I serve as a member-at-large of the Electoral District Association in Vancouver Centre for the federal New Democratic Party of Canada, and I will also be standing for a seat on the federal party’s BC regional council at the 2026 Winnipeg Convention!
What Do I Stand For?
I’ve worked in the technology sector for well over a decade, as well as more brief stints jobs in education, animal care, scientific photography, and civil service. I have an academic background in philosophy, history, and social sciences. My years of engagement with technology, ecology, and history have made me a systems thinker – and our political systems are badly broken!
So my political priorities centre on fixing political, social, and economic systems. I want to unblock the powerful, forward-thinking grassroots movements who’ve spent decades fighting uphill battles for justice, solidarity, and a healthy environment. This means:
- Strengthening democracy in Canada through electoral reform, campaign financing reform, transparency laws, citizens’ assemblies, and other accountability mechanisms.
- Systematically dismantling oligarchy, especially in the media and technology spheres, to reduce the control that the wealthiest elites have over our society.
- Restructuring the economy, including through tax policy, antitrust enforcement, cooperative ownership, a rock-solid floor for our social safety net, and industrial policy.
- Investing in community-building, because hostility and suffering thrive when people are disconnected from one another, both individually and as communities.
- Rethinking foreign policy to prioritize fair and sustainable international trade and alliances, while supporting peoples around the world in charting their own destinies free from coercion.
While a lot of these touch on different issues, to me, they are all unified under a core political ideal: democracy.
Why Democracy?
I grew up in Québec, where the political and social culture of the 1990s and 2000s taught me a lot about challenges facing our world. In school, I pursued history to understand how we got here, and science to understand how we might make things better; outside of school, I was attending my first political protests alongside my secondary school classmates.
For years I felt there were serious problems, and that we had to start applying some of the many ideas and resources we had to solving them. I expected society to make progress on fixing those issues; at times, I felt progress was happening. But since the mid 2010s I’ve felt more and more that our progress was not sustainable way, and that in many cases it was being eroded and reversed. That has only accelerated since 2020.
I stepped into politics because I realized the root of the problem isn’t that humanity doesn’t see the problems, or have the ideas or tools to solve them. Most people know we have problems, and we have more than enough wealth and knowledge to solve them.
The problem is that the power to make decisions, to allocate resources, and to set goals is locked up by a small group of people who are cut off from normal human experiences by their immense wealth and power. They are unaccountable to the rest of us, and use their power to threaten, manipulate, and sabotage in order to maintain that and grow that power, instead of solving problems.
Even though those are private sector elites, it’s a political, structural problem. And I think fixing that problem will allow us to make much more progress on all the big challenges facing Canada and the world. That’s why my priority is democratic renewal.
Why The NDP?
I believe the federal NDP is the best-placed party to be the voice of Canadians who are not represented by powerful economic elites. Canada’s two biggest parties lean on those elites and their lobbyists as key supporters and advisors. They differ on some emotionally charged issues, which makes for dramatic theatre, but ultimately they share the same masters and ways of doing politics. The drama obscures the fact that neither of them want to change the system, because the system promises them both complete power if only they can play the game right.
Our leaders aren’t out of touch because we elect the wrong people, but because the system that puts candidates in front of us, and then determines how elected officials operate, has been shaped by elites and their interests. We don’t need to switch who’s in the driver’s seat; we need to take the whole car back to the shop.
Improving democracy is against the interests of the Liberal and Conservative parties (especially the Liberal party, which has governed for far more years in total). They’ve built huge party machines around elite politics and culture war campaigning. But the NDP? We’re outsiders, with no elite backing. It’s in our interest to fix the system, not maintain it.
After our historic defeat in the 2025 election, everyone in the NDP knows things need to change. That means that not only is the party inherently less beholden to the elite, but there is tremendous energy now to rebuild something more powerful and more democratic.
Unaffordability, poverty, social breakdown, the degradation of the land, sprawling bureaucracies, despair and exhaustion, control and surveillance, foreign threats – Canada has a lot to deal with. But the elite is insulated from all that, and have no interest in sacrificing their power to fix issues that don’t affect them. Power won’t serve us until it is accountable to us.
Canada’s NDP is the right place to be to try to make power accountable. It’s a tough fight, but the good fight is bound to be tough. At least that way you know you’re not someone’s pet gladiator.
