Lord, Give me a sign!

Why I Do It This Way

Every campaign has a platform. Fewer have a reason the platform is built the way it is. Here's mine.

I tell people the truth, not what they want to hear

"Constituent relations" in this city too often means managing how people feel about a decision, not telling them what it cost, who voted for it, and what it did or didn't fix. My assumption is the opposite: residents can handle the real numbers and the real gap between promise and delivery. They don't need protecting from it — they need it published.

An incumbent's livelihood depends on people feeling good about the last four years. Mine doesn't. That asymmetry is what lets me say the uncomfortable thing instead of the reassuring one.

Evidence first, conclusions second

Thirteen years at IBM and Cognos, then a PMP and a data analyst — that background shows up in how I work. I start with the data (311 tickets, audited financials, attendance records, Auditor General reports) and let it tell me the story, not the other way around.

Sometimes it surprises me. Pulling 311 data on flooding in West Rockcliffe didn't turn up a simple crisis narrative — it turned up 123,000 tickets bulk-closed in six days, a data-integrity problem bigger than any one flood. Not the story I went looking for. The one the evidence gave me.

Structures, not scapegoats

It would be easier to make this campaign about one councillor's failures. I've tried not to, and where I've slipped, the results told me why: pieces attacking individuals underperform pieces attacking the structure. Readers trust "this system produces bad outcomes regardless of who's in the seat" more than "this person is bad" — because it's usually true.

Urban wards get outvoted 16-9 by suburban ones. Incumbents win nearly every time; turnout hovers around 40%. Those are structural facts — true no matter who holds the seat. So my energy goes there: ward boundary reform, a consolidated liability statement, a funding source attached to every debt motion. Fixes outlast elections. Grievances don't.

Outcomes over outputs

Municipal politics runs on outputs — motions passed, statements made, committees struck. I care whether the thing the motion was supposed to fix actually got fixed. A councillor can call for transit oversight for years without sitting on the Transit Commission. A city can pass an Anti-Racism Strategy with no published way to measure it working. A safe-workplace program can lose 40% of its budget while the audit language stays just as vague.

None of it requires bad intentions — just someone willing to check output against outcome and publish the difference, even when it's inconvenient.

One term, said out loud

I've committed publicly to a single term, and I think it matters more than it sounds. Most of what's wrong with this council isn't corruption — it's the caution that comes from needing re-election. Committee seats skipped because they're exposed. Audits not pushed because you'll sit across from that department again next year. One term removes that gravity from my decisions. Not a virtue — a structural fact about my incentives, and I'd rather you know it now than discover its absence later.

What this looks like in practice

It's why a post from me is as likely to be a liability-management plan or an LRT bearing-failure timeline as a stump speech. Why I file records requests instead of press releases. Why, when criticized, I check if the criticism is right before deciding how to respond — which is also why early pushback on one piece settled, once people read the underlying facts, into roughly two-to-one support.

I don't expect agreement on every conclusion. I do think you should be able to see how I got there, check the numbers yourself, and hold me to the standard I'm applying to everyone else. That's the approach. Everything else is the platform built on top of it.