Squamish is amazing.

Squamish is a special place. The people of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw have known this since time immemorial. I am grateful for the opportunity to live within their traditional territory. Municipal elections are an opportunity for each of us to choose who we believe will make decisions in the best interest of the communities we live in and the communities we live with. Serving in local government means listening, staying informed, and making difficult decisions that affect people every day. To help make difficult decisions in the presence of conflicting perspectives, I strive to follow these three core principles:

open and humble community consultation
informed and respectful debate
timely and transparent decision-making

The Council directs many aspects of our community. It prioritizes resources (your property tax dollars) to keep Squamish an amazing place to live for all members of our community, both present and future. My guiding principles in Council decisions are:

fiscally and environmentally sustainable core infrastructure
fair and responsible development zoning
reasonable and reliable recreation amenities

Andrew Hamilton

Show me the data...

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” (Daniel Patrick Moynihan)

To share a common set of facts, we all need access to the data that builds them. To help provide access to that data, I built bcmunicipaldata.org, a website that lets anyone explore and compare property tax information for any municipality in BC from 2005 to 2026. I hope you enjoy visiting it as much as I enjoyed building it!

My views on some current issues.

Council does a lot more than deliver on a short list of campaign promises, so rather than telling you what I "promise to deliver", I will share my views on some current issues. If you have an opinion on any of these issues, or if you would like me to include an issue that is important to you, please email me so that I can include it in my FAQ page.

Housing Affordability

Housing affordability is a complex issue. Part of the reason Squamish is such an expensive place to live is that Squamish is an amazing place to live. Another factor is that we are located in a river delta surrounded by mountains, which limits the land available for development. Any economics 101 book will tell you what happens when demand is high, and supply is limited.

What control does Council have on housing affordability? The most direct long-term control Council has over housing affordability is zoning. By allocating a mix of housing sizes and styles through zoning, Council can work to maintain a supply that keeps pace with demand. An important question in zoning is whether the increase should take the form of density or sprawl. Generally, I believe infill development (density) will lead to a more economically and environmentally sustainable community compared to greenfield development (sprawl).

Here are some books and reports that have influenced my perspective on our housing affordability challenges:

Climate Action

There is no question in my mind that the Earth's climate is changing due to the carbon that humans are emitting into our atmosphere. As an individual citizen, I feel limited in what I can do to effect meaningful change without sacrificing what I consider a reasonable standard of living. As a Councillor, I feel limited in what I can do to effect meaningful change because many of the 'big' decisions are outside local government's jurisdiction. But those limitations do not change the importance of making changes or the value of those within our control.

Here is one small example of what I mean. When I'm working in town, I usually ride my bike. That is an individual choice I am fortunate to be able to make because I work in town (a couple of days per week), I can afford an e-bike (with fenders), and I am physically able to ride a bike (for now). Not everyone can or will make the same individual choice as I do - and that is good, because society would be pretty boring if we were all the same. One of Council's roles is to build a community that promotes individuals' ability to choose. If there are bike paths and streets that folks feel safe riding on, they are more likely to cycle to work, to school, or to the store. If folks can work in town, they are more likely to choose to ride. If public transit is more frequent, people are more likely to use it. And for each person who chooses to use a bike or a bus to get where they are going, there is less traffic in the way during the times I drive - either by choice or by necessity.

Transportation is just one example to highlight what I feel is within Council's control - build a community that provides the infrastructure for folks to make individual choices that meet their needs in a way that reflects their beliefs in the impacts of their choices on our climate.

Here are some of the books that have influenced my thinking on climate action:

The "P" Word... Parking

"I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream parking!"

Parking is one of those topics that tends to stir up strong emotions. In my view, the core challenge is that we have finite space and many potential uses for it. How people choose to allocate limited resources among alternative uses is the fundamental question of economics. To ensure sufficient parking is available, we need to think clearly about how local government regulations affect parking supply and demand. Let me use ice cream as an example.

People love ice cream, and they want more of it. They tell their local government to make sure they can get ice cream wherever they go. So the local government starts giving ice cream away on the street, for free. The people want even more ice cream. So the local government enacts a bylaw that all shops must supply ice cream to their customers. The shops are okay with that because they can cover the cost of the ice cream by raising the price of the things they sell. The people want even more ice cream. So the local government enacts a bylaw that all homes must come with ice cream. Home builders are okay with that because they can cover the cost of the ice cream by raising the home's price. The people want even more ice cream. Because ice cream is freely available on the streets, in the shops, and at everyone's home, it is unlikely that a business will invest in opening an ice cream shop for fear they cannot cover their costs. So the local government decides to build their own ice cream shop. The municipal ice cream shop cannot cover its costs through ice cream sales, so the shortfall is covered by property tax.

Now replace the word "ice cream" with "parking" and "ice cream shop" with "parking lot" in the paragraph above. Parking is a classic example of an economic shortage caused (in part) by parking minimums required in our zoning bylaws and free on-street parking policies. The cost of parking is distributed across our food prices, our home prices, and our property taxes. Whether we drive a car or not, we all pay for parking. If we want parking to be plentiful and available, we need to think clearly about how our regulations incentivize or disincentivize the supply of parking in our regulated free-market economy.

We have many examples of community assets whose cost is shared between property tax and the asset's users. The swimming pool, the ice rink, and our public transit system are all public assets funded by a mix of property tax and user fees. Like the ice rink, on-street parking is a community asset, and its cost should be shared between property tax and the people who use it.

Here are three parking reforms that Donald Shoup (economist and professor of urban planning at UCLA) describes in his book “The High Cost of Free Parking":

Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there are no parking shortages. Prices will balance supply and demand for on-street spaces.
Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. Let people see directly where their meter money goes; don't let it go to 'general revenue'.
Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.

Here are some of the books that have influenced my thinking on parking:

Capital Projects

How much does a bridge cost? For such a simple question, it's hard to answer accurately. But with hundreds of millions of dollars in capital projects in our master plans, this matters.

Predicting the cost and timeline of a capital project is difficult. When we complete our 10-year financial plans, we need to predict project costs several years in the future with only rough ideas about project parameters and what economic conditions might be when it starts. We start collecting development and amenity cost charges and project future taxation levels based on these predictions. So getting them right (or at least close) is important.

Project costing often starts with a draft of the initial designs, which you send to an engineer to count up how much concrete, how much steel, how much asphalt, and how many hours of people and equipment you'll need. You can then multiply these by the estimated costs of each item to get the total project cost estimate. A project manager can then plug it all into their favourite task-managing software and predict how long it will take. Add a 30% contingency and call it a plan. And yet, with all this planning, we (I don't mean just District of Squamish; I mean most people and organizations) end up predicting that a project will cost less and finish faster than it actually does.

You could simply say that you need to "hold someone accountable" for cost or time overruns, but what does that really mean? Firing someone won't deliver the project any faster, and fear is a notoriously poor motivator of great work. We need to think about the whole project life-cycle, from the initial objective to the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Start with your initial predictions. We know there will be unforeseen issues and that those issues will depend on the nature of the project. To help there, we can use something called "reference-class forecasting" - looking at what other projects have been completed and how much they ended up costing. The photo on the left is the $33M Hwy 7 Dewdney Bridge project near Mission. Collect as many of these examples as you can (the 'reference class') to see how much bridges typically cost. While this reference-class estimate should never replace a full design cost estimate, it is an important starting point that doesn't require paying for detailed drawings and costing. This reference-class forecast is not current practice for project costings submitted to Council. I believe it should be. Something that looks like a cost overrun could actually have been a prediction underrun.

As your projects get shovels in the ground, time matters. The longer the construction takes, the more opportunities there are for problems to pop up. Plan slowly (well, carefully), build quickly. Use modular design whenever possible. Unless required, avoid customization. Define clear decision pathways so you can respond quickly to changes. None of this is news to the District's professional staff, but as Council, we need to keep these things in mind as we guide projects from initial concept to final ribbon.

Here is the book that has most influenced my thinking on project planning:

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg (2023)

About Me. [hear my name]

I am an instructor of Computing and Data Science at Capilano University, a husband, and a father of two boys. We found our way to Squamish in 2016 when I accepted the amazing opportunity to teach at Quest U. I have a PhD in physics from the University of Alberta and helped discover the Higgs Boson at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). My research and academic career have allowed us to live in several countries, including the United States, Switzerland, and South Africa. I hope to have the privilege of growing old (well, older), enjoying the people, trails, lakes, and mountains of Squamish. Squamish is an amazing place, and I would like to help continue making it even more amazing.

Get in touch, andrew@andrewforsquamish.ca

Disclosure Statement.

My campaign is completely self-funded. I am acting as my own financial agent. I have not, and will not, accept campaign donations. I will spend less than $500 on this campaign because I do not believe that money should buy your vote.

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