Born and raised in London for his first eight years, Greg Thompson moved to Woodstock where his mother was a major player in that town’s United Way campaign and his father was a long-serving trustee for the Separate School Board, giving him an early grounding in municipal politics and how they work. He studied economics at the University of Waterloo and worked for a number of years for credit unions in the Toronto area. “I then moved into management at a credit union in the GTA just about the time when interest rates went through the roof, from the fall of 1980 to the spring of 1982 when mortgage rates went to 20%. That was probably the most formative influence on my life because I had to do the powers of sale. I participated in many foreclosures when people came in and dropped their keys off. I learned then that when the system goes wonky, it’s average folks that end up paying the price for that.”

Thompson was a father of three when he returned to London in 1986, and soon found work as a hospital housekeeping supervisor at Child and Parent Resource Institute (CPRI) where he continues to work on a part time basis. “I work part time there and then I’m a full time realtor and a full time community enthusiast as well. I’ve always been interested in municipal politics and I think a lot of that comes from my background in the credit union sector which is all about mutual aid and self help. Any neighbourhood I’ve lived in, I’ve been involved because that’s where you get things done. Local politics is where the vast majority of things that have an impact on people’s lives occur. And if you do any work in communities, you soon learn that you have to get into that system and work it. I live smack dab in the middle of the Old East Village on Lorne Ave. right in the middle of the heritage district which is 1,004 homes from Central to Queens and Adelaide to Quebec.”

For the past decade Thompson has been a founder and three-term chair of the Old East Community Association which has been waging heroic work not just trying to clean up the drug and sex trade in East London but to boost the prospects for a neighbourhood that the entire City denigrates and runs down. “You have the EOA stereotype. I find it really instructive on a couple of levels. For one, look where this activity is happening. Chief Faulkner, Chief Fantino, Chief Duncan now, can virtually look out the window of their office and see what’s happening. Anyone who’s ever been active in Old East, certainly for 20 years will know – I’ve had senior police officers say this to me and senior staff at City Hall – that they’re quite comfortable with the notion of Old East as the natural home of the street level sex and drug trade. Some of that is fear based. As long as it’s contained in one area, then in people’s minds at least it’s not going to spill out into other areas. We’re told, ‘Keep it in your neighbourhood so it doesn’t come to mine.’ That’s a lot to ask of any neighbourhood but of course it exists all over the place. With the street level sex trade, where do the johns come from? Well, they come from these neighbourhoods like Masonville or Westmount where people say, “We want you to keep that stuff there but we want to be able to access it’.

“We’ve always said we have no interest in pushing these problems out to the other neighbourhoods but we all need to do more than simply try and manage this problem and that’s not happening if everyone is quite content to not devote any resources to it. That’s the kind of situation that leads to neighbourhoods rising up and saying, “no more.’ Now we’ve not gone there, thank goodness. I always say to people, “Après mois – le deluge.” If you can’t satisfy me as the president of the Old East Village Community Association that you’re working in the most efficient way possible to deal with street level problems, then you ain’t going to convince anybody in the neighbourhood.

“As a neighbourhood we have to try and make a place for everybody. We’ve built incredible value in Old East over the last ten years. We can’t move the city forward if we’re willing to leave lots of our fellow citizens behind. If we can’t make that happen in Old East, it’s not going to happen anywhere because no other neighbourhood in the city is as inclusive and diverse as Old East is. What we’ve noticed over the last few years is that the street level drug trade has become much less furtive. It used to be when people exchanged drugs for money that you’d see them disappear behind a building or down an alley or whatever. Now it happens right on the street.

“We don’t have the policing resources that we deserve. We have a police department in this town with 600 sworn officers with a budget of $80 million. Only 12 of them walk a beat, ten of them downtown and two in Old East. We have none on Kipps Lane, another Ward Four neighbourhood where youth crime is such a problem. The police do a fantastic job. We treasure them. I think they enjoy the work because it’s the old-style policing where you’re not cruising down the street in a car with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on so that you could be getting mugged on the side of the street and they’re never going to know. But they need to do more. I say that ten per cent of the force – about 60 officers – should be committed to community policing. Some might be in a flying squad that moves from area to area to deal with short term surges in crime. Most however should be on the streets day and night, giving the troublemakers something to worry about and offering instant response when they’re needed.”

Thompson ran in 2006 for Councillor for Ward Four. “We had five or six candidates so we did a lot of vote-splitting which seems likely this time too because we’ve got so many candidates. In 2006 all that our incumbent Stephen Orser talked about was the sex trade and the drug trade on Dundas Street. In 2010 I think the situation is worse than it was in 2006 and I don’t know of a single initiative that he has successfully moved forward so that’s why I’m running again.

“There’s been a lack of progress on important files and Ward Four doesn’t get its fair share of City resources. In Ward Four and East London in general you don’t have the full range of recreational opportunities made available to other parts of the City. Ed Blake Park which is the big park in the Kipps Lane area, there’s no way it should’ve had to wait until 2010 to attract City funding – and that was found money, that was infrastructure money. Ed Blake Park had to wait 40 years to be developed . . . “

Until almost nobody remembered who Ed Blake was . . .

“That’s right, I don’t know who Ed Blake was.”

He was a CKSL talk radio host who opened up a travel agency and also served on City Council.

“So there’s a big park that had to wait until 2010 to have resources devoted to it. Compare that with Stoneybrook or Sunningdale which hasn’t even reached full build-out yet and has had millions of dollars of recreational funding. We have Queens Park now because we wrestled that back from the Western Fair when the 100 year land lease came up in 2008. That might be a little uncharitable but we felt like we had to wrestle it back.”

The Old East Community Association has made so much progress in attracting new development to the Old East that Thompson actually worries about the possible gentrification of old east end neighbourhoods that could dramatically raise costs in a part of town that has allowed many Londoners over the decades to buy their first properties. No development seems more unlikely, more utterly fantastic to older Londoners, than the enormous retail/residential development going in on the site of the old Embassy Hotel; once the epicentre of the Old East’s drug and sex trade.

“There was a development company from Toronto, Medallion Corporation, which has a history of identifying emerging neighbourhoods and then being the first one in, doing these big projects. In Old East the BIA and the Community Association met with them right at the very beginning and sat down and said, ‘What are you planning on doing? We want to participate in the design and all of that stuff and in return for that, we’re with you all the way. You go for your variances, we’re there.’ It becomes a shared process. We do open houses before the applications are submitted – which I think might’ve been useful in Old South, right? That’s the way we’ve learned to do it. We want the very best quality development we can have. We worked with the architects. It’s a twin tower building, 600 units in the Vancouver style, so needle towers, starts with masonry, gets glassier as you go up. It’ll be the nicest building in the City of London. It was a nice fit for us. People think of Old East as affordable housing and sub-standard market rentals so here we have what will undoubtedly be the nicest rental building in the City going up.

“Now we have Centretown Mall which is being demolished as we speak and a project for affordable housing is going in there. And it was the same thing. We sat down with the architect and worked with him on the design. We had their back. They’re doing six new commercial spaces there and we tweaked the revitalization plan for Old East with the advent of the Farmers Market at the Western Fair. They’re doing a lot of incubator, artisanal food production work there so I think at some point you’ll see the main floor of that as a farmers market and the second floor will all be artisanal food production. Our plan is to hopefully secede some of these people out onto Dundas Street. We’ve tweaked it so that not only will the Old East be an artistic and cultural node – with the Aeolian Hall and the Palace Theatre and now the Potters Guild – we’re also promoting it as an artisanal food neighbourhood with your butcher, baker, candlestick maker. And this is the beauty of the Centretown development because it’s six commercial spaces of about 500 square feet. That can be a big problem. People come into Old East and say, ‘Gee, we really want to be part of it. I’ve got this business that I’d love to run on the street but I don’t have a ton of money. It’s a start-up for me and I don’t need 3,000 square feet.’ So this is much smaller. And behind that there will be 72 units of seniors’ affordable housing. Affordable housing is done by targeted groups and we were very clear that we wanted seniors housing.

“People like to label stuff and they might look at the work I’ve done with the Urban League as anti-development or anti-growth. And I have some serious issues on where and how we grow the City because I think that’s a legitimate matter of public policy. Having said that, it’s the private market that builds so we have to make sure that we get out of their way. Once you set the rules on where and how we’re growing, you need to let the market do what the market does best and that’s build what people want or are willing to pay for.

“One of the lessons that I want to take to City Hall is how you do community consultation. The City is getting more serious in trying to do that but I just don’t think it’s in their skill set. Community consultation too often happens late in the application process to fulfill a statutory requirement and then you force neighbourhoods to become defensive, which leads to NIMBYism and all that other stuff rather than active participation. I think the City tries. We now have the Business Approvals Unit. But City Hall is still organized in silos. When we got the heritage designation in Old East in 2005, it wasn’t done by waving flags; it was done by working the system. It became the largest heritage conservation district in the country. It was really quite interesting because we started out with about 200 houses and we’d have a public meeting and people would say, ‘Well, what’s wrong with my house?’ So it went like that from 200 to 1004. We would’ve gone across Quebec Street if we could’ve but the City finally said, ‘Woah. It’s just too much work.’ So we did that and then there was a fire in a house on English Street that destroyed the house. The lot sat empty and somebody bought the lot and built a snout house.”

A snout house?

“It’s the kind of house that we’re really good at building in London with a garage poking out the front that completely inverts the social relationship between the house and the street. And this person got a permit to build this house. I didn’t know it was a garage until it was built. I just thought it was a bump out. The guidelines for Old East clearly prohibit snout houses and we went to the City and found out that the Building Department didn’t know that Old East had been designated as a heritage conservation district. I’m sure that the people who manage these silos think it’s the most efficient way to do business. Let the building department look after building permits, let the planning department look after planning, and so on. It was a case of one department not talking to another. I think we need integrated service teams so that you reorganize City Hall on the basis of geography. So let’s say we have an East London Department. There would be one manager who has the authority to make decisions and underneath that manager, you’ve got planning staff and engineering staff and roads staff and recreation staff and building staff and by-laws staff and so on. That way, communities would get to know the team of people who make these decisions and the team gets to know the communities.

“With Centretown Mall when the developer went to pull his permits, he found out that he had to take his storefront and set it back three feet. Well he already had plans that he’d already altered twice and now this comes along. Now urban design guidelines on the main street are absolutely clear that we have a continuous street wall, right? That’s why we fought so much with the police station redesign. And now he’s being told to set it back three feet. I mean, it’s insanity. Get out of the way. Get everybody on the same page and let the market do what it does best. But don’t change the rules and don’t change the rules halfway through the process. I have a lot of sympathy for the development industry in this town. I think they’re always standing on shifting ground and I think that needs to be fixed.

“At election time, we ask the citizens, in effect, ‘Are you getting fair value for your tax dollars?’ Well, how does a citizen determine that? They have a choice. They can listen to the bland assurances of politicians that they are, or they can listen to the rants of special interest groups that they aren’t. And that’s all that they really have to go by because all of our budget documents are available – you can go online and get them – but they’re not in a format that’s decipherable to the average citizen. We need to produce budget documents that allow citizens to see what’s going on financially. How many people work for the City? What are their salaries? What are their benefits? How much money do we pay to developers? What are the total costs for infrastructure projects? The way it is now you can spend a weekend trying to figure out what the Oxford Street bridge cost because there’s pockets of data all over the place. If we could bring together all the information people need to know, then the citizen could make an informed judgement on whether they’re getting good value for money.”

I think some of this bewilderment is happening because of the collapse of the old media. We used to have pretty adequate coverage of City Hall that just isn’t there anymore. They say we’re in the midst of an information explosion but it’s become very difficult for citizens to inform themselves.

“You’re right. I would say it’s more of a data explosion than an information explosion. We used to have the Free Press with a few reporters covering City Hall. We used to have the Londoner that was independent for a while. We had Barry Wells at Scene. I learned more about City politics from reading his column than probably anywhere else. We used to have serious blogs in this City that weren’t ambushed by all of the nonsense now. I agree.”

Joe Fontana is promising a tax freeze for four years. Is that realistic? Is he whistling Dixie? What’s going on here?

“Who doesn’t want a tax freeze? But if one is going to run on a promise to freeze taxes, starting from November 1st, they’ve got to show us where the costing is coming from. Without that, I think they’re just contributing to the cynicism with which many people regard politics. Let’s be honest. Say we’re going to have a tax freeze and we’re going to have to cut services. $90 million is the figure I’ve heard. That’s what it would cost to have a tax freeze over four years. Let’s also not forget that two thirds of the City’s operating budget is non-discretionary spending. It’s spending that the City has to do by law.”

If this is a worthwhile goal to pursue, if you were elected, where would you look to find those savings?

“I’ve been a follower of City affairs for many years. I have a better attendance rating at City Council meetings than at least one councillor. We have this feeding frenzy every year at budget time where these base budgets are brought in and then targets of increases are set for each department. And this department here says, ‘We’re after a one per cent increase this year.’ Well, you can’t get to a tax freeze that way. You can’t get to a tax freeze starting with base budgets that start from the previous year’s position. I think you really need zero-base budgeting. Each department needs to justify their spending in total every year and not just justify an increase or hold it at zero or whatever. I think we need to start breaking down silos. I don’t think anything can be off the table. All expenditures have to pass the smell test. Every expenditure has to be the most efficient effective means of either improving our quality of life, improving the competitiveness of the City in some measureable way or contributing to the timely renewal of our infrastructure. If it doesn’t meet that smell test, then I’m going to want to know why. As things stand now, the budget when it comes to you as a Councillor already is at a billion dollars. You’re playing with the one and a half to two per cent at the end of a billion dollar budget. That’s ludicrous. The entire budget needs to receive scrutiny. And in some ways I think Councillors probably have the same difficulty citizens do with budget documents that are so difficult to read.”

I expect you’ve already addressed these, but what would your top three priorities be as Ward Four Councillor?

“My top three priorities are safe streets, fair value for the tax dollar, and a fair share of city investments and services for Ward Four.”

Is there anything I’ve not asked you about that you’d like to get down on the record?

“Economist Don Drummond said several times that the Ontario economy needs to radically restructure because the three things we built our economy on – low dollar, cheap energy, free and unfettered access to the American market – don’t exist anymore. So we have to do that. We have to create jobs. We have to grow the City. Societies are urbanizing now; it’s just a fact of life. That’s where the synergies come from. The economy’s changing. We need to be thinking about the new knowledge industries, green technologies, because that’s where the growth of the future is going to come from. And to do that we need to build a city in which people want to live because if we can’t keep our young people here, we can’t attract these industries. Industries follow workers. It’s not the other way around. It’s the complete opposite of the old manufacturing pattern. Exporting our best and brightest is not the same thing as exporting auto parts. If we can build a City that people are proud of and want to live in, then we’re going to create jobs. Building a City that people want to live in is economic development.”

All of your community work – do you do that as a volunteer?

“It’s all volunteer.”

This is really the last question: I take it then that you regard the pay that Councillors currently receive as adequate?

“It’s absolutely adequate. The pay did not factor in my decision to run in the least. If I’m elected, I will park my real estate licence because I want no chance of conflicts. I want to sit on Planning Committee or whatever the new planning committee will be, and the other committees as well. From my perspective, the last thing we want to do is create career politicians. If you came to me and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to pay you $70,000 a year but you have to quit your job and give up your pensions,’ I wouldn’t do it. Councillors that work full time for the current pay do it willingly. Those that work less than full time do that willingly. I don’t know for the life of me why anyone would think that somebody who’s not working full time, is now going to work full time because you’re paying them more money. It’s public service. It’s a temporary sojourn. If you’re not moving the agenda forward, you move out.”