I entered the race late, on nomination day, because after another candidate withdrew I felt Otonabee residents deserved a real choice about who represents them at City Hall. With two incumbents and only one other candidate in the race at that point, I felt a responsibility to make sure voters had another voice and another vision to consider, so I jumped in.
More broadly, I’m running because many of the issues people deal with every day - housing, roads, transit, taxes, and access to City services - come down to whether Council makes good decisions and follows through on them.
I want to bring a practical, project-management mindset to the job, but one grounded in community service. I run a small business, volunteer extensively, and have worked closely with non-profits and people facing financial insecurity. To me, good government means defining the problem clearly, being honest about costs and trade-offs, listening to the people most affected, and making sure limited public dollars actually improve people’s lives.
Otonabee is growing and changing, and I think our biggest challenge is making sure that growth actually improves everyday life for the people who already live here. That has to mean everyone: we can't build a ward that only works well if you have money, a car, and no accessibility needs.
Residents should be able to rely on safe streets, continuous sidewalks, useful and affordable transit, accessible parks, and infrastructure that is maintained before a small problem becomes an expensive one. These aren't luxuries; they determine whether people can get to work, school, groceries, appointments, and the rest of their community.
I want the City to set clearer neighbourhood infrastructure priorities based on condition, safety, accessibility, and need. When we rebuild a street, that's the time to look at roads, sidewalks, crossings, drainage, transit, and accessibility together, rather than repeatedly returning to fix each piece separately.
I think what makes me different is the combination of worlds I’ve worked in. I’m a small-business owner and digital project manager, so I spend a lot of time thinking about budgets, systems, timelines, and how to turn an ambitious idea into something that actually works.
At the same time, much of my volunteer work has been rooted in the community. As a founding board member of Volunteer Peterborough, I worked with non-profits, volunteers, and organizations trying to do a lot with limited resources. Through the Basic Income Peterborough Network, I’ve also spent a great deal of time listening to people with lived experience of poverty and financial insecurity.
What I think is useful about that mix is that I’ve seen both sides of public decisions. In project work, a good idea still has to survive budgets, timelines, implementation, and all the boring details that determine whether it actually happens. In community work, I’ve seen how easily something that looks sensible on paper can miss the people it is supposed to help. I’d bring both perspectives to Council.
Peterborough’s economic strategy should be about building local prosperity, not just chasing the next big employer. Attracting new investment matters, but so does helping the businesses already here survive, grow, and create good jobs.
I want City Hall to be easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to navigate, with fewer unnecessary delays and clearer support when someone wants to open, expand, or invest. I’d also like us to make better use of tools we already have, including social procurement, so more City spending supports local businesses, employment, and community benefit where possible.
Economic development also can’t be separated from housing and transportation. A new job doesn’t help much if the person taking it can’t afford to live here or reliably get to work.
With Peterborough developing a new economic strategy, I want us to be clear about what success actually looks like: more local businesses surviving and growing, more good jobs, a stronger commercial and industrial tax base, and more of the wealth we create staying in the community.
I strongly support housing intensification. Peterborough needs many more homes, and continually stretching the city outward is one of the most expensive ways to provide them.
In established neighbourhoods, that means making it easier to add duplexes, townhomes, small apartment buildings, secondary units, and other forms of gentle density while respecting infrastructure capacity, trees, drainage, and accessibility. Higher-density development belongs downtown, along major corridors, and wherever transit and existing infrastructure can support it. We also need community, supportive and deeply affordable housing, because simply increasing the overall number of units won’t meet every housing need.
Sprawl isn't just an environmental issue; it's a financial one. Every new low-density area requires more roads, pipes and other infrastructure to reach fewer households, and the City inherits the long-term cost of maintaining it. It also makes more trips dependent on cars, adding pressure to roads and parking elsewhere in the city.
Intensification lets us add housing while making better use of infrastructure we've already paid for, supporting better transit, and protecting more green space. To me, that's simply a more efficient way for Peterborough to grow.
My priority is a transportation system that gives people real choices in how they get around. Driving will remain important, but walking, cycling, and transit should be practical options rather than something people use only when they have no alternative.
That starts with maintaining roads and bridges before they become much more expensive to repair, while also building continuous sidewalks, safer crossings, accessible streets, connected cycling routes, and transit that is frequent and reliable enough for people to plan their lives around.
The biggest problem is often the gaps. A bike lane that disappears at a dangerous intersection, a sidewalk that ends halfway down the street, or a bus connection that turns a short trip into an hour can make an otherwise useful network effectively unusable.
Transportation is something everyone depends on, but not everyone has the same options. Some people can’t afford a car, some can’t drive because of age or disability, and others simply shouldn’t need one for every trip. Our transportation system should give all of them a realistic way to get to work, school, groceries, appointments, and the rest of their community.
To me, a connected city means people can reliably get where they need to go, whether they drive or not.
My financial priority is making sure residents get better value from what they already pay, without confusing short-term cuts with long-term savings.
That means protecting essential services, keeping up with maintenance before small problems become expensive ones, and looking at the full lifecycle cost of major projects before Council commits to them. The cheapest option on paper can become the most expensive once you include financing, staffing, maintenance, and replacement.
I also want regular reviews of programs and service delivery, not as an excuse to cut for the sake of cutting, but to ask whether money is actually producing the result it was meant to. If something isn’t working, we should fix it or redirect those dollars.
If it is working, we shouldn’t weaken it just to make the next budget look better on paper.
We also need to grow the commercial and industrial tax base and pursue outside funding where it makes sense, so residential taxpayers aren’t carrying so much of the load. To me, responsible budgeting means being honest about trade-offs, spending carefully, and not handing the next Council a bigger bill because we avoided dealing with something today.
A ward councillor has two responsibilities, and I don't think they can really be separated.
Otonabee residents elect their councillors to know the ward well: to be accessible, understand local issues, follow up when something isn't working, and bring that context to the Council table.
But councillors don't govern five separate cities. Every vote on housing, transit, infrastructure, taxes and services affects Peterborough as a whole. I don't think it's responsible to win something for one ward by simply pushing the cost or the problem onto another.
My job would be to represent Otonabee's needs clearly while making decisions with the whole city in mind. When those interests conflict, I would explain the trade-off, show residents how I reached my decision, and be willing to stand behind it even when it isn't the answer everyone in the ward wanted.
One issue that runs through a lot of my platform is how City Hall communicates with residents. People shouldn’t have to watch hours of Council meetings or dig through lengthy reports just to understand what is being decided, why their councillor voted a certain way, or what happened after they raised a concern.
I want municipal government to be easier to follow and participate in. That means explaining important votes in plain language, keeping residents updated on neighbourhood issues after they’ve reported them, and being more transparent about whether projects and policies actually delivered what Council said they would.
Too often, the public conversation ends when Council makes a decision. I think that’s when the accountability part should begin.