The Record sat with New West mayoral candidate Chuck Puchmayr to get to his likes, goals, top issues and beyond.
What’s your favourite book?
I like autobiographies. I'm a musician. And the last one that I read was about B.B. King. I thought it was a really good book and then historic going way back, one of my classical favourites is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Why is it your favourite book?
I just thought it was really well cast. And it really tells a story about the days when people were incarcerated with mental health issues when they really shouldn't have been incarcerated. I think that movie, it hits home because it tells that story of of prerelease, of our mental institutions by the courts.
It has relevance in the sense that it tells you that these that people are suffering from the type of mental illness that was exposed in that book. The courts over the years have ruled that people in those conditions cannot be kept incarcerated against their will. But there's also a real important need to have proper places for people to go that are dignified and that are clean- where they're housed, they're clothed, they're looked after. They have staff that makes sure that they take their medications and they can integrate properly into society. And that seems to be the missing piece right now is we we we send them out of the institutions or out of the psychiatric ward at the hospital, and we put them into shelters where they're at risk of being abused again in shelters by some very marginalized people in our shelters.
Good things have happened since that. But we're missing that extra piece where we need to nurture and protect those most vulnerable people in our community.
What would your first 90 days look like in council, should you be elected?
My first 90 days would be getting the new council together- bringing in a facilitator, setting up a work plan first meeting with every new elected official. Listening to them, listening to what their vision is, what their goals are, and then meeting with the entire staff: starting with department heads. One of the first groups I'm going to meet with is the police to let them know that they're respected and that they're needed and they're wanted in the community. I want them to feel comfortable that that me as mayor and also chair of the police board respects what they do.
I really cherish I value we're one of the most progressive police forces in the nation which which would make us one of the most police progressive police forces in North America. And I want to expand on that, but I want to let them know that they're welcome and wanted and of course, fire services. People that put their lives on the line risked their lives every day for us.
I want them to know that this council cares about them and they value them and then just start working on building a relationship of some of the things that I brought up in my platform. I want to I want to engage the the council. I want to work with them to see how we can move that platform ahead, see if some of you know what parts of my platform are. Can they buy into what parts are contentious and need more work and then engage the community? I want to get out there. I'm in this coffee shop. I find coffee shops are better polls than the cities engagement because you meet all the citizens in the coffee shop. Many citizens can't aren't capable of using the technology of the engagement.
I want to show people that we're not going to make big, drastic changes. We're going to move with engagement. We're going to have true engagement. We're going to make council more accessible to the public, and we're going to be more open and disclose more of what goes on in our council.
What is the one issue you are most passionate about addressing?
You know, housing and the proliferation of homeless people. We really need to address that. We can't do it alone as a city council. We need other communities to do their fair share. We need the province at the table. We need the federal government at the table. We need to look at housing solutions that don't only shelter people but have places for people from shelters to go, especially people that are in recovery and want to turn their life around and want to recover.
So we have to focus really seriously on the housing issue. Seniors are becoming homeless. We have working people in our shelters that are homeless. They're sleeping in their vehicles. They move into a shelter for a couple of months till they get enough money for rent. It's a crisis. Rent is a crisis. And so that is a really, really high priority.
And that leads into a good economic development. When you're when your streets are clean and people are being looked after, businesses flourish. So we need we need to boast both those two things come together in a very important way. And we have to engage our police service, our non-profits, our business community. Everyone has to be on the same page. But we need help from senior levels of government.
Why did you choose Kamini’s corner cafe as the location for your interview?
Before I ever ran for office, I lived down the road on Sixth Avenue. I was waking up to the noise and in the back lane, syringes in the in the yard, there was a rampant prostitution issue on 12th Street with with men that were that were pimping the women. The women were actually, in my opinion, being abused.
The drug dealers were there to sell the women drugs after they got money from their from their tricks. This street was full of graffiti. Almost every building was tagged. We started a little program. We bought some gallons of white paint and we got some paint brushes and let all the businesses know that the second graffiti shows up, call us, will come and take it out.
And we literally cleaned this whole street up from graffiti. So if you look outside now, the sidewalk is spotless. We've got a new leaf organization, mental health organization. They have people that come here and clean every day and we have businesses that are that are flourishing.
So this is a this is a very unique place.
Many, many new immigrants come here. When they come to Canada, they open shop. There's beauty salons, there's barber shops, there's food places. These are really important in your community, are important to people living around here, and they're important from people coming from other destinations as well.
What is something people might not know about you?
I coached amateur sports for years- Lacrosse. I was starting a junior B franchise to help the young kids that no longer had anywhere to play when they graduated from intermediate. I've worked with the executive of sports organizations- gymnastics organizations. My kids have been involved in sports.
I've been really active in the community. I do a lot of fundraising. I volunteer for BC transplant because I'm a liver transplant recipient. We have, we have a farm on Barns Island that we lease where we grow produce for food banks all over the lower well, especially this area here in Burnaby. And we have a prison that grows sometimes up to 60 tons of produce for us that we distribute to a whole bunch of food banks in the Fraser Valley.
I work with the Goodwill and Queen's grow. We collaborate a lot. We coordinate donations. We sent them to our first nations in our sister city. We were sending pallets of hand sanitizer flying them into remote First Nations communities during the pandemic. After the flood, we were bringing water to Seabird Island and Hope, First Nation and Food supplies, diapers, pet foods, things that they needed.
I just get involved. I love to be involved. It’s an activity that I think keeps you young and keeps you alive. The donor family I received liver from, in the back of my mind, I always want them to know that their decision was a good decision. I want to do good things and I want them to know and they do. We now know the family. And they're very appreciative of the things they do because they see a little bit of their loved one that passed away carrying on and doing good things for the community.
*Edited for clarity.
