Former mayor Corinne Lonsdale says Squamish council ‘totally disconnected’ from public

Former Squamish mayor Corinne Lonsdale says council has become “totally disconnected” from the public, and she blames the shift to longer council terms for widening the gap between elected officials and residents.

Lonsdale, who served 25 years on council and was Squamish’s first female mayor, said in an interview with Meet Squamish that council terms lengthened over the years, eventually reaching four years, and that the connection with the community eroded over that time. She said councillors now hear mostly from one group.

“They’re not connecting with the community, with the people who elected them, only the developers, who don’t even live here, most of them,” she said. She added that when developers complain about how the district does business, council pressures staff to speed things up.

Lonsdale also criticized the provincial government’s role in local decision-making. She said the province replaced spending referendums with a counter-petition process, in which a project proceeds unless 10 per cent of voters sign a document opposing it — a threshold she said is not easy to reach. She pointed to the police station, which she said failed at referendum multiple times before proceeding under the newer process.

She said the province has mandated density increases the community cannot support because it has not delivered the infrastructure to match. “The provincial government has not provided the infrastructure to enable it. Our hospital, 20 beds. Sechelt, 60 beds. Come on, that’s bad in itself,” she said. Squamish General Hospital is a 20-bed acute care facility, according to Vancouver Coastal Health, while Sechelt Hospital has 63 beds.

She said she approached the job with strict fiscal discipline. “I treated it like my backyard. I ran it like it was my family business. If I couldn’t afford something, we didn’t do it. If I didn’t think the district could afford it, we didn’t borrow… we didn’t do it,” she said.

On leadership, she said elected officials need to follow their beliefs. “You have to have the courage of your own convictions. You need to at all cost do what’s right for you, do whatever you need to do to be able to sleep with yourself at night, and do it,” she said.

Lonsdale pointed to two difficult periods in her political career: the proposed expansion of the Brackendale airport and the chip facility, which she called the downfall of her last council. The lesson from those episodes, she said, is that when enough people tell you what they want, “you better bloody well listen to them.”

The chip facility controversy also brought threats. Lonsdale said she received an email from a man who said he owned an AK-47 and was going to “take me out,” which she called “bloody frightening.”

Lonsdale arrived in Squamish by boat in 1952 at age seven, before roads reached the town, when her father took a job building roads for Empire Mills. She recalled a community of about 2,500 people with gravel roads, wooden sidewalks and twice-daily bus service between Brackendale and Squamish.

She graduated from Howe Sound Secondary in 1963 and worked at the Royal Bank before raising two sons and a daughter. She credited her husband, a logger who cooked and cleaned when he was home from camp, as her biggest supporter.

Looking at Squamish today, she said she feels sad standing on Cleveland Avenue and no longer being able to see parts of the Stawamus Chief, a view she said was still intact when she left council.

“I love my community and I want it to be the best it can be. That’s it in a nutshell,” she said.