Local business owner, educator, columnist and Stop the Spray BC founder James Steidle is seeking election to Prince George city council.
“Prince George is a beautiful place, with a resilient community and world class nature. We have been through a lot of ups and downs. To make it through our current downturn, we need to return to our roots as conscientious, hardworking northerners,” said Steidle. “Prince George seems to be going through an identity crisis. With our pulp mills shutting down and our roots in forestry appearing to whither, we are at a crossroads. I think we need to find a
way to keep our history in agriculture and forestry at the heart of who we are. Meanwhile City Hall’s priority is a grandiose and expensive downtown civic core plan that appears detached from the reality of constantly rising tax rates and less industry to pay for it. City Hall needs to take a more active role in rebuilding our economy before we spend on unnecessary and expensive projects. Our priority needs to be building a more affordable and prosperous future for everyone.”
Fiscal Accountability at City Hall
Steidle believes that the City of Prince George needs to be realistic about its finances.
“The city is spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Taxes have risen nearly 27 per cent since 2022, and we have a majority on council wanting to tear down the Kopar arena and put us another $80 to $100 million in debt to replace it,” said Steidle. “We’ve torn down a number of good buildings in recent years, our history and heritage along with it, and we still don’t seem to recognize modern architecture isn’t built to last like the old days when function took priority over form.”
Prince George Community Forest
For Steidle, a community forest is a key component of the future of Prince George for economic development and providing work experience for the next generation of workers.
“Last month The Burns Lake Community Forest donated $200,000 to the Lakes District Senior citizens Housing Society. In addition to donating profits to community groups, a community forest can be an employer for residents of our city, it can deliver training and experience to youth, and it can provide a supply of timber that we can direct to entrepreneurs, value-added manufacturers, and local businesses to help build our forest economy back up again.”
Food Security
A secure supply of food is essential to secure the future of Northern BC for Steidle.
“Prince George used to be a lot more self-sufficient with its food. I grew up in the ranching industry and currently help grow commercial fruits and vegetables. In the past six years we have had multiple food crises, from empty shelves to the current crisis of food affordability. As a community we spend at least $300 million on food every year. Almost all of it is not local. If we can spend even 10% of this on local food, that’s a $30 million industry right there. We have the land, we have the water, and we have the customers, we just need to do more to make it work.”
Smart Growth
Steidle also wants to see the city take a closer look at what sprawl is costing us, and stop changing the Official Community Plan based on the whims of developers.
“Our road, sewer and water infrastructure has expanded at a much higher rate than our population has, and the result is higher taxes and no real solution to the housing crisis,” said Steidle. “Rather than leveling forests for high-end houses, we need to start looking at getting non-market and more rental housing downtown to address homelessness and start reinvigorating downtown.”
Hub Cities Need More Help
An overarching issue facing Prince George is the lack of resources to deal with its position as a critical hub city, says Steidle.
“Prince George deals with a lot of mental illness and addiction and folks facing a tough time in life. They’ve always congregated in Prince George and that’s just the reality of being a hub city. But what our present governance structure doesn’t recognize is that Prince George taxpayers bear the brunt of those costs of policing and homelessness and even the cost of our new hospital expansion. Ultimately we need new regional revenue sharing and governance agreements so we can more effectively address problems that the Province is failing to address.”
About Steidle
Born and raised on a cattle ranch south of Prince George, Steidle has run Steidle Woodworking since 2011, and is now pursuing a career teaching high school shop class. He attended Beaverly and College Heights schools and has a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from Simon Fraser University with a focus on urban studies. He studied and lived in Cologne, Germany for part of this. He has experience in government at the provincial, municipal and regional levels, was a 2005 Legislative Intern, worked for the BC Legislative Assembly doing research for the then-opposition
NDP in 2006, followed by a stint working for the Labour Union movement (public and private unions) covering Metro Vancouver board meetings before starting a woodworking business. He wrote an award winning paper on regional planning efforts in Greater Vancouver.
His master’s thesis was on the provincial property tax system and how that impacts tax equity and has informed the discussion of the Home Owner Grant over the years. He briefly taught microeconomics in Bangladesh and currently teaches high school metalwork.