Well Being

A Community That Is Healthy, Safe and Active

Social Spaces

• Rebuild the community aquatic centre
• Wider use of the central athletic grounds, including school district fixtures, community groups’ programmes, and open public access
• A parks acquisition strategy funding new recreation space, playgrounds, plazas and parklets, putting the parks and open space master plan to work
• Development rewards for building, or contributing toward, improvements to the public realm and to shared community space
• More support for arts and culture – carrying forward the arts and innovation district plan, the cultural spaces road map, and the city arts and culture master plan
• Tax relief or reduction, plus extra funding, for groups that serve the community

Health Services

• Housing, financial and practice incentives for health professionals and for the wellness workers who assist them
• Permissive tax exemptions for non-profit health societies, health co-operatives and clinics staffed by doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, and other health and wellness workers
• Support for places where wellness workers can train
• Advocacy for harm reduction services across the region, and for safe supply

Comfort & Safety

• Better funding for civilian community crisis response teams
• Greater emphasis on, and targeted funding for, community policing
• A safety and security initiative covering the whole city
• More cleaning and upkeep of the public realm, more bylaw staff, more street ambassadors etc.
• A revived ‘welcome and thank you’ programme for businesses and residents
• Backing for what residents already do to lift their own neighbourhood’s well-being
• Support for every recommendation of the provincial review of policing legislation, set out in the report Transforming Policing and Community Safety.

Well-being comes down to how we work together so that every resident can live a healthy, safe and active life in a community that weighs everyone’s needs against each other, does not pretend urban pressures away, and looks for answers grounded in compassion, practicality and plain reason.

Our programme treats well-being as three separate “baskets” of action that add up together.

(1) Social Spaces

Being healthy, and feeling healthy, both depend on having somewhere to be active and somewhere public to meet other people.

Over the coming term the community aquatic centre should be rebuilt as a place every resident can actually get into and use. A pool of that kind carries a great deal of a district’s day-to-day health, and it has to work for people of every ability.

The central athletic grounds are underused. A full look at the site in 2023 should ask how it can best serve residents’ well-being. Part of that is its value as open ground for the streets immediately around it, and part is its unusual capacity to hold a wide range of amateur and semi-professional sport, including tournaments and one-off events. There is room for far more community and school sport, working with the school district and with leagues in baseball, ultimate, soccer, rugby and cricket, to name only a few.

Over the next four years we want the parks acquisition strategy inside the city’s parks and open space master plan properly resourced. It would protect fragile habitat, open new ground for parks and paths, and put more green space in every neighbourhood. As the population grows, residents need more places to gather and share – new playgrounds, plazas and parklets, the sort of spots where people who have chosen smaller private homes can easily meet others and enjoy being outdoors close to where they live. They should also put art, history and culture in front of people in unexpected corners of the district. Some spaces need building for younger residents, indoors and out, where enjoying yourself is the whole point, and others for older residents, to keep quality of life high and make room for sharing experience and knowledge.

Well-being is social as much as physical. Residents need chances to work alongside each other, to look after one another and to build community through personal and collective ties alike. They want healthy local organisations that create occasions to meet, share, learn and give support. The city has a part to play in keeping those benefits alive, by revisiting tax relief or reduction for community organisations – including those that rent their premises – and by revisiting eligibility for civic grants and ongoing funding. Arts and culture groups make a social and a financial contribution to well-being, and we can recognise it with stronger support for their programmes and agencies, by resourcing the cultural spaces road map and the city arts and culture master plan, and by pushing ahead boldly with plans for the arts and innovation district.

Although it belongs mostly to housing policy, there is a set of development tools the city could use that would benefit social space and, through it, well-being. The city could look at development rewards, such as faster or simpler processing, for building, or contributing toward, improvements to the public realm and public space, and for temporary or transitional premises for community service providers.

(2) Health Services

Well-being right now is defined by one of the sharpest health problems of the moment – how hard it has become to see a family doctor, a nurse or another health professional. Health care remains a provincial responsibility, and recent provincial signals that change is coming, with transitional funding attached, deserve applause and municipal support. The alliance will keep pressing for systemic change in how health professionals are able to serve residents here.

In the meantime our city has to do what it can about the consequences of that shortfall. There are steps available that would make the district more attractive to GPs, nurses and specialists, and to the technicians and assistants who support them.

The alliance would like to see a recruitment function for physicians and health professionals, set up to find ways of drawing them here. For that to work, council has to be willing to consider – and to test the edges of its own authority in offering – housing and practice incentives for doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, other health professionals and their support staff, along with permissive tax exemptions for non-profit health societies, co-operatives and clinics. Health professionals can also be given a seat at the partnership tables where local health needs are identified and the case for change is put together.

We are not regulators and cannot assess practitioners – credentialing and hospital hiring stay with the health authority – but we can be inventive about making this a place where those professionals, and the workers who assist them, want to live and work.

Further out, the city can partner with training institutions to open more places where health professionals and assistants can qualify, and contribute toward housing and other supports for wellness workers while they are studying.

This district has a history of bringing health professionals together to talk about how mental health and addiction services are delivered and distributed. As harm reduction widens to cover a broader range of options, and the poisoned drug supply keeps taking lives, the city still has a role in arguing for more harm reduction services spread across the region and for a regulated safe supply.

 (3) Comfort & Safety

Well-being is also about how the district feels to move through, and where – and whether – people feel safe in it.

This place is no less safe than any other urban centre growing at speed. But it has come out of a pandemic into a rate of social change and a squeeze on resources it has not met before, and those realities deserve more attention than they have had.

Our answer starts with a different approach to community crisis response: peer-assisted response teams. Piloted here with a national mental health association, the model has worked in other cities for people in crisis who need help, have committed no crime, and do not need a police response. Once the first pilot shows how it performs locally, its funding should be extended and the model tuned with partners to fit what the district actually needs.

As these teams, and similar programmes, take root, police will be able to turn more attention back to the work they do best – preventing crime and responding to it – which gives us a chance to work out what resources our policing really needs. When budgets are debated, more weight and more targeted funding can go to community policing. And we can press the province to act on every recommendation in the report of its review of policing legislation, Transforming Policing and Community Safety.

Part of comfort and safety comes from how the built environment feels. We would give more attention to the physical fabric of the district, with extra resources to maintain and improve the public realm through cleaning, maintenance, landscaping and bylaw services, and through ambassador programmes. Streets, sidewalks, parks and public spaces that look cared for give people more confidence in using them, in their own safety and in themselves. There are examples of businesses and residents taking part in city-funded safety and security schemes that back local action, kept inside the bounds of civility, balance and fairness.

We would build on what residents already do to improve their own neighbourhood’s well-being, backing that work with funding and staff time – placemaking, sharing information, community mapping, movable features such as tables, seating and pop-up notice boards – so that effort already under way gets support rather than instruction. And we would build on neighbour-to-neighbour schemes that create cooperative relationships, where people know and watch out for each other, including a revived ‘welcome and thank you’ programme for businesses and residents.