The platform
Four things I will work on, and what I will actually do about each one. Accessibility is not a fifth item. It is the lens over all four. A city that works for the person facing the most barriers works better for everyone.
What I will push for
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Safe streets and ready responders
- A published list of which crossings get fixed first, ranked by where people have been hit
- The fifth fire station sited and budgeted
- A provincially funded crisis team, so an officer is not the default answer to a mental health call
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A city you can afford to live in
- City land reserved for non-market housing
- A bus route to Snuneymuxw reserve lands
- Empty and derelict buildings brought back into use
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Health and care close to home
- Family doctors recruited the way Colwood does it
- Nurse practitioner care in a second neighbourhood
- Rec centres and parks this whole city can get into
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A green city that protects us
- One funded wildland fire fuel program, with a published map
- The wetland protection bylaw finished and passed
- Tree planting aimed at the least shaded neighbourhoods first
No problem in this city stands on its own.
When a bus does not reach a neighbourhood, an appointment gets missed, a shift gets dropped, and a downtown shop loses a customer. Fill a wetland, and we end up paying to build the stormwater system it was already running for free.
We all pay. We just pay somewhere else, on a line in a budget nobody connects back to the decision that caused it. Build this city around the person facing the most barriers and it works better for everybody in it.
Safe streets and ready responders
Four people have been hit on Departure Bay Road since neighbours started asking for help in 2019. One of them died. The fix sat in the city's own plan the whole time.
Our fire crews face a harder problem: distance. When the 2022 fire plan was written, the department could gather a full crew for a house fire only 9 times out of 100. The plan has a three-step fix, and step one is funded. I would keep the next two on schedule, starting with the fifth fire hall the plan already has a spot for.
When somebody is having the worst mental health day of their life, we send police and firefighters, because there is nobody else to send. BC pays for crisis teams of mental health workers instead. Those teams have taken about 20,000 calls since 2023, and 99 out of 100 needed no police at all. Nanaimo does not have one. I would apply for one. Every call handled by the right team is an hour handed back to the officer investigating your break-in.
Source: Nanaimo Fire Rescue Master Plan, 2022.
A city you can afford to live in
Food bank visits in BC are up 79 per cent since 2019. I have stood in that line myself. About 580 Snuneymuxw members living on reserve vote in a Nanaimo election this October for the first time in 152 years, and not one bus route reaches them. handyDART does not go there either.
Council cannot fix inflation. It does decide what city land is for, what gets built on it, and who our buildings serve first. A boarded-up building downtown drags its whole block down, and it sits there as a fire waiting for a reason. Bringing those buildings back into use is housing policy, business policy and firefighter safety at the same time.
Health and care close to home
Medical calls are now most of what Nanaimo Fire Rescue answers. Our fire department became this city's biggest medical first responder, and nobody decided it should. ER hallways fill up partly because older patients have nowhere accessible to go home to.
A city cannot run a health system. It can stop pretending the file belongs to somebody else. Colwood hires its own family doctors, bills the province for their work, and it costs that city nothing year after year. A 22-bed complex care building is coming on Boxwood Road in 2028, and I would protect its timeline and publicly ask for the next one. And the buildings we already own should be open to everyone. A gym a wheelchair user cannot reach past the stairs is a gym the paramedics cannot reach either.
A green city that protects us
There are hundreds of hectares of dry wildland in and around this city, with no real plan to reduce the fuel. Our wildfire plan dates from 2016, written before Lytton burned. The province has replaced that whole generation of plans. I would bring ours up to today's standard and fund the work with the provincial money that exists for exactly this.
In July 2026 the City's own hazard study called extreme heat, drought and wildfire almost certain here and getting worse, with heat dangers growing by as much as 400 per cent. Wetlands and trees are how a city protects its people and property from exactly that. So the wetland bylaw gets finished and passed, community gardens get placed as fire breaks, and tree planting money goes first to the neighbourhoods with the least shade, because heat and smoke hit hardest the people with the least.
How I will work
Trust is not a policy area. It is how I plan to work.
A written answer, with reasons, to every advisory committee recommendation. I have watched good ones vanish without one.
Let the public vote on part of the building budget. Then publish what got built and what it cost.
Documents everyone can read. Plain language summaries of staff reports, agendas that work with a screen reader, and captions on meeting video.
Engagement that goes out to community centres and food banks, instead of waiting for people to show up downtown at 7 p.m.
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