Local businessman Dan McLaren is putting his name forward for Prince George City Council.
“I think I have something positive to contribute,” he said in an interview with My Prince George Now. “I’ve been a business person in Prince George for going on 40 years, I’ve owned my own business for 31 years. I’d like to give something back to Prince George, and I think I’ve got something positive to contribute.”
McLaren said there are three themes in his campaign:
- A great city doesn’t have to cost more,
- A great city must have safe streets,
- A great city must attract investment.
“Costs of running cities, like many things, goes up every year, it’s more expensive for the fire department to fill up their gas tank today than it was a year ago,” he said, “but we have been increasing taxes at twice the rate of inflation, and I think, especially considering how hard done by our people are right now, it might be time to give them a bit of a break for a couple of years.”
McLaren said he’s calling for a two-year freeze on tax increases.
“I think that if we can over-tax people for 12 years, maybe we can under-tax them, or appropriately tax them for a year or two, and that’s where I’m at,” he said. “I’m hoping that we can look at ways that we can be actually reducing taxes.”
On safe streets, McLaren said it’s not necessarily the City’s fault, but there is work to be done.
“The City funds the police department, it funds the fire department, but it’s the province’s policies that have caused us a great deal of issues,” McLaren said, citing the decriminalization of drugs, the lack of treatment centres, and people not being charged by Crown Counsel.
“I think as a City, we need to recognize that we cannot wait for the province to change their ways, because I don’t think they will,” he continued. “We have to think of creative ways to start taking care of ourselves.”
On attracting investment, McLaren said the City needs to be doing “sales calls.”
“Not just going to conferences, but actually making hard sales calls,” he said. “Hard call might be flying to Toronto, meeting with the head of Amazon for Canada, and pitch them on opening up a distribution centre beside our airport, we know it’s on a rail line, close to fourth biggest runway in Canada, and we have a special tax zone infrastructure, those are the calls that need to be made to replace the jobs, and if we don’t do that, we’re going to be seeing even greater increases in our tax that we charge to people.”
McLaren said while governments can’t run like businesses, but there are business “attributes” that could translate well into the public sector, such as yearly employee evaluations, or ensuring Council has access to all pertinent information at budget time.
The municipal election is set for October 17.
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