Dianne Watts

Early life

Watts was born on October 30, 1959. She is a second-generation Canadian with Ukrainian-Yugoslavian roots.

She studied at Mount Pleasant Elementary School and Templeton High School in Vancouver's east side before moving to Kelowna. After graduating from Kelowna Secondary School, she married her first husband at the age of 18. After a divorce, she travelled and worked in Australia and other countries in the 1980s.

After her return to Canada, Watts worked as a credit manager and a materials consultant for an architecture firm during her 20s and early 30s. She married Surrey resident Brian Watts in 1992. She was a stay-at-home mother with two daughters prior to being a campaign manager for new provincial MLA and family friend Bonnie McKinnon in 1991. Watts later won a seat on city council in 1996 with Doug McCallum's Surrey Electors Team.

Municipal politics

Before becoming mayor, she served on the Surrey City Council since her election in 1996.

She ran as an independent candidate, defeating incumbent Doug McCallum at the polls on November 19, 2005, who had been her political ally as recently as 2003. When she announced her intent to challenge McCallum, she claimed that a "culture of control and conflict has developed at city hall under Doug McCallum" and promised "better co-operation between the city and senior governments to bring more social services into Surrey to deal with homelessness, drug use and crime".

Her election affected regional politics as well, since she replaced McCallum on the board of the Greater Vancouver Regional District.

Watts created a political slate called "Surrey First" for the 2008 municipal elections. The slate was made up of current councillors and aspiring individuals from the community. Surrey First is not an official party and its members are reportedly free to vote their consciences on land development and other contentious issues before City Hall. On November 15, 2008, Watts defeated her lone challenger for the mayor's chair by almost 43,000 votes and all six members of her Surrey First slate—Judy Villeneuve, Tom Gill, Barbara Steele, Linda Hepner, Mary Martin and newcomer Barinder Rasode—won seats on Surrey City Council.

She served a term as chair of the Mayor's Council on Regional Transportation (the board which oversees TransLink). She had also been touted as a possible future Premier of British Columbia. Watts was ultimately selected as "the fourth-best mayor in the world, according to the 2010 World Mayor Prize."

Watts was a driving force behind the controversial 2011 Surrey Regional Economic Summit, in which former US presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton were featured speakers. Amnesty International, the Canadian Centre for International Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Lawyers Against the War all called on Canadian authorities to arrest and prosecute Bush for the use of torture by U.S. forces. Amnesty International stated it had provided the RCMP with more than 4,000 pages of documents alleging that the former US president was engaged in war crimes, and called for his arrest. The human rights group stated that it had submitted a memorandum to Canadian officials outlining why Bush was legally responsible for human-rights violations that took place between 2002 and 2009. The summit was also expected to draw protests.

Watts won re-election to a third term as mayor of Surrey on November 19, 2011 with 80% of the vote. Her slate of Surrey First candidates won all seats on city council, defeating Robert (Bob) Bose, her sole opponent on Surrey City Council. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia will also have their new 76,000 square metre LEED gold certified headquarters in Surrey Green Timbers Park, near Surrey Central City, by early 2013.

Federal politics

At the April 2014 opening ceremony for the new City Hall in Surrey City Centre (formerly Whalley), Watts announced that she would not seek re-election as mayor in the November 2014 municipal election. On September 18, 2014 Watts announced that she was running for the Conservative Party of Canada nomination to replace Russ Hiebert who is retiring as federal Member of Parliament for South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale. As of March 2015, Watts won the party's nomination by acclamation for the revised constituency of South Surrey—White Rock.

Watts won her first federal election campaign on October 19, 2015, and was the only Conservative candidate elected in Surrey's four ridings in the 2015 federal election. Watts received 44% of ballots, or 24,934 of 56,631, ahead of Liberal candidate Judy Higginbotham who received 41.5% according to unofficial Elections Canada results.

BC Liberal leadership

Watts announced on September 24, 2017, that she will be resigning from the House of Commons in order to seek the leadership of the British Columbia Liberal Party.