Community led development to retain our youth and rural identity.

Build Tall, Not Wide

Retain our Youth

Community First

Our farmland is an essential part of what defines us in Grey Highlands. Municipal led development cannot, therefore, come at the expense of farmers in our community. Instead of slowly eating away at farmland, our development projects should be focused on renovating, upgrading, and repurposing existing and underutilized land and buildings.

As it stands a continual stream of youth in our community are leaving. Not because they want to, but because we cannot find affordable housing, adequate employment, or meaningful entrepreneurial opportunities. Our growth should therefore be focused on finding ways to retain our youth so that we can continue to stay here just as our parents and grandparents did. To this end, we should be making considerable investments alongside the Provincial and Federal Governments into retaining the youth in Grey Highlands.

Involving the community in the development process as much as possible and ensuring that any proposed development is focused on what the community needs instead of what the developer wants is crucial to ensuring that development is done responsibly and sustainably. It also ensures that our residents are not left covering the cost of maintaining under-utilized developer projects. We should therefore empower our local communities to have a clear say on how, where, when, and what types of development they want in their community.

Council should work with our communities in Grey Highlands, not for them.

Participation

Accessibility

Communication

Participation in council should not be limited to election season and a few committees. Our residents should have a greater voice in the decisions which most affect their day-to-day life. We should therefore look towards implementing and encouraging participation in public referendums to inform and direct council's decisions.

Voting in Grey Highlands should be made more accessible, not less. Restricting voting to online only effectively disenfranchises many of our residents with poor or no access to the internet. We should therefore ensure that it is easier for our residents to vote in future elections by allowing in-person, mail-in, and online voting. In addition, we should also ensure that there are in-person polling stations in each of our communities, not just one or two.

An out of touch councilor is an ineffective councilor. I cannot do this job alone; I need you, your friends, your family, and your coworkers to tell me about the issues within your community. I am therefore committing to meeting with members of each of our communities every Saturday & Sunday throughout my term as your councilor to ensure that I am never behind on the needs of our residents. I hope to see you there.