'I campaigned on change': Kirk LaPointe celebrates West Vancouver mayoral win

And we are going to head to West Vancouver right now to talk with the mayor-elect of West Vancouver, the new mayor of West Vancouver. Kirk LaPointe joins us. Good evening to you, Kirk. Well, good evening. Thanks so much for being with us. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's a real pleasure. I've had worse days, I can tell you, Stephen. Yeah, there you go. I would know that you have had worse days, as a matter of fact. Tell me about this being just, I mean, a very decisive victory for you. Well, you know, I campaigned on change. And what you have to find out is whether, in fact, people really want that change. And the appetite was there. And you talked a lot about the record of the outgoing mayor, Mark Saker. Tell me about how effective you think that was. You seem to be capitalizing on the discontent of voters in West Vancouver. Well, to be honest, though, Stephen, I mean, I was careful not to talk a lot about the record of the mayor. He it was on the record. I'd already written about it years ago. We never once mentioned anything involving his career. And and we were very careful about that. I had to present my own plan. you know you can you can talk about the opponent all you want but you have to be able to talk about your own plan and the plan i put out was based on listening to the community walking around the community meeting people for about six or seven months and it formed a plan that the the community could back you know obviously part of it is to restore trust but a lot of it is just to get some things done that haven't been done and to manage the taxes in a way that they haven't been managed and to really be a lot more accessible and consultative than the community has felt it's been handled. And so all of those things, I think, added up to it. And as you know, too, I mean, just there was a third candidate and I think she pulled away some votes from the mayor, made it a little bit easier for me to do that. And so here I am tonight, the mayor-elect. Kirk LaPointe. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, Leanne. I was just hoping to ask you, you know, Kirk, you know, coming onto this call, you seemed a little surprised by the results. I wanted to see what your expectations were coming into tonight. And, you know, you've been a mayoral candidate before, not on the winning end of it, but tonight you were successful. Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is, you can, people tell you things at the door. They tell you things on the street. They stop you. They have meet and greets and all kinds of things. And they were really generous. But until they really get out, I mean, you can't take it to the bank. And an incumbent has a lot of advantages in this system. We had a very short time to identify our vote, to canvas, to get to know the community. And they just had the awareness edge. And so, yeah, I mean, in driving over here tonight, I was telling my wife, you know, we'll have to see what we have seen. So there we are. And first order of business, Kirk. Oh, probably find the washroom. That's probably important. Second, because I will be using it every day. But no, the really big thing is to do a program review and to try to find ways in order to reduce the trajectory of the tax increase for 2027. I really want to do that and get on with it. And I think the community wants that. I think it feels a little bit overtaxed at the moment. And so we'll do that. And then we'll we'll begin the process of a lot of fulfilling all the commitments that we made in this race. All right, Kurt. Very good to hear you. Thank you. Thanks, both of you.