About Richard

Six years on the city's accessibility committee, and a longer story behind it.

A man painting on a canvas easel in a dark studio or gallery space, wearing a light-colored painter's jacket with paint splatters on his waist. The canvas shows a colorful abstract landscape with blue, red, and yellow tones.

Vision beyond sight

I grew up in Nanaimo and graduated from Woodlands Secondary. I did my foundation year in visual arts at VIU, apprenticed under a professional painter, and transferred into Emily Carr's animation program. That was the plan.

Then, over about six months in 2010, I lost most of my sight to a rare condition called LHON. I was in my early twenties. A doctor told me I would not finish art school. For a while I believed him.

I came home and transferred back to VIU, this time for psychology. I wanted to understand disability from the inside, especially the kinds nobody can see. And I had become somebody strangers confided in, I think because I could not judge what they looked like. Listening had become my main way of taking in the world, and I wanted to learn to do it well.

A few years later I found my way back to art. The great artists I studied in art history class often reinvented their style, sometimes after a major change in their lives. So instead of comparing what I could do now to what I had been capable of with perfect vision, I came up with a new style and method. I reinvented myself to do something greater: accessible art, inclusive at every point, made to educate and to open up a conversation about disability that had usually gone on without us. I paint in high-contrast colours and build textures into the canvas that are meant to be touched. In most galleries the sign says do not touch. Mine is the other kind. I finished with a degree in both visual arts and psychology.

People sometimes call artists dreamers. I prefer the word visionary. A visionary is somebody trained to imagine what does not exist yet, and then to build it. Losing my sight did not take that from me. It is the training I am bringing to council.

What pulled me out was this city. The instructors who found another way to teach me. The CNIB, who taught me to get around with a cane. And the bus drivers who called out my stop, out loud, every time, because there was no system that would.

I came home and rebuilt a life here. At a Nanaimo Old Navy, the tills were too old for a blind person to use, so I pushed the company to replace them. That made me the first blind cashier in any of Gap's stores in Canada, and I trained the second before I left. At Shopify I was the first blind person in technical support, and I helped make the platform itself work for blind people. I worked as a job developer, talking employers into hiring people they had already written off. And I built a small business, Blind Eye Works.

Every one of those bus drivers was doing me a kindness, and kindness is not a system. It runs out when the driver changes. So I asked for the system. Vancouver's buses announced their stops, I pushed for ours to do the same, and they do. Nobody has to be kind to me for that to happen.

That turned out to be the pattern. Everywhere I've worked, I've left the door wider than I found it. The tills, the platform, the buses, the City's forms, the papers you fill out to run for office. Each got me through. What mattered more was that the next person did not have to ask.

A man in a dark navy suit and tie stands at a microphone in front of a white CNIB Inca banner, speaking to an audience in an indoor event setting.

How I ended up doing this

Somewhere in there I stopped waiting for the city to become accessible and started doing the work myself. Nanaimo did not have a table like this before 2019, and getting one took years of asking. I've served on the Advisory Committee on Accessibility and Inclusiveness since its first meeting in February 2020.

Six years of agendas, staff reports and public hearings. The talking crosswalks you hear downtown and the tactile paving under your feet. The inclusive playground at Maffeo Sutton, and the outdoor classroom that opened at Beban this spring. City forms you can now fill out online instead of at a counter, and surveys rewritten so a screen reader can get through them. I had a hand in those, alongside committee colleagues and city staff I deeply respect.

Two I will claim more directly. The LEAP low-income recreation pass had been loaded with so many checks that use collapsed to 300 people in 2020. I pushed to get it online and the barriers stripped out. Last year, 3,326 people used it. And until this year, a blind person could not complete Nanaimo's candidate nomination papers without somebody else reading and writing for them. I pushed to have them digitized. That is the only reason I am on this ballot.

The City's engineering, transportation and parks staff now bring me in at the drawing stage. A barrier caught on a drawing costs nothing to fix. The same barrier caught after the concrete is poured costs a retrofit, and usually never gets one.

See the full record

How I know this city

I do not drive. I get everywhere by bus, by white cane, and on my own two feet, close to 100 kilometres a week between daily life and trail running. This June I became the first blind runner to finish the Run Saysutshun half marathon.

I say that because it answers a question I get a lot. How does a blind man know what the streets and parks of this city are really like? I know because I'm out on them every day, in every season, and my cane finds the problems before my feet do. Every barrier I have ever got fixed, I found by running into it first.

I've used the food bank more times than I can count. I've been the person filling out the assistance form at the counter with a line behind me. I know what this city feels like when it works for you and when it does not. The difference between those two experiences is a set of decisions, and decisions can be changed.

Why I am running

I've spent six years advising this council from the committee side of the table. I've watched good recommendations adopted, and I've watched sound ones vanish without a written reason. The difference between those two outcomes is a vote.

So I am running for one. Not to learn city hall. I already know it: the agendas, the staff reports, the budget cycle, the public hearings, and the people who do the work. I sat on Vancouver Island University's Senate and its Board of Governors before any of this, so a board package and a capital plan are't new to me either. Advice has a ceiling, and the files I care about most have been sitting under it for six years.

Here's what a vote would let me do. A councillor who cannot see reads every report the way a screen reader does, and crosses every intersection the way a person the design was never built for does. I budget the way somebody who has stood in the food bank line does. That is the audit this job has been missing, and I am the only person on this ballot who can run it.

And here's what I want it for. A city that works for you now, and still works for you when you are older and moving through the world differently. Everybody who is lucky enough gets old. Building for that is arithmetic, and it is arithmetic this city has not done.

I had to adapt to something enormous, and I did it. This city has changes coming that it did not choose either. I would rather we planned for them than found out the hard way.

A doctor once told me I was finished as an artist. He was wrong about me, and he was wrong about what an artist is. An artist sees what is not there yet, and builds it. I lost most of my sight sixteen years ago. That kind of seeing stayed. This city is the next thing I want to build. That is my vision beyond sight.

It is in the step with no ramp. The form nobody can read. The crossing that took a death to fix.

I have spent my adult life removing those barriers one at a time. A till at a time, a form at a time, a crossing at a time. Every one of them was somebody's whole day.

With a seat on council, I will remove them at scale.

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