My Priorities

These are the issues I will focus on as your City Councillor. They come from years of conversations with neighbours, colleagues, and community groups across Powell River.

Keeping Taxes Affordable

Families and seniors are feeling squeezed from every direction. I will push for careful, transparent budgeting at City Hall and work to lower the tax burden on households and small businesses, so that living and working in Powell River stays within reach.

Every dollar in the City budget came out of someone's paycheque or someone's pension, and it should be treated that way. I will ask hard questions about what residents actually get for each dollar, expect spending to be explained in plain terms rather than buried in a report, and look for savings that do not come out of the services people rely on.

Much of what I am fighting for will never appear on your property tax bill. Long term care beds and ferry service are provincial responsibilities. The Miklat Recovery Centre was built largely through community fundraising, and a women's recovery centre can be built the same way. What these things need from a City Councillor is not your tax dollars. They need someone who will show up, make the case to the Province and to the health authority, and refuse to let this community be treated as an afterthought.

Advocacy is one of the most valuable things a councillor does, and it costs taxpayers nothing. A council that speaks with one clear voice can bring outside investment into Powell River without raising a cent locally. Too often communities our size go without simply because no one kept asking.

At City Hall, where your property taxes are actually spent, my focus is making sure the basics are done well and done efficiently, and that anything new we take on earns its place.

Affordability is not only about the tax rate. It is about whether people can afford to stay here, and I will weigh every decision against that.

Tackling the Addiction Epidemic

We need a real solution to the addiction epidemic on our streets, and treatment is what works.

My family and I were instrumental in bringing the new Miklat Recovery Centre to Powell River. We helped design it and raised most of the money to build it. I know what it takes to get a facility like that built here, because we have already done it once.

Now we need a women's facility. Women here still have no dedicated place to go, which means leaving town at exactly the moment they most need to stay close to family and support. I will push to build a women's recovery centre, and work with the Province, Vancouver Coastal Health, and the organizations already doing this work to get it done.

I want to be clear about something, because I know there is confusion out there. The Miklat Recovery Centre is not the same thing as the supportive housing downtown. Miklat is free, voluntary treatment and sober living. It is staffed, and it is aimed at people getting better.

My concern is not with housing people. It is with housing people without the supports that make housing work, and with decisions this big being made before residents get a say. Whatever you think of supportive housing, you deserve to be part of that conversation, and a lot of people in this town feel they were not.

I am asking for more of the solutions that actually work!

A life raft keeps someone from drowning. It does not get them to shore. Housing can keep a person alive, and that matters. Treatment is what brings them home.

Recovery is how people get off our streets and stay off them. That is better for them, and it is better for all of us.

And recovery does not stop at getting sober. It is someone getting their health back, their family back, and their place in this community back. I have watched people come out the other side and start showing up again, at work, at the dinner table, in the life of this town. Every one of them is a neighbour returned to us.

Safer Streets Through Recovery

People deserve to feel safe in their own community. Right now a lot of people here do not, and that is not something to brush off.

Ask anyone who runs a business downtown and you will hear the same thing. A small number of people are responsible for the vast majority of the break-ins, the theft and the damage. Not dozens. A handful. The same names over and over, and nearly every one of them is in active addiction. They are known, to the businesses they hit, to their neighbours, and to police.

I have spoken with the owners of two of our grocery stores. Both have had to take on extra security, and both describe theft climbing sharply. That is a cost a business cannot absorb forever, which means the rest of us end up paying for it at the till.

That tells me something important. This is not a problem we arrest our way out of. Those same people have been arrested many times already. What breaks the cycle is treatment. Every one of them who gets into a recovery centre and stays there is one fewer person cycling through, and in a town our size that difference is not small.

This is why treatment capacity is my first priority and not an afterthought. More recovery beds and sober living here is not only the compassionate thing to do, it is the most practical crime reduction available to us.

Fair Ferry Service for Powell River

For us the ferry is not a scenic add-on. It is how we get to medical appointments, to work, and to family, and it is how goods arrive on our shelves. Yet residents face long lineups, a reservation system that is hard to rely on, and decisions made with little regard for the people who depend on these sailings every week.

Powell River residents should not be competing for space on our own lifeline. City Council does not run BC Ferries, but it does have a voice, and I will use it. I will advocate to the Province and to BC Ferries for priority access for Powell River residents, and press for this route to be treated as essential transportation rather than optional travel.

A More Open and Transparent Council

Decisions about your taxes, your neighbourhood, and your services should be made where you can see them. Too often residents hear about a decision only once it is final, and the reasoning behind it is hard to track down.

I will push for Council business to be open by default: meetings held in public except in the narrow circumstances the law sets out, agendas and staff reports posted early enough that residents actually have time to read them, and budgets explained in plain language instead of buried in spreadsheets.

I will also hold myself to it. I will explain how I vote and why, and I will be reachable between elections, not just during them.

More Affordable Housing

Too many people who grew up here, work here, and raise families here cannot find a home they can afford. I will support smart development, faster permitting, and partnerships that add affordable homes for workers, families, and seniors.

Long Term Care for Our Seniors

Our parents and grandparents built this community, and they deserve to age in it with dignity. Right now far too many of them wait far too long for a place. My own uncle waited more than six months to get the care he needed while living with Alzheimer’s. Six months is not a waiting list. It is a family carrying something alone that they should not have to carry alone.

We need real capacity here: at least one more long term care facility in Powell River, and realistically two.

This is also a hospital problem. Reporting in February put it at 10 of the 42 acute care beds at qathet General Hospital occupied by seniors waiting for a long term care placement. From what I have seen myself, and from what friends who work at the hospital tell me, it climbs far higher than that on many days, as high as 70 per cent. Some patients have waited in a hospital bed for more than a year. The fact that none of us can say with confidence what the number is today is part of the problem, and those figures should be public.

Building long term care capacity is not only about treating seniors with dignity. It is about making sure a hospital bed is there when any of us needs one. I will advocate to the Province and to Vancouver Coastal Health for the beds this community needs.

A New Pickleball Facility

The pickleball community here is one of the friendliest and most community-driven groups in Powell River. It is large, it is run by the people in it, and it welcomes every age and every level of athletic ability. You do not need to be an athlete to belong.

I will support anything that brings people together to move, have fun, and get to know their neighbours, and this group does exactly that. I will help get a proper pickleball facility built so they have a real home here.