Before I Was Asking for Your Vote,
I Was Already Doing the Work

For roughly a decade I have worked as building manager of Sequel 138 — the only market-rent building on the 100 block of East Hastings Street, directly across from Insite. That is not a credential I acquired from a boardroom or a policy brief. It is ten years of showing up every day in a building that sits at the centre of the crisis Vancouver says it wants to solve.

I have dealt with the overdoses, the violence, the noise complaints, the property damage, the police calls, the mental health emergencies, and the quiet daily human cost of a system that has been allowed to fail for decades. I know what the 100 block of East Hastings looks, sounds, and smells like at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday in January. Most people proposing policy for this neighbourhood do not.

This work is the foundation of every DTES policy in this platform. It is not research. It is experience.

I personally purchased and installed security cameras on the 100 block of East Hastings Street. The Vancouver Police Department relied on that footage. Those cameras are still operating. The live stream is publicly accessible at easthastings.live — not because the city funded it, not because a nonprofit applied for a grant to build it, but because I bought the equipment and put it up myself.

The Public Safety Camera Network policy in this platform is not a theoretical proposal. It is an extension of something I already built and paid for personally. I know it works because I watched it work, and so did the VPD.

The cameras feed a free public livestream at easthastings.live. Anyone can watch. There is no gate, no subscription, no application process. The city did not build this. I did — and I pay the hosting costs personally.

Transparency about what is actually happening on East Hastings matters. The camera network and public livestream are a direct expression of the same principle behind this campaign: show people the real thing, not the managed version.

Rather than argue in the abstract about sanitation conditions in the Downtown Eastside, I documented them. The Vancouver Shart Gallery is a photographic record of what publicly funded services actually deliver on the ground — not in press releases, not in annual reports, but on the sidewalk.

It is blunt, deliberately so. The conditions it documents are blunt. Vancouver spends significant public money on services in the DTES. Voters deserve to see what that spending produces on the ground. The gallery is that record.

I built insite.press as a scrutiny site examining the evidence base behind the public health claims made to support Insite's continued operation — including the methodology behind landmark studies, conflicts of interest in the research and advocacy ecosystem, and what the outcome data actually shows about mortality, recovery, and housing outcomes in the DTES.

I have no objection to supervised consumption as a harm-reduction tool. I used Insite myself. I have serious objections to the claim that the evidence base behind it is beyond scrutiny or that questioning the model is the same as wanting people to die. It is not. Good policy requires honest evidence, and honest evidence requires the willingness to look at the data without filtering it through a predetermined conclusion.

I filed a Freedom of Information request with Vancouver Coastal Health asking for data on detox-bed funding, occupancy rates, wait times, and the spending balance between recovery and harm reduction. VCH responded with a fee estimate of $14,250 — effectively pricing public information out of reach for most members of the public.

I filed a complaint with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC. The OIPC opened a formal investigation in June 2026. The question I asked — how much does Vancouver Coastal Health spend on detox and recovery, and what does it produce? — is a question every Vancouver resident should be able to get an answer to. I asked it and I am fighting to get it answered.

I operate a set of public-interest investigation websites under the Diggers With Attitude name. The premise is simple: take tips from ordinary people who know things the public should know, dig into the evidence, and put it on record in a form that can be read, challenged, and acted on. Every site is personally funded, personally operated, and completely independent — no campaign money, no donor money, no organizational backing.

Current sites include daterapeisxanax.com (public health accuracy on drug-facilitated assault warnings), economicsabotage.com (fentanyl border failures and the case for an independent inquiry), fentanylepidemic.ca (epidemic documentation), and others listed on the Investigations page.

I built thankthevpd.ca to do something that almost nobody does: publicly recognize police officers who act with courage, integrity, and restraint — while also holding honest space for scrutiny of conduct that falls short of those standards. I believe the VPD can be held accountable and genuinely thanked. Those are not contradictions.

My experience on East Hastings has included serious negative encounters with police. It has also included situations where officers showed up and did their job well under difficult circumstances. Honest accountability requires acknowledging both.

I developed and published the concept for Text911.ca: a system allowing people in danger to report emergencies silently by text message, bypassing the requirement to speak aloud. This matters most for people in situations where a phone call would escalate danger — domestic violence, hostage situations, and situations involving people who cannot speak.

This is a personal innovation project, developed without institutional support. The concept forms the basis for the SMS-emergency component of the AI City Hall plan in this platform.

In 2006, I documented a serious vulnerability in Ontario's municipal elections process. At the time, Ontario municipal voters were not required to show identification. I cast five spoiled ballots in a single day at multiple polling stations using valid addresses but no ID — documenting every ballot with a pinhole camera sewn into my shirt to prove none of the ballots were cast for any candidate. A journalist accompanied me throughout.

Police investigated. They declined to lay charges, stating publicly that it was not in the public interest to do so given the stunt's clear intent to expose a democratic vulnerability rather than affect any outcome. Years later, Ontario amended the Municipal Elections Act to require voter identification. The city clerk's office confirmed the stunt prompted the city to seek legislative changes.

I note that the fix created a new problem: people without identification — including most residents of East Hastings — are now effectively excluded from municipal voting. My proposed civic digital ID addresses exactly that gap.

I was community-elected as Mayor of Bowser Island — a role that arose from community organizing rather than formal civic process. I am not presenting this as a traditional political credential. I am presenting it because it is part of the record, and because the role was later referenced in filings by the Province of British Columbia and the Attorney General in BC Supreme Court proceedings.

Community organizing, accountability work, and public-interest pressure can reach further than people expect. That is the lesson I took from it, and it is part of why I believe ordinary people — not party machines, not career politicians — can change how cities work.

For roughly the past ten years I have purchased concrete and asphalt out of my own pocket to repair potholes and dangerous sidewalk transitions on East Hastings. Many of these repairs were performed after midnight because City crews had previously instructed me to stop during daytime repairs. The goal was simple: make sidewalks safer for wheelchair users, seniors, and everyone else.

I also personally constructed approximately half a kilometre of roadway on Bowser Island after an existing dirt road became nearly impassable, helping ensure emergency vehicles could reliably reach nearby homes.

Why do some neighbourhoods appear to receive substantially more road maintenance than East Hastings?

Long before City Hall began discussing free Wi-Fi expansion, I paid to provide it myself. For more than five years I operated a free Wi-Fi network serving portions of East Hastings. Internet access is no longer a luxury — it is essential for employment, housing applications, banking, government services, emergency communication, and education.

My goal as Mayor is to create universal free public Wi-Fi throughout Vancouver using a hybrid system combining City infrastructure, participating businesses, and volunteer residential guest networks — with secure bandwidth management, fair-use limits, and privacy protection. If Vancouver can coordinate thousands of independent Wi-Fi access points into one secure roaming network, we could become one of the first cities in the world offering near-universal public Internet access.

Public washrooms save lives. Over the past several years I have personally paid for portable toilets and servicing in both the Downtown Eastside and on Bowser Island. No one should be forced to relieve themselves in public because basic sanitation is unavailable.

While working in multiple Downtown Eastside SRO buildings I encountered conditions that most Vancouver residents never see, including severe rodent infestations, heavy cockroach infestations, bed bugs, decomposing bodies, and unsafe living conditions.

I obtained a pesticide applicator licence and frequently treated units myself when funding or management support was unavailable.

After discovering approximately one-third of the units in one SRO lacked working smoke detectors following inspections I had performed, I repeatedly requested approval for replacements. According to my account, reimbursement requests were denied. I ultimately purchased approximately thirty smoke detectors with my own money and installed them myself.

Shortly afterward my employment effectively ended under circumstances I believe amounted to constructive dismissal.

Over the years I have administered naloxone to more than fifteen people experiencing opioid overdoses. Each survived.

Every second counts during an overdose. Sometimes the first person willing to help is simply whoever happens to be nearby.

Several winters I personally shovelled sidewalks outside the police station near Main and Cordova after snow remained uncleared for several days. The area serves many seniors and people with disabilities.

Safe sidewalks are everyone's responsibility.

I have represented numerous tenants free of charge before the Residential Tenancy Branch, including preventing unfair evictions, protecting long-term pet owners, and defending tenants against actions arising from circumstances beyond their control.

Keeping people housed is often less expensive than dealing with homelessness afterward.

I volunteered washing dishes and performing kitchen work at Carnegie Centre when employment opportunities were scarce. Compensation consisted primarily of meal tickets.

That experience reinforced my belief that frontline workers deserve dignity and fair compensation.

For nearly a decade I have purchased RVs and campers to provide emergency shelter for people who otherwise had nowhere to live. Sometimes rent matched provincial shelter assistance. Frequently I charged nothing.

I have also personally experienced homelessness, living in vehicles or outdoors for roughly half of my twelve years in Vancouver. Those experiences shaped my understanding of what works — and what does not.