When Salt Spring works it is because of the people who show up. The volunteers. The tradespeople. The parents who coach our teams. The farmers who feed us. The artists and musicians who run the festivals. The Lady Minto extended care volunteers and the quiet heroes who keep this island alive when no one is watching.
When Salt Spring doesn't work it is because we forget that waiting for someone else to fix what only we can, never works.
Our problems are real. But no cavalry is coming to save us. We need to stop pretending that if we do nothing it will all be okay. Neither our forests nor our communities will flourish if we leave them to care for themselves. Both need stewarding.
Luckily, our strengths are greater than our problems. The only thing holding us back right now is that we are stuck: in ideas that don’t work anymore and in a local government that has run on a complaints-driven model for so long that it only answers to the loudest voices, not the wisest decisions or the most inclusive choices. You cannot guide an island through a crisis, whether climate change or housing, by lurching from one grievance to the next.
We are staring down decisions that will echo for a generation. Housing. Water. Wildfire risk. A changing climate that is unpredictable and needs us to be nimble. And an Official Community Plan that will decide whether our nurses, teachers, tradespeople, grandparents, and young families can afford to stay.
These aren't abstract debates. They are the difference between a future where our kids can live here, and a future where this becomes a playground for the few.
The result? Good projects wait years for a simple answer. Good people get worn down by the process until they give up. And the Trust has become a government that defaults to no when it should be asking how.
I refuse to accept that.
Our outgoing trustee Laura Patrick saw this too, and wrote in her farewell letter that much of her agenda was blocked or lost inside the system, and that the Trust cannot really be fixed from within. While I respect her years of public service, I reject her conclusion.
If the system is broken, we need to double down on fixing it, not just hope for the best. The job is not complicated: decide clearly, decide on time, and respect the public's money. Make the call. Give the reason. Stand behind it. Do the job.
I am running for Local Trustee in the upcoming election to do exactly that.
Who am I to ask for your vote?
I grew up in the Yukon, the son of small-business owners. I watched my parents struggle and persevere with what little they had. And I learned early from them to finish what I start, stand behind my decisions, and take care of my people.
The North also gave me a lasting respect for the land and what it takes to live well on it. That drew me to solutions grounded in ecology and justice: I earned a Ph.D. in Environmental Ethics at the University of Waterloo and taught in that field for years. The same perspective stayed with me as I founded several technology companies and led large teams through messy, high-stakes decisions, the kind our island faces right now.
When I moved to Salt Spring six years ago, COVID was tearing people apart and, strangely, also bringing them together. The strangers I met quickly became my community, and the community became people I would fight for. I volunteered at the Food Bank and saw something I wasn't prepared for: people who had never needed help before, standing in line with their neighbours, served by their neighbours.
But I also saw what wasn't there: not a crisis of food, but a crisis of opportunity, especially for kids. There was no place that gave them the chance to build, fail, and try again, no matter who they were or where they came from.
That’s how I became “the FabLab guy.” Through the Wilding Foundation I have fully funded the FabLab over the past five years, helped our kids learn coding and robotics, supported local artists through direct grants, and backed many other local community projects. All of this has been driven by one goal: to help our community thrive, and to lower the barriers so everyone can take part, regardless of income.
Lowering barriers isn't just what I do with the FabLab. It's how I'll serve as your trustee. That's who I am. Here's what I'll do.
I will make the process work for community members instead of against them.
We need transparency, accountability, and fairness. This includes published timelines, written reasons for decisions, and the same standards for everyone. We are told time and time again that staff and our planning office are stretched too thin. But other communities facing the same pressures still give people clear answers in reasonable time-frames. At some point, "we are too busy" stops being a reasonable response and becomes a habit. A trustee's job is to insist on results for you, not excuses. Good government is possible, and I am committed to getting us there.
Be an advocate for ensuring compliance is easy and accessible.
Nobody should need a lawyer or a year of their life just to understand and follow the Trust's rules. We need plain-language guides, simple checklists, and an early, honest read on whether a project can work. An early rejection costs a little disappointment. A delayed rejection, after a long and expensive process, costs families their savings, sets businesses back years, and erodes something harder to rebuild: trust.
Staff should work with applicants, not against them, and the goalposts cannot move once an application is underway. The rules should be strong enough to protect the island and clear enough that ordinary people can follow them. I have already started on this: a few months ago I built a set of free, public tools at saltspring.info to help residents navigate our bylaws and OCP, so clear answers do not depend on paying a planner. We need more of this kind of clarity coming directly from our local government.
Address housing, honestly.
A Local Trustee cannot build housing or pay for it, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I can play a role in stopping our government from being the reason good projects fail. Ask around: the people who teach our kids, crew our ferries, and care for our seniors increasingly cannot find a place to live here. When the people who keep an island running cannot live on it, everything else starts to fail. What a trustee can do is clear the path for those homes. We can stop turning every good housing project into a decade-long ordeal. I will fight to get practical housing built in the places that can support it, starting with our village core.
Take water seriously.
Water is the real limit on this island, and most decisions about it sit outside the Trust's authority. But land-use decisions have to match the water we actually have. That means planning honestly around our watersheds and our limits, and pressing for transparency on what our water infrastructure costs. It also means making it easier, not harder, to install rainwater cisterns and reuse grey water, so households can ease the pressure on our shared supply.
Community Assemblies for the complex stuff.
For the complex questions, ones that will shape this island for a generation, no single trustee and no one vocal group should settle them alone. We should decide as one community. That is what a citizens' assembly is for, an idea I wrote about recently. The idea is simple. Take a real question that affects our community. Choose a representative group of islanders by lottery, so the room looks like the whole island, with Indigenous participation on terms set by the Nations whose territories these are. Give them good information, skilled guidance, and the financial support they need to take part. The assembly recommends. Elected officials still decide, but they decide while answering to the considered judgment of the whole island.
The islanders who do show up, meeting after meeting, year after year, deserve better than a process that wastes their dedication. And the people most affected often cannot show up at all: renters, working families, young people, anyone who cannot take a Tuesday morning off work. A fair process does not just count who is in the room. It brings everyone to the table and lays out all the facts.
An Island Worth Protecting.
Salt Spring is not a problem to be solved. It's a promise to be kept.
The forests, the shoreline, the water: they are not just views. They are who we are, and one of the reasons we all love living here. But protecting Salt Spring cannot mean freezing this place in time. It has to mean finding solutions, so that we are all represented and we can all afford to stay. And it has to mean protection that actually protects: decisions based on science, measured by the health of our watersheds, forests, and shoreline, not by how loud the room gets.
Keeping that promise takes a government that can listen, decide, and act: one that stewards what we love and still makes room for the people who keep this place vibrant and resilient.
Salt Spring works because of the people who show up for it. It is time we had a government that shows up for them. I am running to do my part, and I hope you will join me.
