Building a practical platform with evidence of support
I’ve been meeting people each day now for months, sipping my body weight in coffee and tea, learning about their needs and expectations in order to create an election platform for the West Vancouver mayoralty that can be delivered.
I don’t want to write a campaign platform behind closed doors. I want to build it with the community. Too often I’m hearing that the community doesn’t feel involved in the decisions at Municipal Hall. It’s time to change that.
I’m treating this stage of the campaign the way I would treat an investigative journalism project in a newsroom. It means keeping an open mind on what I might discover, accepting insights on ideas I might have, and hearing what the community believes are the best paths forward. Listen to get the facts first, hear all the perspectives, then draw conclusions on them.
About the only non-negotiable ideas in my research are my commitments to better consultation, stronger management of your tax dollars, and more accountability and openness in government. Everything that emerges from my dozens, even hundreds of conversations will adhere to those values.
My aim is to develop an election platform backed by the evidence of support. More important, it would be a platform of promises that can be kept. I certainly hear a lot about broken promises in my discussions with voters. The platform is still a work in progress, but I know it will include a long-term vision for our community services, our finances, our local businesses, our housing, our natural beauty, our culture and our sense of play.
Meantime, it involves talking to the widest possible range of interested parties–people on different sides of an issue, even some people who won’t talk to each other–in order to get the clearest possible picture.
Along the way I’ll stage some events with themes of the discussion. The first one is June 23, at 12:30 p.m. at the Seniors Activity Centre, to talk and hear how we can better serve our seniors in West Vancouver. Email rsvp@kirklapointe.ca to let us know you’re coming.
I’d invite your participation on those issues at the event and on others in the weeks ahead. This is the time to bring forward your ideas, and to test some of mine, as we get into the more intense part of the October 17 election campaign. Write to me at kirk@kirklapointe.ca and let’s book some time to talk so I can hear the best possible perspectives to build a platform that can be trusted and delivered.