The Platform

Nanaimo holds enough empty lots to meaningfully expand supportive and non-market housing without buying a single new parcel. Lease the land, fast-track the permits, and work with the Province on the funding that is already on the table.

Clustering every homeless service in one neighbourhood has failed the people who live there and the people the services are meant to help. Scattered sites work better. Every other BC city that has moved faster has done it this way.

The 2025 vote that killed a health centre serving 2,700 people without a family doctor should not have happened. A councillor's default should be to find a way to yes on housing and healthcare, not to block what the community needs.

Stable funding for the people who actually respond to street-level problems. No cuts.

The City and its partners already collect data on safety, housing, and downtown conditions. Residents should be able to see it without paying for a new reporting department to produce it.

Other Canadian cities have done it when the Province has been slow. One year of serious work gives us either a real project or a definitive answer.

The hospital serves everyone between Victoria and Campbell River. The Province has been promising the expansion for years. Council needs to be the loudest voice in the room, alongside the 240 doctors who have already petitioned.

The Seniors' ER works. The next logical step is a specialized intake for the mental health and addictions crises that are clogging the main emergency room.

Doctors want to live near where they work. Zone for clinics, medical offices, and staff housing around NRGH. Recruitment is partly a land-use problem.

Patients, caregivers, and downtown shoppers all need it. Simple, popular, cheap.

Right now the main bus to the regional hospital runs once an hour. For seniors, people without cars, and anyone trying to visit a family member, that is unacceptable. The first transit priority is direct, frequent service from the major exchanges to NRGH.

The five main routes, the Rapid #1, the #7, #15, #30, and #40, carry most of Nanaimo's riders. They deserve a proper public review with published findings and deadlines for change.

One of the cheapest real improvements to mobility the City can make. Assign a public organization to run it.

The Hullo is one of the best things that has happened to downtown Nanaimo in years, and yet the bus schedule to its terminal does not match the sailings. Vancouver coordinates its buses with the ferries at Tsawwassen. We can do the same.

Right now homeowners carry more than two-thirds of Nanaimo's property taxes. Industrial properties pay more than three times as much per dollar of value, but there are not enough of them. Every new business we attract is a little bit less on everyone else's bill.

Nanaimo's own consultant said in 2021 that the system was broken. Five years later it still is. Three concrete changes: let professional staff approve routine applications instead of dragging them through council, stop requiring a second round of design review on land that is already zoned industrial, and have departments review applications at the same time instead of one after the other.

Nanaimo is on track to run out of industrial land within the next fifteen years. The City needs to know which parcels can be rezoned, serviced, and made shovel-ready, and it needs to know this year, not in 2041.

New provincial rules make it easier to build housing on land that is currently commercial or light industrial. That is good for housing and bad for the tax bill unless the City is deliberate about protecting the employment land we still have. We can hit housing targets and protect the businesses that pay a big share of the city's costs. It takes intention, not luck.

Kamloops gives ten years. Nanaimo gives five. Match Kamloops, but only for buildings that include affordable housing in the mix. The incentive should do two jobs at once.

A separate tool from the downtown one, aimed at advanced manufacturing, technology, and marine industry. Time-limited, outcome-measured, and published so everyone can see what the City is actually getting for it.

Fuel prices are rising faster than almost anything else in the budget, and the last ten years of international conflicts have made oil markets dangerously unpredictable. Electrifying city trucks as they wear out protects the budget from the next price shock. This is a fiscal decision first.

A freight connection between Wellcox Yard and Duke Point could eventually give local businesses a cheaper way to move goods off the Island. The work is ongoing. The councillor's job is to make sure it does not stall.