Candidate Interview: Sandy Jenkins

By Katy Anderson

<1. What do you think the big issues in this election are?
2. How are you planning to address the city’s crime problem?
3. What can the city do to ease the crunch on affordable housing?
4. What transportation infrastructure need would you address first?
5. What separates you from the other candidates?

1. Transportation, affordable housing, quality of life.

My number one issue is the LRT. It’s just not good enough. In a way it’s a very popular system, I mean, ridership is extremely high, but that’s part of the problem now. You can’t get on. People aren’t taking it at rush hour for two reasons: they can’t get a parking spot and they can’t get a seat. To build it longer is only going to exacerbate that problem. The real solution is to put an underground downtown. Expand it to five car trains. Five car LRT trains are equivalent to subway trains in Toronto or Montreal. They were built with five car trains in mind. They saved that much land, so it won’t be that much more expensive to do it.

The other issue is the taxi commission. Two companies control all the licenses. It’s an oligopoly. We don’t regulate the number of ice cream stores in the city, why would we regulate taxi cabs? People just drive home drunk because they can’t get a cab. If you own your own car for Checker, you pay 350 a week to just use the license. 600 Checker licenses, that’s $11.4 million. Nice. All they provide the dispatch system.

2. One of the ways is by putting the LRT underground. My vision of Calgary is the honour system, is toast. No proper city in the world has the honour system. That was a nice quaint idea. So, I say nix all the platforms. The one at the U of C is perfect. You can walk up the stairs, but to go down to the platform you need a ticket. It’s that simple. So that’s how I’m going to address crime. Crime rates go down, population going up. Therefore, crime goes up. We need more cops, simple.

3. Legalize secondary suites and build more affordable housing. Stelmach gave this money to Bronconnier in April and the only provision was to build affordable housing. Well Mr. Bronconnier chose to rail against that for six months and guess what? We need affordable housing? The only thing he did was get the affordable housing part taken out. Why did he do that? He’s like a carny! It’s all shell games, just so he could announce it three weeks before the election.

4. LRT. Underground.

5. I’m a good candidate. That’s what separates me from the other candidates. I have good ideas, and they don’t. Bronconnier, sounds great. Alnoor’s–they sound great, but you know he didn’t write them it was the campaign manager. Alnoor has absolutely no credibility. Remember what he said in the debates: forget about what happened in the past, it’s all about the issues. It’s not all about the issues, it’s issues and the credibility.

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