Wednesday evening, 10pm: AMS Council Chambers. VP Academic Alex Lougheed introduces the second-last motion before council adjourns for the evening and everyone’s free for drinks. “Whereas the AMS needs to honour respected leaders, and whereas dogs are a plight on this beautiful campus,” Lougheed says in measured cadence, “be it resolved that council formally recognize and thank the Fire Hydrant, Darren Peets, for his long-standing contributions to the society and the campus.”

There is a brief pause, and applause begins. And continues. And continues. Only after 30 seconds of a standing ovation does the room quiet down, leaving an older student with light brown hair and expressive eyebrows with an embarrassed, if slightly emotional look on his face.

To the campus at large, Darren Peets is the man behind the perennial joke candidate known as Fire Hydrant. To those in the AMS, the Graduate Student Society (GSS) and the university administration, he is known as much more. He is the man who led the initial charge against building condos in the centre of campus. He is the student with an encyclopedic knowledge of all developments on campus. He’s the councillor whose opinion regularly carried the most weight at debates. He is a father figure and a mentor.

And now, he is gone. After 12 years, a PhD in physics, and a successful thesis defense last week, Peets has parted ways with UBC. Last week, a plane took him to Kyoto University, where he will spend the next two years doing post-doctoral research. In his absence, we are left to consider how a meek and initially uninvolved physics student and his fire hydrant became giants in campus politics.

Two days before he left for Japan, I sat down with Peets to try and get a sense of what he set out to accomplish, what he thinks about his time at UBC, and the motivations behind his work. It is a frustrating exercise; he clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about himself.

To hear Peets tell it, in his first six years at UBC, “there was nothing that would have indicated I was going to get involved in politics.” An ordinary student uninterested in the inner workings of UBC, he felt absolutely no need or urge to get involved.

“I assumed the university was run perfectly well—there was a lot of smart people around that would use common sense.”

Enter University Boulevard. Beginning in the late 1980s, with the aim of enlarging UBC’s endowment, a series of expensive housing complexes were built with the goal of creating a “University Town” at UBC. Though the projects had made UBC more financially sustainable, they also made many question whether UBC was appropriately concerned with serving the needs of students.

In 2002, Campus and Community Planning turned their eyes to the stretch of land between the Bookstore and War Memorial Gym—the heart of campus. Initial plans for the area sought to create an entire neighbourhood from scratch, with up to 17 different buildings constructed over ten plus years, including two 18-story condos. It envisioned a mix of market and rental housing, retail and office space, and an underground bus loop. This plan is what galvanized Darren Peets to get involved in politics.

“Physicists have a spatial sense of things,” says Lougheed, himself a fellow physics student. “So when they see things that don’t make sense spatially, they get upset.”

Peets was peeved, and joined a raft of campus development committees. “When they started consulting on the neighbourhood plan, what they came up with was substantially worse than [what] I thought was ridiculous to start with….So I started attending meetings and asking questions.”

Asking questions. Demanding accountability. Pointing out flaws with the process. People slowly jumped on the bandwagon against the plan, culminating with a petition from thousands of students against the proposed development in the summer of 2006. Today, with the exception of the bus loop, the University Boulevard plan is more or less in the scrap pile, with the renovated and expanded SUB set to become the centrepiece of the area instead. Only one of the buildings (the David Strangway Building, housing Shoppers Drug Mart and Mahony & Sons) ever got off the ground.

“To the extent that UBC’s plans and approach to development have changed over the past few years, Darren is responsible for more of that change than anybody,” said Tim Louman-Gardiner, AMS councillor and former student rep on the Board of Governors. “Darren almost certainly knows more about development on this campus than most university officials with responsibility in that area—that was a huge advantage, and he learned how to use it.”

“He was able to anticipate the long-term impact that U-Town developments would have on students at the university,” said Tristan Markle, who was one of the leading student activists against the U-Boulevard project. It was this type of long view thinking that allowed students the foresight to halt and alter the U-Boulevard project.”

The role that Peets played in the student pushback against the University Boulevard project was one that he would repeat again and again when issues arose in the AMS and GSS. Not the type to be on the front lines of a battle rallying the troops, he would make his greatest impact behind the scenes.

“Because I had information, people started going to me with questions, and I ended up on a couple committees.” After a fair amount of arm-twisting, Peets agreed first to become a GSS councillor, and then a GSS representative to the AMS beginning in 2005 “on a temporary basis,” which turned into a three-year term.

The direct accomplishments Peets had were few. Ordinary representatives can only do so much. Instead, he made his mark by bringing up the issues that others would run with.

“Most of the points you see around the underground bus loop come from Darren,” Lougheed said. “Then other people make them big, and shove them in people’s faces.”

Brian Sullivan, UBC’s vice-president for students, has been perhaps the university executive in direct contact most with Peets over the years, and cites his tireless effort as one of the keys to his success.

“To be effective you must be there always, be prepared, be raising questions if something is not clear or seems nonsensical, and pushing for the details of what has been decided and how one will know if it has been done.”

“He actually read motions, he looked at bylaws and constitutions in great detail,” recalled Brandon Adams, former Ubyssey news editor. “He was very detailed in looking through plans, analyzing them, and doing things you think would be important for student government, but would be all too often forgotten in the day-to-day workload.”

A case in point, cited by many, would be his involvement in allowing international students to sit on the board of governors.

“A guy from UNBC came down and visited the GSS [in 2004],” Peets said. “He pointed out that international students couldn’t run for board. I didn’t believe him. I read the University Act—he was right.”

At which point, Peets went into action, reading provincial laws, phoning up government officials, and pushing the AMS to take action. Former AMS President Spencer Keys eventually spearheaded the public charge that resulted in the BC government changing the University Act to allow international students to run for board, but he credits Peets with starting the process.

“There had been numerous groups arguing for this, but it was only after Darren told me the deputy minister had voiced his support and he laid out the issue for me [that the AMS stepped in].” After that, the interested groups pulled together and got the University Act changed.

Another example of his influence could be found in these very pages. With his raft of institutional knowledge and non-partisan nature, Ubyssey writers often went to him for background on a story. As a result, Peets’s views regularly informed UBC students, shaping the course of debates on campus.

Jesse Ferreras, now a writer for the Pique Newsmagazine in Whistler, but former culture editor and news writer for The Ubyssey, avidly reported on AMS affairs for this paper.

“The Ubyssey should have hired Darren Peets as our expert commentator on everything,” he said. “Nothing pissed off AMS politicians more than seeing Darren’s name in the paper about ten times more than their own.”

It is two and a half feet high, 191 pounds, pulsating with water throughout its frame. It hates dogs. And Darren Peets had a dream: to get it elected to the highest rungs of power at UBC—the Board of Governors. The legend of the Fire Hydrant was born.

“I had a pet fire hydrant, it seemed the sensible thing to do would be to run it for public office,” Peets said.

Thus, in 2004, the Hydrant ran under the Radical Beer Faction slate (the last year that slates were allowed at UBC), promising, among other things, to “FIGHT fire with…um…fire,” and claiming that, unlike other candidates, it had “a much higher output capacity.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many puns in an election campaign in my life,” said former Elections Administrator Chris Anderson.

Unfortunately for the Hydrant, it came up 800 votes short in its initial attempt at office. Darren wasn’t deterred.
“There’s a lot of jokes when you’re running a fire hydrant. There was way more than enough material for another run for office—so I had a second go of it.”

During the course of the 2005 campaign, the Hydrant seemed to become more than just a joke candidate. Peets had been immersed in student politics through his involvement with the University Boulevard development, and as a result, the Hydrant seemed to have the appropriate pipelines to all the faucets of campus power. Many students saw the Hydrant as a protest vote against then UBC President Martha Piper’s administration, something Peets took advantage of in campaigning.

“It would be telling them to wake up, students don’t like where this is going,” he said at an all-candidates meeting during the election.

Ultimately, the Hydrant came within six votes of winning a seat on the Board of Governors. “I never thought it had much of a hope,” Peets said. “As the campaign progressed, I realized people were talking about it…but I had a great deal of confidence in the voter’s ability to forget to vote.”

The Hydrant ran (or “rolled”) for Board again in 2006, and for VP Academic in 2008, both times finishing with a competitive number of votes. It even garnered some national attention through an online piece in Maclean’s. In between those two attempts however, Peets had a novel concept: he’d run as himself.

“I had run out of jokes, so I decided not to run the Fire Hydrant. After I had made that decision, a couple of people tried to convince me to run, a few people worked on me, and I ultimately decided to give it a go.”

In 2007, Peets decided to run for the board of governors as himself. And he won.

“I anticipated not being able to have a whole lot of impact. I thought I would try and slow things down, redirect them and make life awkward for people, make sure they did their homework…but I was surprised the extent that I was able to meet with people, talk with them and point out problems.”

Unsurprisingly, many administrators at UBC didn’t appreciate a student “pointing out problems.” Indeed, Peets’s straight-shooting demeanour ruffled some feathers.

“Some people thought of him as the devil,” Lougheed said. “He would show up to committee meetings, and would speak confidently about what he perceived to be the honest truth, which some people didn’t like.”

“I couldn’t have asked for a better person to work on board with,” said Jeff Friedrich, who was AMS President and Board rep with Peets in 07/08. “If he gets into your office for a conversation, you can expect that he’ll be there for a long time.”

“I remember a UBC administrator, one time, after being asked for a meeting with Darren saying ‘I have to prepare three hours for every hour I plan to meet with Darren,’” said AMS President Michael Duncan.

“Where Darren was a real amazing benefit to student government was in his ability to understand where administrators are coming from, anticipate that, and then protect us from any potential problems.”

Brian Sullivan is no less effusive regarding Peets’s effectiveness in holding university administrators accountable. “Reporting back to communities of interest and to one’s constituents is a creed. Holding others and university processes to a similar expectation is a duty.”

Our interview time is wrapping up; the man has furniture to unload. His hours left in Canada are ticking away. Time to ask the introspective questions assorted with retiring politicians.

He finds the accolades, awards and applause he has been steadily accumulating over the past month “a bit embarrassing.” I ask him why he thinks it’s happening and am answered by a long, awkward pause. “I don’t know that there’s any real concrete accomplishments [people] can point to….They seem to be doing it more for me than a lot of people that it would be more deserved for.”

I ask him if there’s a run for public office later in life. It’s at this point he becomes the most passionate in the entire interview.

“I hate running for office as me…the shameless self-promotion part I can’t stand and I’m not good at it. It’s very difficult for me to say I’m the best and I’m fantastic and I’ve got all the great ideas and they don’t. I really didn’t like it at all. It’s not fun for me, it’s not something I’m good at, and nobody wants to hear it.”

In a series of questions that invite public figures to wax nostalgically, reminisce and talk about one’s importance, Peets demurs, looks embarrassed, and seems incapable of putting himself in a positive light. Either he is a stunningly good actor, or he is the antithesis of a typical politician.