Solutions

After three terms on Council, I've watched too many good ideas die in the chamber. So I stopped waiting — and a study tour of Finland showed me why so many of them die, and what to do instead.

Kingston has real problems. Housing people can actually afford. Food on tables that have been bare too long. Neighbours who don't know each other. People sleeping outside in January. Council has tried. Sometimes Council has tried hard. But the hardest of these problems have outpaced everything the council chamber has thrown at them — and after years of watching, I've come to believe the issue isn't effort, and it isn't money. It's how we try to solve them.

This page is about that — the one general idea I think can move many of Kingston's hardest files at once — and about the projects where I've already started putting it into practice.

Why our hardest problems persist

A large institution solves problems one way: plan, then plan some more, then execute. Study it, budget it, run it through committee, write the policy, make it compliant, then deliver. For a known problem — paving a road, running a payroll, plowing snow — that is exactly right. You want it careful, accountable, and done by the book.

But homelessness, hunger, and isolation are not known problems with settled answers. They are intractable. They shift. What worked last winter doesn't work this one. The plan-then-execute machine is far too slow and far too rigid for problems like that. By the time the report is written and approved, the need has already moved.

Intractable problems need the opposite instinct: try something small, watch what happens, keep what works, drop what doesn't, and try again — fast. Rapid prototyping and rapid pivoting. Less by-the-book, more by-the-result.

And here is the part we keep missing: Kingston already has people doing exactly that.

The people already doing the work

Groups like Wendel's Warm Paws, Red's Rack, POET, Feed the People, and Threads of Hope have spent years quietly filling the gaps the big systems can't reach — meals, warm clothing, drinking water, outreach, a hand when someone has nowhere else to turn. Most of them aren't agencies. Only one, POET, is even recently incorporated. The rest are simply good people of goodwill who saw a need and started showing up. I've written more about the dignity this kind of work creates, and about the people behind it.

What these groups have that no program can buy is trust — and it's worth being clear about why. Their volunteers aren't paid. They aren't passing through on a contract. They come back, week after week, in all weather, and the people they serve can tell the difference. That authenticity is the beginning of a real continuum of care. There is absolutely a place for professional, arm's-length help — but not at the very start, when what a person needs first is to believe that someone will actually be there. These groups earn that belief. It is no accident that even Addiction and Mental Health Services and the police have turned to them for help.

And here is what should bother every taxpayer: the City's instinct has too often been to treat these groups as a problem to be managed. Too informal. Not compliant. Not doing it the official way. The very flexibility that lets them succeed gets read as a liability — so they are held at arm's length, or quietly obstructed, while the official approach keeps not solving the problem it was built to solve.

That has to change. It is one of the clearest reasons I am running again.

What Finland taught me

Last year I had the good luck to join a study tour of Helsinki — a city that once had people freezing to death in its streets and is now the only place in Europe where homelessness is actually going down.

What I found there wasn't a clever policy. It was a different posture toward exactly the kind of people I just described.

Finland didn't turn things around by being perfect. It turned things around by starting small, testing ideas in real time, and scaling up only what worked. When a handful of neighbours or a single determined volunteer found something that helped, the City's response wasn't "come back when you're compliant." It was how do we make this happen? Government there acts as a servant, not a gatekeeper. It removes barriers and gets behind what the community is already doing. It builds trust by letting the people closest to a problem help shape the answer. It treats dignity as a hard constraint, not a nice-to-have. And it understands that housing someone is the start, not the finish — that real support has to follow the person.

Co-design. Community-led solutions. Government as servant. Dignity. Test, back, improve, scale. That is the whole lesson — and it is the general solution to a great many of Kingston's ills. Finland took the very groups a rigid system would have brushed aside, gave them the benefit of the doubt, helped them get better, and then duplicated them where they worked.

The encouraging news is that the instinct is beginning to take hold here too. A motion has recently come out of committee to test-fund some of these newer community groups — to put a modest amount of money behind promising ideas and find out whether they can fill real gaps faster, and at lower cost, than our existing institutions could. That is precisely the right direction: give willing people the benefit of the doubt, test them, let them pivot, let them deliver, and help them improve — not by dictating from above, but with genuine openness to good ideas that didn't originate inside City Hall.

I've already started leading the way

I came back from Finland convinced these principles work — and convinced Kingston wouldn't adopt them just because I thought it should. So I started building, designing each project around these principles from day one, to show what they look like in practice. The four below aren't four separate ideas. They are one idea, demonstrated four ways.

Limestone City Co-operative Housing

Founding President and Board Chair · lcch.ca

LCCH actually came first — I had been building it before I ever set foot in Helsinki. What Finland did was confirm I was on the right track. It is a $100M+ co-operative housing project — Canada's first to integrate non-profit co-op housing with a commercial-scale vertical farm. The plan: 250 attainable units, nearly off-grid, net-zero emissions, designed to last 200 years, housing roughly 400 to 500 residents.

Co-operative housing means residents collectively own their building. There is no one taking profits out, no rent escalating to whatever the market will bear. The vertical farm means food security is built into the foundation — fresh produce grown on-site, year-round, with members contributing volunteer hours. Together they address the four problems I see in Kingston: housing costs, food insecurity, climate emissions, and the loneliness that comes from people not knowing their neighbours.

In February 2024, Council unanimously committed the City-owned site at 900 Division Street to LCCH for twelve months while we secured grant funding. We built the partnerships — Planetary Harvest, Bendale Property Management, 3 Peaks CPA, Our Livable Solutions, Luke's Place Kingston, Extend-A-Family Kingston. We secured a letter of engagement of around $100 million covering up to 95% of residential development costs through private financing. We announced the project to the city.

In March 2025, Council voted not to proceed.

The project did not die. We are looking for new sites and finalizing partnerships. The model works — and Kingston needs it more than ever. A new council may be more helpful.

Kingston Food Rescue

Co-founder · kingstonfoodrescue.ca

This one grew directly out of the shift in thinking Finland prompted. Kingston has surplus food and Kingston has hungry people. Both at the same time, every day. Kingston Food Rescue is the technology and the volunteer network that connects them — restaurants and grocers tap one button when they have food to give, drivers see nearby pickups and accept, and the food gets to community fridges, shelters, and Belle Park before it can spoil.

I co-founded KFR with two partners — one with deep frontline experience in winter shelter operations and survival outreach, and one with decades of public-systems design experience inside institutions where failure carries real human cost. We were inspired by Feed the People, a Kingston volunteer effort that proved during COVID that surplus food and hungry people don't have to exist side by side. You just need volunteers willing to move fast and a system that gets out of their way.

The system is built to be reliable and useful. Today KFR delivers to Belle Park and is expanding across the city. Producers, drivers, storage hosts, and places of need are all welcome.

Good Neighbours Co-Housing

Co-Founder · goodneighbourscohousing.ca

Good Neighbours came from the same shift. Kingston has empty bedrooms and people on waitlists. The math is solvable.

Co-housing is different from co-operative housing. Residents have their own homes, but the homes are designed around shared spaces, shared meals, and the kind of everyday neighbourliness that builds communities. The trick is that compatibility comes first — match people on values and habits before they share a roof, and the rest follows.

GNCH builds on three co-housing models already operating in Kingston: a covenant-housing community for seniors aging in place, a mixed-income shared household running for over six years, and HomeMADE Housing for senior women now expanding into Kingston. GNCH exists to give them firm legal footing, support new Kingston-grown approaches, and help every model scale.

Every GNCH home includes a Weathering Centre — a community storage and volunteer hub that doubles as a food-rescue node and a shared cause for residents. It is built on what we know about how chronic stress wears people down, and what protects against it. Compatibility-matched community, stable affordable housing, and ongoing social engagement are not amenities. They are protective infrastructure that builds common cause and community supports.

Kingston City Works

Co-founder · kingstoncityworks.ca

The last project is the basic feedback loop a city owes its residents — the servant posture made into a tool. Kingstonians shouldn't have to learn how a municipal complaint system works to report a pothole. A downed tree, a missed garbage pickup, a broken streetlight, a flooding storm drain — these should take thirty seconds and a button, and someone should actually hear back. Council kept declining to move on a tool like this, so four of us built it ourselves. Kingston City Works lets residents report something in seconds, see it tracked, and get an answer. The four councillors behind it — Conny Glenn, Lisa Osanic, Gary Oosterhof, and me — agree with each other on perhaps half the things we vote on. What we share is one frustration: when residents ask Council for help, the system too often doesn't answer. That four councillors with different politics chose to build this together is, I think, the strongest evidence that civic responsiveness is not a partisan idea. It is the baseline a city owes its residents.

The pattern

One idea, demonstrated four ways. The pattern is simple: stop treating the people closest to a problem as obstacles, and start treating them as partners. I saw what Kingston needed, looked at what Council was doing, decided the gap was too big to wait on — and started building, both to fill it and to prove the approach works.

I am proud of this work. I am also clear-eyed about its limits. Volunteer-driven projects can do a lot — but they cannot replace what a city does when it puts its full weight behind a solution. Co-operative housing scales when the City commits land. Food rescue scales when the City coordinates infrastructure. Co-housing scales when zoning makes it possible without a fight over every variance. Civic responsiveness scales when the City runs the system itself. And the grassroots groups keeping people alive on the coldest nights of the year scale when the City backs them — instead of blocking them.

That is the real solution, and the quiet truth is that it costs less, not more: it is far cheaper to back good people already getting results than to keep funding an approach that isn't working. Re-elect a councillor who builds, who listens, and who will push the City to do for everyone what Finland did — get behind the good people already doing the work. I will keep doing it whether Council follows or not. But with Council behind it, Kingston goes much further, much faster.