Wendy Bergfeld And all this week we will have interviews with the mayoral candidates in CBRM. There are nine people in the race for mayor. James Edwards is one of those candidates. He is currently the deputy mayor of CBRM and he spoke with Kyle Moore. James Edwards I've been involved in the community forever, not only in the last four years as counselor and the last two as the deputy mayor. I've been involved in the minor hockey circles and President Glace Bay minor hockey for the last 17 years and going into my 18th year. And I want to see things get done. I'm not the type of person who will give the same old rhetoric that we're going to do this, we're going to do that. I'm the guy who has the leadership skills to bring a team together, to work together as a community to make things happen. I bring a passion as well, not only for the community, but the passion for success to get things done, make life better for everybody. In CBRM, people can talk about taxes. In fact, one of the first things in my platform is to have a symposium when I become mayor to see what we can do about taxes. The province has made it perfectly clear that they're not interested in tampering with the tax capital. So what can we do as a community? I'll bring together mayor and council along with the business leaders, CBU, NSCC, the accounting world. See, perhaps there's a better way we can to do that. To make taxes better for all business taxes. We have to do something about that. There's no question about it. I had a nice meeting the other day with the chamber of Commerce and just looking at ways to increase not only business but employment because that's another topic we have to address. And, you know, perhaps there's a mechanism we can look at to encourage a small business and, well, large business as well. And again, I have experience in that. I did 34 years with Revenue Canada where I went in and out of businesses of all kinds, everything from a mom and pop convenience store to large corporations with thousands of employees. So I know how business works. I know how business people work. And it's just a matter of putting everybody on the same page. Again, with my Revenue Canada experience, I worked in the bureaucratic world. So it's just a matter of talking to people and working as a team to get things done. The other thing we have to do is we have to listen to the community. In my term as a counselor, I've had several community meetings where we sit down with the people and listen to what the concerns are and take it from there. But it’s the things that I would bring to the table as mayor. It's the things that matter most to Cape Rettners here and now. You know, we talked about taxes, we talk about police work, the crime. In fact, an interesting story, I had a conversation with a policeman friend of mine recently. I asked, "Is there a lot of crime in the area?" He said yes. And I said, "Why?" He said poverty. Just a simple one-word answer. And you know, we know that about the child poverty rates in CBRM. I also drive a school bus. I know that the—I congratulate the school system for the breakfast, lunch, and after-school programs. There would be kids who wouldn't be eating the three squares a day, I'm sure. But see, it comes together with what I mentioned about the chamber of Commerce conversation. If we can encourage small business, we can do a mechanism to encourage small business to hire people to, first of all, open our young people. We have to tap into our young people. There's lots of ideas to encourage small business. If we can do something as a municipality for some kind of a tax holiday to help a small business get off the ground, all of a sudden you're increasing employment, so you're cutting into child poverty. But I go back to the police and I say about the crime, I mean we have to bring the drugs under control. Our fire services—we need a universal approach with our fire services. Just things that are important to Cape Rettners right now. Our public works department, what can we do better there to maintain our roads, our sidewalks? Our holy smokes, you wouldn't believe the number of calls that I get as a rural counselor, especially in the summer months about elephant ears, or in the winter snow removal. And like what can we be doing better? We need a new relationship or we have to have a conversation with the province about what we can do better as far as shared services are concerned. Lest we forget our Indigenous communities. I attended a couple of interesting, great announcements in the last two weeks. One over in Sidport with Eskazoni where they're working on the East coast medal project—they've got great plans there. And then I was also at the 7th exchange recently with Chief Terry Paul and the leaders about the opening of the McDonald's and the new complex out there. And I made the comment what's good for Membertou is good for CBRM. People are working there. It's just all part of making the community vibrant. Kyle Moore So why not run for counselor? Why run for mayor? What can you do differently in the role? James Edwards Well, it's the leadership that I bring to the role. I've done that for certainly all of my adult life. I've been involved in the community again. I can bring people together to lead, to direct, and to get things done. That's a quality—I'm sure everybody has that quality. It just so happens that I was in that role in my minor hockey role. Many people in your listening and viewing audience will recognize me as being the president of Glace Bay minor hockey. We grew that association from a really grassroots to the extent now that most of our kids don't pay to play hockey, which is a huge saving to the kids in the community. It also includes how we spawned other associations locally to do the 50/50. And that's just what's good for one is good for all type of thing. So that's part of the leadership qualities that I bring to the table as mayor and something that I will continue to do. Kyle Moore So how do you feel about your competition right now? Two big names in Cecil Clark, Rankin McSween. James Edwards I've got the blinders on and I'm focused on October 19. I'm worried about James Edwards. I'm going to go out to the community and have this type of conversation and see if people will elect me as the mayor. I think I bring a lot to the table. I'm a first-time mayor. Of course. I'm not really focused on the other candidates. I'm sure they'll all do well, get their share of votes. I just want to get the most. Kyle Moore And what are you hearing on the doorstep right now? James Edwards I'm hearing nothing but encouragement. People are encouraging me to go the distance, go all the way. Everything is positive. I bring a new, fresh perspective to the campaign. Again, it's time for thinking outside of the box, as it were, in CBRM, to just try something different. The other thing that I will be bringing to the table is, you know what, an old friend of mine one time said to me, "If one person comes to, approaches you with a situation or a problem, whatever, that's one thing. But if two people or two or more people come to you with the same situation, then that's an issue that has to be addressed." There is no doubt in my mind or anybody's mind in CBRM that we have to address the library. The library will be a focus of this council, and under my mayorship, we will get that done. There's no question about that. Wendy Bergfeld That's James Edwards. He is currently the deputy mayor of CBRM. He was speaking with Kyle Moore. He's one of nine people running for mayor in this municipal election. Another candidate is Joe Ward. He spoke with Tom Ayers. Joe Ward Well, Tom, I've always been wired to defend people, and for a long time, I thought that I could sort of—well, it sort of naturally translated into paying attention to, you know, the things that affected people. And I would write about that. And then I transitioned to podcasting about that. But at some point, you know, I made runs for council, and I thought you had better start being a part of the solution. That leadership might be the way to actually make a bigger impact rather than just talking about it. My biggest focus will be lowering property taxes because I think that has a direct relationship with the problems we're seeing now, specifically with the shortage of housing and the rapid inflation in housing. It's been an issue that we've been at for a long time in the CBRM. It's not new, but I think that it's an issue that we can actually make some ground on. A lot of people may not know, but I was involved in influencing Tim Houston actually to send that—or to double the equalization transfer, which resulted in $15 million more for the CBRM. So I think we can basically expand that to get a new deal if we speak in the language of Tim Houston and negotiate. If we look at the provincial surplus, the last one they declared was about $142 million. Our residential property taxes are only about $89 million that we're pulling in. So there's more than enough money. Even without having an equalization conversation, we can just look at provincial surpluses and know that if you took a chunk of that surplus that the province had, you deliver it to the CBRM and apply it to offset taxes, that we can already bring our tax rates on par with the HRM. Now, the thing is, the importance of that in the relationship to housing is that housing development is slowed when the rates disincentivize that. And that's whether it's an individual homeowner that wants to build a new home or move here and build a home, or if it's multi-unit developers that are comparing where they should invest their money in the province. Will it be the place where we're not going to be eaten alive by taxes, or is it going to be the place where we're going to be disincentivized for higher rates? Tom Ayers You mentioned equalization. There's often a debate about whether we're entitled to it or whether the provincial government is required to send more money to us or not. You're saying that we can get more revenue from the province even without equalization. Like you're not, you're not interested in that argument? Joe Ward I'm completely interested in the argument, but I'm interested in rising a level above. So if we put it like this: if there's billions of dollars coming into the province from the federal government's equalization program, the surplus that I just talked about in the province is from equalization. It's all coming from the same pool of money. So the conversation about how that money should be distributed is an important conversation. And the Nova Scotians for Equalization Fairness are pushing that debate. And I want to be a part of that debate. But the negotiation does not require that when the province has enough funding to achieve the same end result. So we know where it comes from, but it's just about whether or not there's an availability of money and what we would do with that money when we have it. So I mean, we can very easily move chunks of money between $30 million and $50 million to the CBRM and lower the taxes and do some dramatic things. We can also look at other options. Instead of just demanding the transfer, we can say, let's go back to Bill 340. You removed corrections and you removed housing. Let's look at removing education and free up another $16 million. So there are ways to either lower our expenses or increase our transfer that actually get the job done on lowering taxes and getting out of the way of the housing market development. That's the key plank solely because it's going to have the biggest impact on our lives. But I mean, I'm huge on communication, transparency, and negotiation, which is basically—communication is letting the people know what's going on. Like, less of treating people like they're outsiders that have to fight for information. Just putting it all out there. I mean, we don't even get proper transcripts of council meetings. They're not made available in such a manner that the public really knows what's going on. A recent example is people being shocked by the wastewater bills that they're getting because they never had a water bill before, some of them, but they have sewage connections and they're wondering where this comes from. I talked about this probably eight months ago and knew it was coming, but the people generally didn't know what to expect because the municipality is not doing a good job of communicating these things. Tom Ayers And did you want to say something about your campaign? I mean, it sounds to me like you're intentionally not running a conventional campaign with signs and political organization, that sort of thing. Joe Ward Absolutely. So I'm a die-hard non-partisan. I'm not affiliated with any party, and I can work with any party. But one of the things I tell people, as support for me is starting to rise, is they immediately want a yard sign. I'm not doing yard signs specifically because a name on a sign doesn't tell you anything about a candidate other than their name and potentially a slogan where 10 seconds at a door doesn't really equate to a sincere—well, first of all, there's not enough time, but it's not necessarily even an authentic portrayal of what that particular candidate wants to offer. So my method is to simply make my message available in full detail, whether people will eventually support what I'm suggesting or not. Put myself out there and let them decide. Now, the hurdle for me to overcome is that I have to make sure that that message gets as far and as wide as possible. So I'm asking the people that support me and that are consuming all these messages and finding out what I'm all about to make sure that if there's friends and family around them that are not online or don't have enough time to be online, if they haven't heard about me or some of the things that I'm discussing, make sure they know about it so that they know they have another option. I have a website, electjoeward.com. I'm also available on Facebook, and I, you know, I publish videos and some written stuff there pretty much daily. Wendy Bergfeld That's Joe Ward, one of nine people running for mayor. And before Joe, you heard from James Edwards. In total, there are nine candidates. They are Donnie Basic, Cecil Clark, James Edwards, Carla George, Vince Hall, Kevin MacCachren, Archie McKinnon, Rankin McSween, and Joe Ward. And on tomorrow's edition of Main Street, you will hear from Archie McKinnon and Kevin MacCachren.