I’m back on the campaign trail and am hoping the members of the Tsawwassen First Nation elect the person who is best qualified for the job as Chief.  We are on the brink of great success – but now more than ever we need someone with a steady hand, who knows what needs to be done, and someone who has a track record of getting things done.  I am clearly the best candidate in this election.

I’ve been fortunate to be leading at Tsawwassen as a member of council for just under 20 years prior to last September, 6 years as a councillor and 13 and a half as Chief.  My vision and goal since I went to college is for our community to enjoy a quality of life comparable to our neighbours.  The only way to increase our quality of life is to promote economic development and to have the jurisdiction to build our economy.  I led our community’s treaty negotiations to give us not only the tools to make money, but to have the power to fix some of the problems that are a legacy of the Indian Act.

We are truly on the brink of sustainability as a community.  That doesn’t mean our problems will be fixed in a few months.  It means we still have to work hard.  We have to work hard individually, within our families and with each other’s families.  We have tough decisions to make.  But we should make them collectively.

We have made great strides in opening up our governance in the past 20 years – working together to first design our own, appropriate governance structures and then to implement them.  Transparency has been a founding principle under my leadership.  I’ve seen that fading in the past 6 months.  Major decisions are being made without community consultation.  Questionable activities are happening right before an election – this doesn’t seem collaborative, or the plan of a chief and council who wants to work with others or even communicate to the community about its plans. Frankly, I think it takes us backwards as a community.

We built a vision and a plan together, and I want to get back to it.