need them to do. We
can't do this without them. We'retelling them what the challenges and we're telling
(32:46):
them how to fix it. Oneof them is bail reform. The Chief
of Police, Nish, likes totalk about this a lot. But there's
a story of a criminal who stolea car, was caught. By the
way, we catch about forty tofifty percent of the cars that get stolen
and return them. But the otherfifty percenter are leaving the country. But
this person that they caught, theyknow it's catch and release. You bring
(33:07):
them to jail. The next morning, they get a bail hearing, they
get released on bail. The storythat Chief Inish likes to talk about is
there's this one criminal who was releasedand given his tools and he stole a
car from the parking lot of thejail. He was just at like,
how crazy is that. You getcaught for stealing a car, you go
to jail for a night, youwalk out, you're stealing another car.
(33:28):
That's just wild. So bail reformneeds to happen. The federal government can
do that. Second is on theports, most of the cars are getting
stolen and they're getting sent out atthe at the Port of Montreal, there's
two places that we can catch them. One is in the intermodal hub here
in Peel region in Brampton. Theother one is at the port itself.
(33:49):
In Canada, we scan less thanone percent of all the containers leaving the
country. That's not acceptable. Thefederal government can invest a few million dollars,
buys them scanners and make sure thatthey can scan these containers before they
leave. It says potatoes, it'sfull of cars. We're not shipping out
potatoes for Montreal anyway. And thenthe last one is jurisdictional sort of leniency.
(34:16):
We know so many people have airtags in their cars and GPS's and
we know where they are, sowe call the cops and we say,
hey, it's over there, it'son the four to one. It's literally
driving to Quebec right now, orhey it's now at that innermotal hub is
it's getting on a shipping container,go get it. Peel police goes to
the goes to the gate. Theycan't go in. They don't have jurisdiction.
(34:39):
We need the federal government to allowjurisdictional crossover between CP rail, cnrail,
whatever it is, so that wecan continue stopping where it is and
then keep getting them back. Solots to be done, but there is
a plan we are moving forward onit. You'll see a lot more police
officers on the roads nowadays as theyhave just started implementing this new kind of
(35:00):
take back the streets type of policywhere they're going to be doing more patrols.
They're not going to catch people inthe act, but it's going to
do a lot more deterrence. Okay, I want to ask you a question
about the tax freeze, and Iwant to also talk a little bit about
affordability in general, or the affordabilityplan you've put forward. So you are
proposing a tax phrase. You've beengetting a bit of pushback from other candidates
(35:25):
since from some people on Twitter.I've from what I've seen, tell us
about how that would work, andyou know what, you know, what
would that look like? Yeah,I'm so excited to talk about this too.
I mean, one I said atthe top of the show, I
think it's so important that we're concentratingon people's affordability and how do we help
(35:45):
them. You know, the averagetax freeze would save people hundreds of dollars
a year, and we're going todo that over the next two years.
I want to put people's I wantto put pocket money back in people's pockets.
If you don't agree with that,that's your opinion. I challenge you
to find something better that would helppeople. We want to also help older
people's age in place. We havea tax rebate for seniors for low income
(36:09):
seniors. We need to increase thatthreshold so we can help way more seniors
age in place. And we alsoneed to improve the business community here.
We have one hundred thousand businesses inMississauga, despite being the third largest city
in population in Ontario, we havethe second largest economy. That means our
businesses is what keeps us going.That's why we have a larger tax base
in the city Mississauga. I wantto lower their small business taxes by fifteen
(36:30):
percent. So the big one thateverybody likes to talk about is how are
we going to pay for tax feesover the next two years. Great we
had very good time going over thenumbers and we have a very very detailed
costing platform that we've had many expertsgo through, including my friend Joe Hornick,
including the former budget director the Cityof Toronto, including former staff from
(36:52):
the Ministry of Finance, and I'mhappy to share those numbers with anybody who
wants them, because we went throughthe details and there's a lot of details,
but basically, a two year freezeis going to get paid for in
three different ways. One, we'regoing to use the reserve. We have
a tax stabilization reserve. We're notusing all of it. Bramson froze taxes
for four years. I'm talking abouttwo years, and I'm talking about using
(37:14):
twenty percent of our reserve, notone hundred percent. So it's a rainy
day fund and for so many peoplethey're drowning right now. This is what
is for. That's what I'm goingto do with it. Second, we
are going to expand the tax basebecause we are going to build more housing
in this city. When we buildmore housing, when we approve more housing,
we are expanding the tax base andgetting more revenue for the city.
(37:35):
Third, when we build that morehousing, we will hit our housing targets.
When we hit our housing targets,we will get the additional money that's
been promised to us by both theprovincial and federal government. The provincial government
has a thirty two million dollars incentivefor hitting our housing targets. Eighty percent
of our housing targets, we don'teven have to have hit one hundred.
We can hit eighty and we'll stillget thirty two million dollars. We lost
(37:57):
thirty two million dollars this year becausewe only hit thirty nine percent of our
housing targets, and we're on trackto also not hit our housing targets this
year, so that's going to bea big problem federal government. Because of
my motion for four plexus and transitoready into development making sure that we're building
and improving more homes around. Transitgot us one hundred and thirteen million dollars
from the federal government, but that'sbeing done in installments. If we don't
(38:22):
meet our targets, if we don'tshow that we're making progress to building the
housing that we need in the city, they're not giving us the twenty eight
million dollars check next year. That'snot counted in the in the city's numbers.
So when we hit our targets again, we get more money from there.
Lastly, we also still need tofind efficiencies in the city. The
city is a really well run place. It's been a lean organization for a
(38:43):
long time, and we're really goodwith our dollars. We're not going to
be Toronto. We're not going tobe doing what they did and coming in
with a ten percent increase in oneyear. That's not going to happen.
We are going to continue to fundthe infrastructure necessary to continue building more homes
and more transit and everything else weneed in this city. And we're not
going to raid the piggybang while doingit. We're going to do it in
a smart way, in an efficientway, and a way that actually helps
(39:04):
the people on the ground. BeforeI actually started working at the City of
Mississauga in recreation, I was ayouth worker and one of the biggest issues
that we've had, and even nowI have a father of two, is
the Active Assist program that the Cityof Mississaga has doesn't really reach as many
people as it needs to. Andthat's one of the complaints I've been hearing
a lot from parents. I'm wondering, do you have anything in your platform
(39:29):
to address recreation, childcare, anysort of thing like that. Right.
I keep saying, I love talkingabout these things because I'm so passionate about
these things, because these things areso important to me. I also have
three young kids, you know,I've had a lot of challenges in terms
of how do we get more spacefor them, how do we get more
activities for them? And I've gota lot of different plans to do this.
(39:50):
I also work for the city forten years as a lifeguard. Maybe
I saw you at some of theseprojects and programs, but a couple of
things. One on affordability. Iwant to make all skating, drop in
skate and drop in swims free forkids. Let's help families get more kids
into these programs. Second on childcareone. I used to be the vice
president of TARIA Coalition for Better Childcareand I actually started and petitioned and got
(40:14):
the federal government to introduce paternity leaveor an additional six weeks of leave for
the secondary parent who is the nonbirthing parent. And one of my huge
successes in my sort of personal careerlobbying, the government got that for everybody.
Childcare is really important to me.We have a program in the city
in Mississauga where we offer a littlebit of summer care childcare for families that
(40:37):
I want to expand and be availableto everybody so that you have some free
activities for your kids to enroll induring the summer as well. That's just
the tip of it. We gota lot more to do in terms of
how we want to invest in termsof the programming and space availability across the
city Mississauga for families as well asyour seniors. That's wonderful. We've got
a lot of ideas and the prettygood. I like a lot of what
(41:01):
you're saying. So Alvin, tellus more about Alvin. Let's get to
know Alvin a little bit. Nota lot of people know you. You're
fairly new in terms of the youknow, public life of Mississauga. I've
known you for a long time,but you know, I'm one person.
So tell us more about Alvin.What do people What should people know about
(41:23):
Alvin? You know, I grewup here. I love this city.
I want my kids to grow upin the city. I want the city
to be better. I think thecity has a lot of potential. Right
I went to Corpus Christy and MetroAndre elementary schools. I went to Father
Gates High School. I was theyoung Citizen of the Year in Mississauga back
in nineteen ninety eight or whatever.It was, and Hazel gave me this
(41:45):
award and told me, you know, you should run for something one day.
And went away to university at Queen'sfrom my undergrad and political science,
and then to Harvard University for mymaster's degree in Digital Media Designmunications. And
I worked a lot in education,right. I spent a lot of number
of years working in the Ministry ofColleges and Universities, and then worked for
(42:07):
Shardan College here in Mississauga doing governmentand community relations. And then I was
recently at Ryerson or TMU doing strategyand communications as well. But I've always
been an advocate. I've always foughtfor transit and I worked with the Minister
of Transportation to make sure that wegot you know, the here interial line.
I've always been an advocate for families, trying to make sure that we
(42:29):
have childcare spaces and working to helpyou know, moms get back to work
and dads, you know, gettingmore time off, and really trying to
find ways for us to support familiesand here in the community. I want
to see us reach our potential.A lot of people like talking about we're
celebrating fifty years. Well, Iwant to talk about where we're going to
(42:50):
be in one hundred years. Whatdo we need to do now, What
are the steps we need to dotoday, in the next six months,
in the next two years, thenext five years, so that we're in
the place we want to be whenwe hit our one hundredth anniversary, and
I plan on being there for that. So I'm really excited about where we
can go in the future. Ithink if you are interested in politics,
(43:10):
you want to get something done,and so that's my vision. I want
to build a better future for ourcity, and I want to get things
done for our community, and Iwant to work with everyone to do it.
I've worked with all the different counselors. I've had different motions on the
table with everyone. We've done alot in just a couple of years that
I've been elected, and I've workedwith every single one of the councilors on
different motions to build more housing,to get more transit, and to have
(43:35):
more complete communities. And that's whatI'm going to continue doing, hopefully as
mayor, and to have someone whohas that sort of leadership envision to drive
the city where it needs to goin the future. I want to thank
you Alvin that is our time.That was a lot to cover in such
a short time. Good luck andwhen I thank you for taking the time
to talk to us and you know, explaining going to details about this,
(43:57):
So thank you so much. Andwe're going to take a quick break and
come back more of Beyond the Ballot. So stay tuned right here on U
stocks doc at nine sixty am,stream US live at SAGA nine sixty am
(44:19):
dot CA. You're listening to Beyondthe Ballot with Ryan Gurcharn and Noka Duck
Rube and welcome back. Wow thatwe went over affordability, crime, transportation,
(44:46):
housing, He spoke about a lotof things. I hope we were
able to ask them on some ofthe topics that were on your mind.
Nooka, what did you think aboutthat interview just now? I thought it
was great. He's got a lotof ideas, very well thought out,
a lot of details. So yeah, we talked about We talked a lot
(45:07):
about housing, we talked about transportation. The property tax question that people are
always asking about. Uh, heis proposing a property tax phrase. He
did explain that to us and tellus how it's gonna work. And we
talked about crime because that's on everybody'smind. Did you see did you find
(45:27):
anything that stuck out to you,anything you thought, hey, that I
haven't heard from heard about yet.I think the biggest thing was, you
know, he did walk us throughhis uh his plan for for for crime
or safety plan or public safety rather, and he hadn't released that yet,
so I hadn't actually been aware ofthat. But really it's it's interesting to
(45:57):
see the depth of of knowledge andthe depth of the information and detail that
he's put into the platform. That'sfor sure. For sure, I don't
think anybody else has released this detailedplatform. The question I guess would be
is that it is that is thatwhat it takes to is that what people
(46:22):
care about? Well, our voterspaying attention, Well, this is yeah,
so you said it better than Idid. Our voter's paying attention.
And with this resonate, with thislevel detailed resonate, I've seen that he
has a transit map that may theothers may still come out with. I
mean, we still got a fewmore weeks. It's not until June tenth,
(46:45):
and I think maybe a week ora week before no week or two
before advanced polls. So you know, so in the next couple of weeks
we may see more platforms planks comeout on transit and housing. And he
had something about small businesses that Ithought was pretty interesting too, right he
(47:07):
spoke with that, he went overyou know what, I didn't hear into
housing, and I didn't get achance to ask him, so you could
ask him when he comes to yourdoors because he is door knocking. I
didn't hear anything about co op housingor social housing, which is a regional
issue. But he is going tobe a regional counselor too, a regional
vote, so that is something Iforgot to ask. But it was great
(47:31):
having him, and I'm looking forwardto our next candidate that we have next
week. Who is Steven Dasco.That's the one. Okay, Yeah,
we're very excited. We have wehave you covered. We told you we're
going to have you covered when thisstarted. We are bringing all the candidates,
well not every single one of them, but the I guess top five
(47:54):
candidates, top five into polling polling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and
you've seen their signs around now,so you'll know you've got a sense of
like who sort of has a realisticchance of becoming ANX mayor of Mississauga,
and I'm kind of excited. Iwish I really hope you folks who are
listening are planning on going out tovote. I hope this doesn't turn into
(48:17):
a sleeper election, because there aresome great ideas out there. Carolyn had
some good ideas, Alvin had somegood ideas, and I'm pretty sure when
we hear from Dasco next week,he may have a whole different take on
some of this stuff, especially beingthe counselor that he is for the waterfront,
So I'm sure that Yeah, alot of people have been talking about
(48:39):
his area, so we'll see whathe actually has to say. All right,
So with that, we gotta go. It's been fun and we will
will be back next week saying battime, saying bat channel. Until then,
stay safe and get involved, Noradio, no problem. Stream is
(49:15):
live on SAGA ninety sixty am dotc A
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