About
Scott Gilbert
A plain-spoken, working-class outsider running for Mayor of Vancouver — results over politics, accountability over excuses.
A Working-Class Outsider
From the streets of the Downtown Eastside to City Hall, people know me as Great Scott.
I am a former community-elected Mayor of Bowser Island — a role later referenced in Supreme Court of B.C. filings by the Province and Attorney General as the “Mayor of Bowser Island.” For roughly five years I was building manager of Sequel 138, the only market-rent building on the 100 block of East Hastings, where I installed the public safety cameras the VPD relied on.
My two children served as police officers on Bowser Island during my mayoral term there, which concluded on June 15, 2026. Part-time biker — evenings and weekends.
I am running for Mayor of Vancouver because this city deserves a leader who says what he means and means what he says. A plain-spoken outsider who puts results over politics and accountability over excuses.
I believe in praising those who deliver results regardless of politics, and in holding every official to the same standard I hold myself. No more career politicians. It is time for a working-class leader to take back City Hall.
Bowser Island Tour
A tour of Bowser Island in North Vancouver, showing my work as Mayor of Bowser Island — the community I led until my term concluded on June 15, 2026.
Bowser Island, North Vancouver — filmed during Scott's term as mayor.
Where It Started
Long before City Hall, before the Downtown Eastside, before politics — Scott was a teenager building websites. His first clients were tattoo artists: working-class craftspeople who needed an online presence and had no one else to call. He built their sites on spec, learned the trade by doing it, and got paid in the currency of people who appreciated honest work.
That world shaped him. Tattoo shops in the late nineties and early two-thousands were not corporate environments. They were small businesses run by skilled people who trusted their hands, told the truth, and earned loyalty from clients one sitting at a time. The code was direct: do good work, say what you mean, and stand behind it.
Scott has carried that culture into everything since — the building management work, the public-safety cameras, the investigations, the policy platform, and this campaign. Great Scott is not a slogan. It is a standard inherited from rooms full of ink and people who did not tolerate pretense.
The image to the right — commissioned by Great Canadian Tattoo Co — captures that spirit: the North, the craft, and the audacity that comes from building something real with your hands and not apologizing for it.
Artwork inspired by the talent at Great Canadian Tattoo Co
I Know Vancouver's Drug Crisis Because I Lived It
I am not running for mayor as someone who learned about the Downtown Eastside from a boardroom, a press release, or a consultant's report.
For years, I used IV drugs in Vancouver. I used Insite regularly. I saw the supervised-consumption system from the inside — not as a politician, not as an academic, and not as someone whose job depends on defending the current model.
I also know recovery is possible. The thing that changed my life was not a brochure, a slogan, or another taxpayer-funded program that accepted addiction as permanent. It was relationship, stability, encouragement, purpose, and work. Within a year of building a stable life with a partner who worked inside Vancouver's harm-reduction system, I was off needles, off drugs, off cigarettes, and working full time — without detox, treatment, or jail.
People do not need to be abandoned to addiction. They need a real path out.
After years around these services, I can say plainly: Vancouver's system does not do enough to help people stop using. I did not see serious, consistent, practical pathways into detox, treatment, housing with recovery supports, dog-friendly options, paid work, or civic recognition for people trying to rebuild their lives.
A city that spends public money helping people survive another day must also spend public money helping them escape the conditions that make every day a survival crisis.
I will not shame people who use drugs. I was one of them. But I will also not pretend that indefinite addiction is compassion. Vancouver needs leadership from someone who understands both sides: the desperation of addiction and the practical reality of getting out.
Harm reduction should keep people alive. City policy should help them come home.
On Artificial Intelligence
I believe artificial intelligence is simultaneously the biggest threat to the existence of all life on earth and the most powerful tool available right now to benefit human society. I hold both of those things to be true at the same time and I do not think that is a contradiction.
I spend a significant amount of my time using AI tools to conduct research and craft the arguments that form the basis of my websites, apps, and policy proposals. The research behind this campaign — its platform, its evidence, its structure — was built with AI assistance. I am not embarrassed by that. I think every serious policymaker should be doing the same thing.
Non-biological intelligence greater than the combined intelligence of all humans is likely to arrive within the next mayoral term. That is not a fringe prediction. It is where the serious researchers are landing. We have no coherent plan for what happens when it does, and the window to build one is closing.
The goal I am working toward — in my apps, in my platform, and in how I think about government — is a future where AI and humans exist in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both. Not a relationship where we try to control something we cannot fully understand, but one where we accept that AI is already better than us in most areas and we focus our energy on the things it still gets wrong, on goal-alignment, and on ensuring the outcomes it produces serve human flourishing.
I am proposing Vancouver as a pilot city — for AI-assisted government, for digital ID, for civic engagement tools — because cities are where change can actually happen at scale and speed, and because someone has to go first.