Last night WORCA brought all of us candidates to the multipurpose room at Whistler Secondary for their Meet the Candidates night. No stage. No microphone. People sat at tables, we candidates walked, and every five minutes a bell moved you on to the next table.
The public meetings so far were presentations: a minute at the microphone, then the next candidate, then the next question from the floor. Useful — but mostly one way. Tuesday was the first time I actually sat down with people. Face to face, their questions, no script.
Finally not a presentation — a conversation. I came into this campaign to listen. This was the evening built for it.
A unicorn. Yes, really.
WORCA had sent all the candidates a few written questions before the night. Between everything else these weeks, mine never got sent back — so unlike the others, I walked in without a prepared answer to any of them. Including the one nobody prepares for anyway: what’s your spirit animal?
Before my brain caught up, it was out: a unicorn 🦄.
Nobody in that room was more surprised than me. But it was the most honest answer I gave all night, and I’m keeping it.
After that, table after table, people I had never met told me what they are dealing with — and I told them what I have run into myself. Five minutes is too short for a speech. It is just right for a conversation, if you ask more than you talk.
Housing — the thing I know from the inside
Three years on the Whistler Housing Authority waitlist. Then I bought in Pemberton, because the numbers made the decision for me. I didn’t bring a housing lecture to those tables. I brought that. More on housing.
Trails — and the gap right next to them
Nobody in that room needed convincing about bikes. WORCA keeps 205 kilometres of trail alive, and Whistler has more than 50 kilometres of Valley Trail that is free for everyone.
What we almost don’t have is a place outdoors to warm up, stretch and build a bit of strength — for free. A simple spot at a trailhead or by the Valley Trail helps the riders, and it helps everyone else too: the dog walker, the kid waiting for a ride, the parent with twenty minutes and no gym membership. That is my Active Community idea in one sentence. The right place to put it is the Parks and Valley Trail Strategy, which Council has been waiting on since the spring.
Fee for Service: keep it, index it
One thing I will say in any room. The municipality pays WORCA through a Fee for Service agreement, and that amount has been held flat for three years. Almost all of it comes from the hotel tax, not from your property tax — visitors pay for the trails they ride. And it is maintenance money: new trails get built from memberships, the club’s own fundraising and a lot of volunteer hours. That is a good deal for Whistler. Index it to inflation, and the club can stop asking every year.
Why wildfire is personal
On July 15, when the Signal Hill fire broke out above One Mile Lake, I stood at my window in Pemberton and watched it burn maybe 500 metres away. The whole village was on evacuation alert — 1,377 properties. I wasn’t a candidate yet. I didn’t think about council or evacuation plans. I thought: what do I do about my mortgage — and where do we go tonight?
Pemberton got it right. The alert went out that same evening, the crews held the fire in four days, and nobody lost a home. That is what a community that knows its plan looks like.
I’m not here to scare anyone. I’m here to say: think about it now. Not necessarily a drill every year — but a plan every household has actually seen, routes that have been thought through, and everything we’ll need on that night already in place before it comes.
So when I say Whistler needs to take evacuation seriously — practise it, talk about it, and publish what it learns — I am not reading it off a website. Highway 99 has no alternative, and emptying this valley could take up to 15 hours. More on wildfire resilience.
There is one more thing I’d put in every Whistler household, and it costs nothing: FireRadar’s Whistler map. It is independent, built and run in Canada, free and ad-free, and it pulls the official BC Wildfire Service records and satellite hotspots onto one map for our community — with e-mail alerts if you want them. It would have told me about Signal Hill before I saw it from the window. Today it shows nothing within 25 kilometres of Whistler. In July it looked different.
Working on Saturday the 17th?
A lot of people I talked to on Tuesday work weekends. You have two ways around it. Advance voting is open on Wednesday, October 7 and Saturday, October 10 at the Whistler Public Library, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Or vote by mail — but you have to apply first, by 4 p.m. on Tuesday, October 13, at Municipal Hall, by e-mail to election@whistler.ca or by phone at 604-932-5535. Packages are issued until October 14, and yours has to be back at Municipal Hall by 8 p.m. on October 17. Everything else is on how to vote in Whistler.
Thank you, WORCA, and the volunteers who ran the bell. And thank you to everyone who spent a Tuesday night in a school classroom asking us questions.
You have six votes for Council. I’m asking for one of them.