The London and District Labour Council sent every candidate the same questionnaire: twelve questions on running an ethical campaign, my priorities for the City, public services and unionized workers, minimum wage and paid sick days, promoting local public services and union jobs, housing affordability and the renoviction bylaw, equity and Indigenous reconciliation, the climate crisis, AI data centres, a commercial vacancy tax and downtown revitalization, divesting municipal water and hydro, and staying in communication with LDLC.
Each question is quoted in full below, exactly as it was asked, followed by my full answer. Each one has its own link, so if there’s one you want to share, it’s easy to do.
All twelve questions, and my answers
Do you pledge to run an ethical and principled campaign? Is there anyone that you would not accept campaign contributions from?
Of course I pledge to run an ethical and principled campaign. Every contribution to this campaign is tracked and reported under the rules that govern municipal campaign finance, and I will stay well within those bounds. There are other candidates with big money behind them. I am grateful for every dollar that comes in from my grassroots supporters.
Further, my principles and priorities are already public, on the record before a single dollar came in. Anyone who gives to my campaign should give with that knowledge: my position was set based on my own principles and what I believe is best for Ward 9, and it won’t move because of any contribution. I’ll put every dollar to work getting my message out to voters for the benefit of Ward 9, and London as a whole.
What do you consider to be the most important priorities for the City of London?
Two things come before everything else for me: Does council actually listen to the residents it represents, and is the City delivering real value for the tax dollars it already collects.
On the first, too many decisions get made by following a staff recommendation over resident opposition, then defended afterward as inevitable. I want a council that weighs a resident’s objection when it reviews a file.
On the second, property taxes have gone up well above inflation three years running. I will not stand for them to increase any more under my watch. I want every dollar the City takes from a hard working Londoner justified against a measurable result: transit that runs where the riders actually are, roads that keep moving, core services delivered efficiently and on budget. Everything else I’m running on, from how the City handles growth to how it spends, comes back to those two questions.
Provide your views on the status of public services and unionized workers for our city. What are your plans for a just economy that supports working people?
Transit operators, water and wastewater crews, and everyone else who keeps this city running in a unionized role do real, skilled work residents depend on every day. I don’t doubt that for a second.
Government, at any level, isn’t built to engineer a “just” economy. Every serious attempt at it ends up picking winners and creating losers. What actually supports working people is a City that does its own job well: deliver core services efficiently, and keep property taxes and the cost of doing business in London as low as possible. That does more for a working family’s paycheque than any citywide economic-justice program could.
I’ll judge every City service and every City contract on whether it’s delivered efficiently and priced competitively, because that’s what keeps taxes from climbing faster than paycheques do. That’s the standard I’d apply to how the City treats the people who work for it too: compensation and benefits benchmarked to equivalent private-sector roles, reviewed in the open every term.
Do you agree with a raise to the minimum wage and ten paid sick days for all workers? Should the City be a living wage employer?
My opinion on minimum wage is moot since it’s set by the provincial government. Where I do have a vote is over what the City itself pays.
Council’s own November 2025 vote disgusts me. Councillors voted 9 to 6 to peg their pay to the 70th percentile of London full-time income, which sets next-term pay at over $94,000. That is almost 40% above the $67,420 they were being paid when they cast that vote, and signals that they believe they deserve to earn more than 70% of full-time working Londoners. I definitely would have opposed that, and I’ve drafted the PACT bylaw that cuts councillor pay whenever council raises the tax levy.
On the employment side, I want City compensation, for staff and for the contractors the City hires, measured against private-sector equivalents, taking both pay and benefits into consideration. Public sector workers should be well compensated, but it should not be more lucrative than a private-sector equivalent. On sick leave specifically, City of London unionized staff already accrue 1 sick day per month up to a cap of 85 days under CUPE Local 101’s current agreement. Ontario law only guarantees private-sector workers 3 unpaid days a year, nothing paid, and, nationally, only 64% of employees have access to any paid sick leave at all. That gap is worth being honest about.
What would you do to promote local public services and good union jobs in our community? Do you support door-to-door mail delivery? Explain your view.
If a City service is worth having, London residents already know about it and use it. Needing an active promotion campaign to justify its existence is itself a sign the service deserves a harder question: is it worth the tax dollars funding it?
Job creation belongs to the private sector. The City does need to employ people directly for essential services like London Transit, London Water, and City Hall itself, and the people doing that work should be compensated on par with a private-sector equivalent.
In a perfect world, door-to-door mail delivery beats a community mailbox for every household. That’s a federal Canada Post decision though, outside what a City Councillor can control.
For local jobs more broadly, my focus is on what council controls: the cost and speed of getting a business open or expanded here. Every month a permit or request sits waiting, or a fee gets added to a project, is a month a local employer isn’t hiring or a dollar that isn’t going towards providing jobs. Removing that friction is the most direct way council can get out of a local employer’s way.
What are your ideas about addressing the affordability and housing crisis in London? What is your position on a renoviction bylaw?
London’s rental unit repair licence requires a landlord issuing an N13 renovation notice to apply for a City licence within seven days, backed by a building permit and a qualified professional’s report confirming the unit genuinely needs to be empty. It’s been in force since March 2025. The City’s own review found only seven applications for the special licence so far, which tells me it’s catching bad-faith cases without choking off legitimate repairs. I support keeping it. The problem it targets is a landlord using a fake renovation to end-run an eviction the Landlord and Tenant Board would never approve. That’s exactly the kind of narrow, provable harm that justifies a rule.
On affordability more broadly, my read is that London’s own approvals process is a real part of the cost problem. Every month a housing application sits waiting for a decision adds carrying costs that get passed straight into the price of the unit. I want faster, more predictable approvals and fewer site-specific exceptions granted off-plan, so a builder can price a project accurately. A subsidy program only stretches to cover a handful of units, while faster approvals lower the cost of every unit that gets built. On the other side of supply and demand is demand itself, which council can only move secondarily. Making London a place fewer people want to live, just to bring prices down, would be treating a symptom of failure as if it were a policy win. My focus stays on supply, where council actually has the tools to help.
What will you do to further embed equity and social justice in London? How will you commit to the Indigenous Truth and Reconciliation process with concrete actions?
Every Londoner should get equal weight and equal treatment from City Hall. Period. That’s the standard I’ll hold every City program and every City decision to, and it’s the one I’d want applied to me too.
On reconciliation specifically, Council approved a ten-year ReconciliAction Plan in May 2025, built from direct input from Indigenous community members through focus groups and a survey, guided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. My job, if elected, is to carry through the commitments already in motion, and examine anything still open to change against that same equal-treatment standard, with real metrics tracked and reported publicly.
Explain your plan for addressing the climate crisis and comment on specific details to date on how London City Council has worked on environmental issues.
London declared a climate emergency in 2019. The City’s own 2025 progress report shows corporate greenhouse gas emissions rose 4 percent the previous year, even as Council approved a million dollars annually for the Climate Change Reserve Fund and then cut that down to $192,000. By the end of 2024 the fund held $1.19 million, but only about $225,000 of it had reached an actual project, while a backlog of requests worth well over a million dollars sat waiting behind it. Money sitting unused and emissions still climbing is not the record of a plan that’s working.
Where I’ll support spending is on projects with a plan, a cost, and a real measurable benefit attached before council approves the money: stormwater capacity, tree canopy, and energy retrofits on City buildings that pay for themselves in avoided utility costs or provide a real tangible benefit to Londoners. Those are projects I can defend to a taxpayer because the return is provable. Before any new dollar goes toward the reserve fund, I want a plan that names the result it buys and how we’ll know it worked.
How would you approach applications to build data centres for use with A.I. in London?
I won’t support a blanket freeze on data centre applications. It treats every site the same when the sites aren’t. Some proposals would pull hard on the local power grid, run noisy equipment near homes, and lean on the municipal water system to cool it. Others don’t. Burlington is reviewing a data centre application that’s built air-cooled, drawing no municipal water for cooling, going through ordinary site plan review like any other large building in the city.
I’ll vote for conditions on approval. A project has to bring its own power generation that adds real capacity to the local grid, use cooling that doesn’t strain the municipal water system, and meet noise and setback rules that protect the homes nearby. Construction on a project like this employs real people, but that work is temporary. Permanent staffing once a facility is operating is a small fraction of the construction workforce. I want the approval to lock in the lasting return too: local property tax assessment growth, and grid capacity the whole city benefits from when the generation condition is actually enforced. Approve the ones that meet the tests. Refuse the ones that don’t.
Do you support a change in provincial law that would allow London to charge a vacancy tax for commercial buildings? How will you approach downtown landlords to revitalize economic activity and build a livable city?
My focus for downtown is on what actually gets a vacant storefront filled: cutting the cost and time it takes a small business to open in the first place. A landlord leaves a unit empty when the return on finding a new tenant doesn’t clear the cost and delay of permits, inspections, and zoning approvals stacked on top of the lease itself. That’s the first cost I’d go after.
Beyond that, downtown revitalization comes back to the basics every other part of the city needs too: reliable transit that actually gets people downtown, streets that are easy to park on or walk to, and predictable approvals for the businesses and housing that bring foot traffic back. Feeling unsafe downtown, from open drug use, disorder, and streets that don’t get cleaned, keeps people and customers away as much as any permit delay does. Public drug use is already illegal. I expect the law enforced downtown, as it should be everywhere else in this city. An empty storefront is a signal that opening a business downtown currently costs too much, in dollars and in safety. Fixing both is what fills the space.
Would you support the City of London divesting from municipal water / hydro resources by way of a Municipal Services Corporation?
London Hydro already operates at arm’s length from City Hall. It’s a corporation with its own board, and the City is its sole shareholder, receiving an annual dividend. Any further change to how these services are structured needs to clear one bar for me: does it actually improve service and value for the ratepayer, without quietly moving costs or debt off one column of the City’s books and onto another.
Water and wastewater are different. The City runs those directly today, and I’m cautious about moving an essential service Londoners can’t choose an alternative for further from direct public accountability. If a restructuring proposal ever comes to council, I’d want to see the real financial case and exactly what oversight ratepayers keep before I’d support it.
If elected, what steps will you take to stay in communication with the London and District Labour Council?
I’ll make myself equally and readily available to every constituent I represent, with no special treatment and no exceptions, including LDLC. If a decision in front of council affects the people you represent, I want to hear about it before the vote, exactly as I would from any other group or resident raising a concern. My website at ward9.online is a pilot project for receiving and responding to feedback, and I’m always open to new ideas for more effective communication.
That is every question, in the order they were asked. If you can help me sharpen my positions, please get in touch!