I am not a career politician. I am a system reformer.

“Thank you everyone. To address Dr. David Ley’s first wondering on espionage or even foreign interference—I only have the Canadian passport by the way. When I was eight I was standing at the Hong Kong border and the communist side of things. I always wonder. And now I have a line for it. Because if you have ever heard of John Lennon’s song, Imagine if there’s no country. Because I think we are all the same. All what we want is the same disregard of the packages. So welcome everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Peter Tu and I’m not a career politician. I’m an operator. I’m a system reformer. And I am a proud generalist. So a jack of all trades. And for more than two decades, I have worked where ordinary people collide with broken systems, delayed answers and institutional indifferences, seeing what happens when the system, the machinery, stops serving the people.

And I know that personally. In 2012, I lost my father after a catastrophic institutional failure at Burnaby hospital, where about 800 people contracted C. diff. And after many years, I’ve realized the problem is they outsourced the cleaning crew from $27 to something that is a lot cheaper. And these are to cut corners. So my father was a historian. He taught me a question that powerful systems rarely like to hear: Whose voices are missing from the record? And that question never left me. Because when institutions fail, they don’t fail just on the paper, they fail on people. And that failure is also in grief. They fail in the widening distance between what the system says and what the human being suffers.

So after that incident, I left the corporate world where I was handling complex insurance claims escalation, working close with an ombudsperson. And I realized taking complaints is critical to improving systems. Because how could you improve the system without the understanding, listening to the people? That will be equivalent to buying insurance that has no complaint department. So would you buy it? You will never buy that kind of insurance. So then I started my own small business in wellness because I want to start building something rooted in dignity, clarity and care. So then when you try to operate your own small business through the pandemic and whatnot, then you came into another problem, which is the machinery of the fog. Another name I have for City Hall. Machinery of fog. They have business license delays, administrative bottlenecks. And I’ve learned through this whole process that you can never find the staff directory of City Hall. They have rules that were difficult to decipher, hard to challenge, and nearly impossible for an ordinary person to understand unless you spend a lot of time, money and hope. And this is where it became clear to me that bureaucracy does not always fail because people are malicious or maybe not, I don’t know. It fails because the machinery stops listening to reality and starts talking to itself. At City Hall, highly trained experts use dense technical jargon to build an artificial filter to build a black box.

I call it a black box. And this black box, it’s a system where they don’t want to explain things and they delay and they have no one being held accountable, so to say.

And when people expect to obey a system that cannot be explained, this is not the reality we want as a taxpayer, we want a system that can be traceable. So I’m running because I want to end that. I want to open up the system. And I think the best way is to turn the black box system into a glass box system where citizens can finally see line to line budgets, for example, and also things to expand the Auditor General of which is enacted by TEAM. And this is one of the major reasons I’m standing here, because when I make a promise, I don’t want to break it. So when I join a political party as a non-career politician, the most important thing for me is when I make a promise, is it possible? Or am I just making a wide promise? And if I keep the promise, how do I keep the promise? And if I have to break the promise, you probably will hear a thesis from me explaining exactly why. And that never really occurs. I only see politicians going around in events, taking photo ops and whatnot. And hardly ever do they sit down and speak to the people. They have to open up that floor. So my vision is basically to turn City Hall into a glass box system. That’s why earlier I mentioned that I’m a system reformer and I’m trilingual in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. And for the city of Vancouver, I think that’s critical for opening up the floor for more understanding and more interaction with different culture. I’m not saying Chinese are the only culture that we need to interact with, but when you say Canadian, quite often that’s not enough. Because as Canadian, one of the best things we do is when someone says you’re Canadian, you want to ask more because anyone can be a Canadian. And that’s the beauty of it.

So I’m not running to decorate the machinery, I’m running to alter it, to explain it, to make it answerable to the people who live here, work here, pay for it and endure the values. Because this city does not belong to the opaque process, it belongs to the people like us. Thank you.”