Shaking the 'Bike Lane Charlie' image: Saskatoon mayor celebrates 1 year in office
Jennifer Quesnel | CBC News | Posted: October 26, 2017 11:00 AM | Last Updated: October 26, 2017
Charlie Clark weighs in on policing, garbage and being pulled in many directions
Charlie Clark won the race to be Saskatoon's mayor one year ago, unseating Saskatoon's longest-serving leader, Don Atchison.
CBC News sat down with the mayor and asked him to weigh in on crime, policing, garbage and his reputation as 'Bike Lane Charlie.'
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: You promised to reinvigorate the safe streets commission and do an audit of the police service. Instead we have Saskatoon's police chief retiring, and an audit that appears to keep getting passed between city departments. How can you prove we're getting value for our tax dollars in policing?
A: We have an operational review and we were going to bring it out and start a process of implementing and evaluating the recommendations that are in the review this fall, and then we heard that Chief Weighill is retiring.
We decided that rather than have it be kind of a political football in the hiring of a police chief we would hold it and get a new police chief in place, with the understanding we're going to be looking for those innovations that help to manage the cost of policing while also still delivering the key public safety initiatives that the public values from policing.
And the police service did a zero-based budgeting approach this year. They're finding ways in their service to find savings in what they're doing and make sure we're demonstrating value to the public.
Q: What happened to the Safe Streets Commission?
A: We spent the summer doing quite intensive work to really talk to the community, talk to all the different stakeholders who've been part of the Safe Streets Commision in order to come up with a more focused approach that helps to both better prioritize and co-ordinate on key issues like mental health, drug addiction, crystal meth, public intoxication in the downtown, and homelessness that's affecting our community.
Their work has to be focused and evidence based. Combine both short-term wins that show immediate results and tackling the root causes of crime and social issues which we know take longer. So we will be within the next few months announcing that initiative more clearly in terms of what the next steps are going to be.
We're also working with the provincial government to make sure that as we integrate at the Saskatoon level that we're seeing the same level of integration between the ministries of Social Services, Justice, Health.
Q: Saskatoon is second only to Regina right now for having the highest crime rate in Canada. What do you hope Saskatoon's new police chief accomplishes?
A: We need a police chief who is a very innovative thinker. You know we live in a time of change and we know that the system as it is right now is failing our people.
And it's not just the police service — in fact I think the police service are the ones that are having to pick up the pieces of a broken system.
People are bouncing around between different services and programs, but we're not seeing the kind of outcomes in terms of a co-ordinated approach to get people from jail back into the workforce, or from mental health or addictions into stabilized situations.
Chief Weighill was tremendously good at building relationships — and building trust among very diverse sectors of our communities, in particular the First Nations and Métis communities. And so we need a police chief that can continue to do that work because you cannot keep a community safe if the community doesn't trust the police service when investigations need to take place. You need that co-operation.
Q: You've made it clear we're running out of room at Saskatoon's landfill. How tough of a sell are the mandatory green bins on their way to this city, and what works best in terms of making garbage pickup pay for itself?
A: We've learned in the past that garbage is one of those things that generates often a very polarized response and a lot of emotional reaction in the community. And so we want to make sure we're being transparent and clear about why it is that the status quo is unacceptable.
We're one of the last cities that hasn't put in some sort of a variable rate or a utility model to deal with waste collection. And so I know it's a change and people are skeptical that it's just a new tax and some of those things. But we're trying to just be really clear on what our choices are, and why if we don't do something more ambitious about this, we're just handing a liability off to our kids.
The decommissioning of the landfill is estimated to be close to $100 million let alone the cost of finding new land and building a new landfill. There's also the environmental impacts of a wasteful model where we don't divert more of our waste. We need to make a change here.
Q: During the campaign, there was this sort of caricature of you as Bike Lane Charlie. I wonder if you've been trying to intentionally change a bit of that perception.
A: The thing about Bike Lane Charlie, politics can get so simplified down to name-calling. And Donald Trump has shown that. It can be very powerful, right?
The problem is nobody's one dimensional.
So yeah, I do ride a bicycle and I think it's still a very smart way to get around a city like Saskatoon. But that doesn't define me. It doesn't define anybody. I also have two vehicles in my household, and I use all forms of transportation to get around the city.
Bike lanes are one part of our city but they're not the whole thing.
Q: Is there any one thing you wish someone had told you about being Saskatoon's mayor, before you ran?
A: (Laughs) I wish there were two of me. One of the worst parts of my week is going through my schedule with my staff and trying to balance between having enough time to do the thinking and the strategic and the planning work on some of these big initiaves we're trying to deal with, and being available to the public for events, for requests for meetings, for responding to correspondence.
The demands are significant and I want to make sure I remain accessible as a mayor and I don't get removed from the everyday life of people. But there's just a lot to keep up with.