Three things I would work on. For how I would vote on something specific in front of council, see Straight Answers.
This is not everything I think. It is what I judged most important.
If there is something you want my view on that is not here, ask me.
Where I Stand
Make Property Taxes Sustainable
I would like to tell you I will lower your property taxes. No candidate could or should promise that.
In the long run there are two ways to make the burden sustainable: broaden the tax base, or reduce what it costs to deliver services. Neither are quick. I would work at both.
A wider tax base
Municipalities have limited taxation tools, and property tax is by far the main one. In the long run, the sustainable choices are to broaden the tax base, increase other revenues where appropriate, or reduce what it costs to deliver services.
That only works if new development makes an appropriate contribution toward the infrastructure and services it requires. And I would not close the gap by raising rates on the businesses already here, because many businesses on the coast are already struggling.
Gibsons is also about to cross 5,000 residents. Crossing 5,000 moves Gibsons into the 5,000–14,999 municipal policing cost-sharing category, where the municipality pays 70% of the applicable RCMP cost base. That is arriving regardless of who wins in October, and the question is how many properties end up sharing it.
I would not campaign on whether growth happens, but on the order we do things in. Growth should come with housing people can actually afford to rent. We should not simply add demand to a town that has nowhere to put it. Get that the wrong way round and we simply add demand to a town that has nowhere to put it, and the people already here pay for that in their rent.
What it costs to deliver services
Shared services where they genuinely save money, and asset management that prices replacement honestly rather than deferring it into someone else's term.
I have specific ideas here that are operational rather than political, and better discussed properly than reduced to a line on a website.
Protect Gibsons' Character, Plan for the Change
The things that make this a good place to live are worth protecting. So is our ability to pay for them.
Policing
If Gibsons is going to pay substantially more for policing, residents should have a clear say in what they expect from that service.
What I would push for is a written service expectation for Gibsons, including meaningful foot and bike patrol time. Detachment resources naturally gravitate toward the larger centre. That is not a criticism of any officer; it is what happens when nobody has asked for anything different in writing.
Visible policing is not about more enforcement. It is officers people recognize, on foot on Gower Point Road and in Upper Gibsons, who knows which corner has a problem before it becomes a file.
Bylaw enforcement
Enforcement here is complaint-driven, which leaves residents to police each other and means a property can sit in the same state for years because nobody wanted to make an enemy. I would rather staff identified problematic issues on a regular pass.
Behind a good many neglected properties is someone who can no longer manage the upkeep: an older person with no family nearby, or someone partway through a serious illness. For them the first knock should bring an offer of help and a realistic timeline, not a fine. I would like Gibsons to be one of the places that does this well.
But a timeline only means something if it ends. Where someone will not engage, escalation should follow on a schedule. Our difficulty has not been that we are too hard on people; it is that we are slow to start and reluctant to finish.
Housing
The community already did the hard work of deciding where growth should go. The Official Community Plan gives us a framework for where and how Gibsons should grow, and my starting point is that Council should follow it.
In practice that means two things at once. The parts of town that make Gibsons feel like Gibsons, particularly the historic areas of Lower Gibsons, should be protected. And where the plan has identified sites as suitable for taller, denser development, we should allow it to proceed rather than reopen the argument each time an application arrives.
What we need built is fairly clear: homes for the people who work here, homes families can afford, and homes that let people stay in Gibsons as they get older. The two phases of O'Shea Place have brought 73 affordable rental homes to Gibsons, with the first 40 opening in 2024 and a further 33 opening in 2026.
I would also like the approval process to be quicker and more predictable. Delay costs money, and that cost ends up in the rent or the purchase price.
The Environment
Gibsons did something unusual that does not get talked about enough. It put its natural assets into its asset management system alongside the roads and the pipes: the aquifer, the creeks, the wetlands, the foreshore. The approach won the UBCM Community Excellence Award for Excellence in Asset Management in 2020, and Gibsons has since helped other municipalities adopt the same way of thinking.
I would protect that and extend it, for two reasons.
The first is the obvious one. Aquifer 560 supplies Gibsons' drinking water, naturally storing and filtering groundwater. The creeks and wetlands help manage our stormwater. The foreshore protects the town from storm surges and sea level rise. These are not scenery. They are working parts of the town.
The second belongs in the tax section above. Natural assets can provide services that would otherwise require expensive built infrastructure, often at much lower operating and maintenance cost. Replacing those services with engineered infrastructure could cost an enormous amount, and a water treatment plant is the clearest example. Protecting the aquifer is almost certainly cheaper than replacing the services it provides with engineered infrastructure. Looking after these things is one of the few genuinely cheap decisions available to a council.
In practice, that means keeping monitoring funded and its results public, making sure the development permit area over the aquifer continues to do its job in land use decisions, and applying the same thinking to the foreshore, wetlands and tree canopy as we plan for higher seas, heavier rain and hotter summers.
On water supply specifically: evidence does not show a shortage of aquifer capacity. Our bigger challenge is the infrastructure needed to manage, store and distribute that water. The evidence shows that Aquifer 560 has the capacity to meet future community demand, including under challenging climate scenarios. The question is how we manage the wells, pipes, storage and other infrastructure around it.
And on wildfire, which is the environmental risk I think about most as a firefighter, the FireSmart point below is a small instance of a larger principle. We should not be making this town more flammable at the same time as we make it more attractive.
Upper Gibsons, and FireSmart planting
Upper Gibsons is where most people actually shop, and it looks like a highway. A tree-lined boulevard would help, funded through federal tree-planting grants rather than the general budget.
Planting should follow FireSmart principles, including appropriate species selection, spacing and separation from buildings. As a firefighter I am not willing to make the entrance to town prettier and more flammable at the same time. This should be done in collaboration with the businesses on that corridor rather than to them.
Childcare
Childcare is not formally a municipal responsibility, which is exactly why it keeps falling through the gap between governments. The shortage here is real, and council is not powerless.
Three things it does control: where childcare is allowed to operate, how quickly an application gets through, and whether Town land or space is made available to an operator. All three are worth using.
There is a fourth. The amenity cost charges bylaw the Town is drafting will decide what new development contributes back to the community. Childcare space belongs on that list, and now is the moment to put it there.
The new O'Shea development shows what this can look like: housing and childcare delivered together.
Getting around
The regional transit plan identifies improvements to connections between Gibsons and the wider transit network. Council does not run transit, but it can make sure the route actually arrives and that it goes where people need to go rather than where it is easiest to run.
Closer to home, most of what decides whether an older person can get around Gibsons is municipal: continuous sidewalks, crossings with enough time to cross, a bench at the top of a hill. Those are decisions council makes directly, and day to day they matter more than the route map.
Youth sport
I have coached youth lacrosse here and sat on the local association's board, so this one is close to home.
Kids on this coast already travel free on the ferry for games, which took years of advocacy to win. What was never solved is the logistics. A parent still drives the whole way, both directions, because there is no organized way for a team to travel together once it is off the boat.
A two-way shuttle would fix it: meeting Coast teams at Horseshoe Bay for away games, and visiting teams at Langdale for home ones. Anyone involved in minor sport here knows about the fixtures that fall through because the trip out reads as more hassle than it is worth.
Council cannot order this into existence. It needs the associations, the school district and an operator willing to run it. It is exactly the kind of practical, unglamorous thing I would enjoy chasing down.
Volunteers and the organizations that hold our town together
A great deal of what makes Gibsons work is not done by the Town. The food security groups, service clubs, sports associations, arts organizations and the people who quietly keep them running carry more of this community than the municipal budget does.
I am one of them. Our fire department is volunteer, and I know what it takes to keep people turning up year after year.
Council cannot run these organizations and should not try. What it can do is make them easier to sustain. There are four practical things I would push for:
Use the Town's existing permissive tax-exemption powers where nonprofit organizations meet the statutory and municipal requirements and provide a genuine community benefit.
Move community grants onto multi-year agreements wherever we can, so a small organization is not spending its volunteers' time reapplying each year for the same modest amount.
Make municipal space and facilities properly available to community organizations, at rates that a volunteer-run group can actually afford.
Keep the cost and paperwork of running a community event proportionate to the size of the event. A small community fundraiser should not have to navigate the same burden as a major commercial event.
And on recruiting volunteers, back what already works rather than launching something new alongside it. Rotary runs an annual volunteer fair. The Sunshine Coast Resource Centre runs an online directory. Both do the job. They deserve support, not competition.
Think Local, Think Coastal
Local first. But our ferry, our labour market and our economy do not stop at the town line.
Almost everything here is something I would push for and cannot deliver alone. A councillor has one vote in five and no authority over BC Ferries, the Province, Sechelt or the SCRD. What a seat can do is convene, champion, and refuse to let things quietly drop.
The ferry
Route 3 is our economic lifeline, and that was true before the mill closed. Nothing else on this page works if the ferry does not. I have taken this to BC Ferries, the transportation critic, the Minister and national media, and I would keep at it with a council seat behind me rather than a business card.
A proposed private passenger ferry connecting Coal Harbour, Bowen Island and Gibsons is being advanced, with service targeted as early as 2027. Seventy minutes direct into downtown changes what living here means for a lot of people, and council should be supporting the permitting on our side.
The mill, and the families
Approximately 400 workers were affected by a single announcement, and many are still working out what happens next.
Domtar has announced an indefinite idling, citing weak global pulp demand and pricing and declining access to affordable domestic fibre.
There is no quick fix. What can be done is a transition table meeting on a recurring schedule, bringing WorkBC, Service Canada, Community Futures and the trades into one room, and the same kind of explicit provincial commitment other affected regions have received. We have a cabinet minister as our MLA. Council cannot replace the Province or Ottawa's employment programs. It can, however, bring the people responsible for them into the same room and keep the pressure on.
A town that leans this heavily on one employer should not stay that way, which is much of what the first idea on this page is about.
Working with the rest of the coast
Why this matters to Gibsons, before anything else.
The economy does not stop at the town boundary. Neither do our water, housing, labour market or ferry.
What I argued, and what I did not
I led the Chamber of Commerce's push to have the question of local government structure on the coast properly examined. The Chamber did not propose amalgamation as the answer. It proposed examining the costs, services and practical consequences before ruling any option in or out.
That means looking at the evidence first: the costs, the services, the responsibilities and the practical consequences for residents. There is no point ruling an option in or out before it has been properly examined.
What I would do on Council
I still think the question deserves a proper examination. But my priority on Council would be more immediate: giving Gibsons a stronger voice in decisions that affect us beyond our boundary.
What I am pushing for is a Regional Growth Strategy.
A Regional Growth Strategy is a long-term, 20-year framework for coordinating decisions about growth, housing, transportation, infrastructure and natural assets across municipalities and electoral areas. A strategy would sit alongside the individual Official Community Plans and give the coast a shared set of assumptions about where and how we grow.
That matters to Gibsons because our infrastructure does not stop at the town boundary. Neither does our aquifer, our ferry connection, our labour market or our housing market.
A shared framework would not replace Gibsons' own planning decisions. It would give us a better basis for making them. It would give us a better basis for making them, and a stronger position when decisions elsewhere affect this town.
A live opportunity
The SCRD is working to integrate its seven rural Official Community Plans into a unified planning framework. The process will help shape where rural growth goes and what gets built beyond our boundary.
Gibsons should be involved early, with a clear position on the things that matter to us: water, transportation, housing, infrastructure and the protection of the natural assets we all depend on.
I would rather have Gibsons at that table from the beginning than reacting after the decisions have been made.
Straight Answers
The questions I get asked most. If yours is not here, send it to me.
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I get asked to be for or against development as though it were one thing. It is not, and I use two different tests depending on whose money is at risk.
For private development: does it fill a real need, and does it pay for its own servicing rather than leaving the bill with everyone else?
For anything funded by public borrowing: is this the best use of money every property owner repays for twenty years?
The difference is who carries it if things go wrong. A developer bears their own misjudgement. Borrowed money is borne by you, whether or not you ever use what we built.
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I am in support, with conditions. We badly need somewhere for visitors to stay, and the shortage costs this town money every year. It would bring event and conference space we do not have. It could revitalise Lower Gibsons, which needs the footfall outside July and August. And the property taxes from a development that size are the kind of revenue that covers the higher policing costs we take on when Gibsons passes 5,000 residents.
My support has clear limits. I will not vote for any version of this project that carries a material risk to our aquifer. On that question, I would rely on the opinion of a genuinely independent expert retained by the Town, with the cost reimbursed by the developer. The design also has to suit the character of Gibsons, and I want to see accurate street-level and waterfront renderings before forming a view on that. If the project comes back to council seeking changes to plans that have been in development for over a decade, I would need a very strong reason to support them.
I do not want the site left as it is, or the waterfront turned into rows of condos that end up as second homes. A waterfront works best with a mix of commercial and residential use. I also do not mind who builds it. Whoever does, the community deserves genuine public consultation.
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No, and the reasons matter.
A lot of people put real work into this proposal because they care about this town, and none of what follows is a reflection on them.
I should say first that part of me wants it. I have a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and a safe place to swim off a proper platform is somewhere I would take them most weekends of the summer. If I were voting with my heart, I would vote yes.
But we are already fairly rich in the things this project is offering. Gibsons has beaches, trails and forest within walking distance of most homes, and none of it costs anyone a parcel tax. Set against that, my honest view is that this is a discretionary project, and discretionary is the part that matters. The task in front of the next council is slowing the growth of property taxes, not adding to them for something we would like rather than something we need.
There is one real gap, and it is narrower than this project. Almost none of our shoreline can be used by someone with a walker or a wheelchair. That is worth fixing, and it does not require ten million dollars to fix.
On the money itself: the estimate moved from roughly seven million to about ten and a third in a single feasibility study. Around eighty per cent of the funding depends on winning a national competition none of us controls. And the scope has grown to include things that are hard to justify to someone already finding their tax bill difficult.
What I would rather do is build the accessible entry point itself, at a much lower cost and without a twenty-year parcel tax. If this referendum fails, I would bring that forward rather than let the underlying need quietly disappear.
This is on your ballot, not a council vote. I get one vote, the same as you. If the town votes yes, that is a perfectly legitimate answer and I would work to see it delivered well.
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I had a great conversation with one resident who informed me on the lack of public garbage bins in our town. He was frustrated as he will pick up any litter he sees, but might have to walk hundreds of meters to dispose of it. Particularly as I want council to do whatever it can to promote tourism and increase foot traffic in our town, I commit to looking into this. Some people will litter whether or not there are bins everywhere, but let’s at least make it easier to keep our town clean.