Langley City Council Meets with Provincial Ministers to Raise Community Concerns and Opportunities

This is a slide from one of the sessions at the UBCM conference this week.

Langley City Council is at the Union of BC Municipalities Conference in Downtown Vancouver this week. This annual conference is an opportunity for local government elected representatives to get together to learn about the challenges we are all facing and potential solutions. It is also a time to have informal conversations and debate resolutions with other elected representatives across BC. Critically, it is also an opportunity to meet with provincial cabinet ministers to bring local concerns and requests forward.

Langley City Council has or will be meeting with six ministers throughout this year's conference.

Our first meeting was with the Minister of Finance, Katrine Conroy. We advocated for the province to split the current single residential property tax class into a detached and attached residential property tax class. This change would allow for more consistency when we annually adjust property tax. You can read more about why this matters in a previous blog post. This call to create two residential property tax classes was endorsed by the Lower Mainland Local Government Association membership earlier this year and the Union of BC Municipalities memberships yesterday.

We met with the Minister of Housing, Ravi Kahlon, to advocate for a BC-wide tenant protection and compensation policy for when housing is redeveloped. These policies are done piecemeal by municipalities today, and every municipality takes a different approach. We also asked the minister to talk with his federal counterpart to reform the CMHC RCFI program to encourage more affordable housing.

Our third meeting was with Rachna Singh, the Minister of Education and Child Care. We asked her to consider building and expanding schools in Langley City in preparation for the arrival of SkyTrain.

We will meet with the Minister of Health, Adrian Dix, this morning. We will ask for Fire Rescue Services to be better integrated into the pre-hospital care system and for the province to compensate local governments for the medical calls our Fire Rescue Services attend.

We will also be meeting with Minister Lana Popham today. As the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture, and Sports, we will ask her to support our plan to build a performing arts centre in Downtown Langley.

Finally, we will meet with the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Mike Framworth tomorrow about the future of the Langley RCMP detachment.