Second in a series of profiles of Surrey's first-time MLAs, the following is a Q&A with Bryan Tepper, MLA-elect in Surrey-Panorama. The Conservative newcomer scored a big win for his party in Surrey-Panorama, defeating incumbent NDP candidate Jinny Sims. Tepper won with 8,735 votes to Sims' 8,472, well ahead of Freedom Party candidate Paramjit Rai's 404 votes.
When and why did you decide to run for office?
"I've been involved in politics my whole life, and I've had the belief that if you don't get involved, you don't get your say and you don't get your opinion out there. I started volunteering and getting on the board of the federal riding for the Conservative Party in about 2005, so that's where I started getting involved in politics. Once I retired, I had been spoken to by a couple of the municipal parties that were involved. In the end, I wasn't sure I wanted to run at that point.… Then once things sort of started going downhill in the province, I had people asking me to run, it got further and further along of me saying, 'Yeah, I think I should get more involved in this.'"
By 263 votes, you defeated incumbent NDP candidate Jinny Sims. Were you confident that you could win, or were you a little surprised by that result?
"You know what, I thought it would be about 50/50 chance of winning. I was actually a little surprised on election day of it being almost exactly 50/50. I did start to get more confident going to the doors, especially as I got closer to election day. More and more people at the doors were excited to say they were voting Conservative. They'd say, 'Don't worry, I'm voting for you.' I'd go to 10 houses where people would say that, and maybe one of them wasn't sure how they'd vote, but I was not running into any NDP voters. It ended up coming out the way I thought it would, a 50/50 shot at it. What it came down to was the work that my team put in of identifying voters and getting them out to vote. I think we got either two or three per cent more of our voters out than the general turnout, so I think that right there is the difference in the election."
You have long served as an RCMP officer, including 10 years in Surrey. How does police work prepare you for the job ahead as MLA?
"I came to Surrey in 2004 and then I went to federal (RCMP) in 2007, then came back to Surrey in 2010. But you know, it's about dealing with the public, getting to hear people's concerns. In policing, you get to see people at their best and at their worst, really. A lot of the time we're dealing with really, really bad situations and seeing people going through the worst things they can in their life. But being able to sit with people, talk to them when things are happening, when they've had a death in the family and we, as police officers, are dealing with them for hours on end and trying to empathize and deal with that. It's certainly been a great benefit when moving toward dealing with people that are really going through a lot better things in their lives than what I dealt with before. So that would be the number-one thing.
Your bio says that as treasurer of the Mounted Police Professional Association of Canada, you played a crucial role in successfully taking the federal government to court, securing the right to associate for RCMP members. Why was that important to you?
"The representation of members of the RCMP, I found it to be lacking. There was no voice in the public for police to describe their actions when certain things went down that hit the news because the RCMP is obviously very tight-lipped, and rightly so for a lot of things, for investigations, but management isn't representative of the membership. The members, if they were going through something or they were accused of some wrongdoing or there was a shooting and a death involved, there was never any defense of the member or anything put out to the public, so that representation really needed to be there. The most important thing for me, seeing that go forward, was so people could have the story from the police officer on the street side of things, when they heard stories."
Have you long held conservative views, politically? Tell me about your path to politics, starting in your younger years.
'When I was younger, in my teens, I didn't really know what my parents stood for politically, I just saw how they conducted themselves, and I think that's sort of where my conservative background started. Just seeing how their relationship was with the government and with the laws around us, it developed from there. As I moved on, it became a little more ingrained in me. In the early 1990s when the Progressive Conservatives lost everything but the two seats, I was in university and didn't have a political home at that point. I had friends involved in politics, under the Progressive Conservative party. I was a little more stringent in my beliefs when I was younger, a little more activist in university, our early years… The Canadian Alliance, I saw that as a very good vehicle towards matching how I'd grown up and what I saw as the right way to move forward, politically speaking."
Where did you grow up, and what brought you to Surrey?
"I grew up in Cranbrook and moved down to Vancouver to go to UBC, and when I got into the RCMP I was posted in Williams Lake and then we transferred down to Surrey. That's a fairly interesting story. When I was there with my wife, we were just having our first child and we were going to take a northern limited-duration posting in hopes of saving up a little extra money to then move down to the Lower Mainland after two or three years. The staffing officer said to me, 'Well, how would you like to go to Surrey right now and go to a plainclothes section?' So we said, 'Well, why don't we?' Really, it was the best move I ever made because even if we had gone north, the way prices had gone around 2003, 2004, we would have had a heck of a time trying to move into this market from where we were. So it allowed me to get down here and I tell you, I've loved Surrey ever since. Each of the communities I go through, they're all a little bit different but you know, I sure am happy that I'm here."
Your bio says you live in the Ocean Park area. Will you consider moving to the Panorama area, in the riding you now represent?
"I'm in Crescent Beach now, and the reason we're here is because of our involvement in Crescent Beach Swimming Club, really. We moved from Ocean Park down there to save driving up and down the hill every day. My wife and I both love volunteering in the community, and my wife is, of course, at the search and rescue station at Crescent Beach. We like boats, we're out on the water a lot, and our kids' community is there too. I don't think we'll move, and until a couple of years ago, until they redistributed, we were in in the correct riding, because the beach was Panorama. Unfortunately now they've moved it up but yeah, I probably will not move."
You were originally the B.C. Conservative candidate in Surrey-White Rock but moved to the Surrey-Panorama riding after the collapse of the former B.C. United campaign, to make way for incumbent MLA Trevor Halford in early September. Was that an easy decision, and what did that involve?
"It was far from an easy decision, right? I had put in a lot of work, and my volunteers had put in a lot of work, door-knocking. I think we'd been to most of the doors in the Surrey-White Rock riding since February, until the changeover (in late August). I'd been to most of those doors myself and had gotten all that ready, so it was a bit of a shock even trying to think about moving (to a different riding), after seeing that many people and get the excitement going. But after talking to the party, I was seen as the guy who could come into Panorama and defeat Jinny Sims in the election — not an honour that I really wanted but I took it as, you know, a pat on the back that they thought I could do it, and made it through. So no, it wasn't an easy decision, but since being here, the people I've met in the community has been just overwhelming, and I've had a great time here in those two months now, running for MLA."
What are your priorities for Surrey-Panorama, and are you hoping to have a cabinet shadow post?
"Yeah, I hope to. I was actually kind of fully expecting to form government and there were a few things that threw that off, with the independents running and a few things that came around.… So now I have been looking at the critic positions and trying to think what I'd be best at, and also what would be the benefit to Panorama. It's an interesting area because it's almost entirely residential. We only have a few commercial areas around. It's very condensed, very residential, so what I'm going to be aiming for in trying to help Panorama is developing the area around it. A lot of our push is going to be for all of Surrey, and hopefully that will affect our day-to-day living, I guess, for the Panorama residents, whatever we can get for them. I think we still need a couple of schools inside Panorama itself, so that will be a big push for me. The other thing being is the hospitals that we need, obviously outside of Panorama. But if the NDP will continue with the one that they have planned (in Cloverdale), and I'm really hoping that they can pick up the women and children’s one that we had announced as part of our platform (at 164 Street and Fraser Highway), I will be pushing that forward as well. Those will be the big things, and then of course crime is going to be affecting everybody all the time, so that will be another issue that we deal with, crime and drugs. And if we can do anything about the decriminalization, I will do everything I can to stop that, and I hope that the government will listen and see how it's gone."
