Extended Platform

Beyond Housing

Housing is the centrepiece, but it isn't everything. Here are my positions on transit, seniors, recreation, climate, and fiscal responsibility.

Transit and active transportation

Getting around Kingston without a car is harder than it should be, and it will keep getting harder if transit and active transportation continue to be planned as afterthoughts to growth, rather than as infrastructure that shapes growth. The city has a transit network that serves the core reasonably well and struggles everywhere else.

The solution isn't just more buses. It's making sure that when we approve new subdivisions and developments, transit and pedestrian infrastructure is part of the plan from the beginning. Not a retrofit that gets promised and deferred. The same applies to cycling infrastructure, which Kingston has been adding to but still lacks safe deployments on arterial roadways. Safe cycling and walking routes that link neighbourhoods to destinations, schools, and transit stops are worth building properly. As we develop new areas of the city, we have the opportunity to design them right the first time.

I want to be clear that this is not meant to disparage the efforts of our existing council. They have taken transit and active transportation into great consideration in both their initiatives and their expectations in the new Official Plan. I am merely reinforcing my own commitments to these principles.

Seniors and aging in Kingston

Nearly one in four Kingstonians will be a senior by 2036, a faster pace of aging than the provincial average. That is not a problem to be managed. It is a demographic reality that should shape how we plan services, design public spaces, and think about housing.

The most obvious connection to my housing platform is this: high rents don't just hurt young families. They drive up the cost of retirement living, too. When the private market sets the price of a one-bedroom apartment, retirement home operators setting monthly fees have to compete for the same land and construction labour. Lower rents across the board, which is the direct consequence of a larger municipal rental supply, put downward pressure on the full spectrum of housing costs, including senior living. That isn't a side effect of my housing plan. It's part of the point.

Beyond housing, I believe the city should be doing more to keep older residents active and connected to their community. Recreation centres, accessible programming, and genuinely usable public spaces matter to seniors in the same way they matter to families with young children. Ontario's EASE Grant program, which is currently closed, offered up to $60,000 for accessibility improvements to outdoor spaces and community buildings, funding that Kingston should be pursuing aggressively, particularly for older downtown facilities where a step or a narrow doorway is the difference between a senior participating in community life or not. We need to keep a publicly accessible catalogue of projects needed throughout our community so that if the program reopens we are ready to work. And if the program doesn't reopen, we need to be ready to fund these projects ourselves.

Recreation infrastructure

I support the investments that council has been making in recreation infrastructure. The swimming lesson shortage in this city is real, parents have described trying to register their kids as something resembling a lottery, and doing nothing was not an option. The Invista Centre pool addition and the Culligan Water Park enclosure are the right direction.

And we need more than just aquatic facilities. Centre 70 is the most immediate example. The arena has now been closed following a burst pipe, and city staff have already recommended decommissioning it entirely, contingent on finding replacement ice capacity, likely through twinning the Memorial Centre pads. This is the right sequence: confirm replacement capacity first, then retire the aging facility. What I want to see is a clear, public timeline for that transition, so the hockey associations and community groups who depend on that ice have certainty and aren't left scrambling season to season.

That being said, the Memorial Centre is no spring chicken. The city needs a long-term goal for new facilities to replace our aging stock, both to ensure improved energy efficiency and environmental impact, as well as ensuring that we aren't left scrambling for solutions in the future.

The broader principle Recreation infrastructure isn't a luxury. It's where families spend time together, where kids develop habits that last a lifetime, and where seniors stay healthy and connected. The city has aging facilities across the board, and the answer isn't to defer everything indefinitely, it's to make a clear-eyed plan and execute it in priority order.

Climate and the environment

I'm not interested in vague environmental commitments. Kingston deserves specific actions, and my housing platform is where I think municipal government can make the most tangible environmental difference: by building well.

When the city develops housing through its own corporations, it sets the standards. There's no developer negotiating down the insulation specification to protect a margin. We can build to the highest energy efficiency standards available, better envelopes, better mechanical systems, and solar-ready rooftops. We're building for the long run, not for a quick sale. Look around the world and you'll find hospitals, libraries, bridges, and housing blocks that are a hundred, two hundred years old and still serving their communities. That's what public ownership makes possible. A municipally-owned building should be designed and built with that same generational ambition, not to a specification that gets a developer to closing. Lower energy costs are also lower operating costs, which in turn means lower rents. Environmental ambition and fiscal discipline point in the same direction.

I also want to explore a construction materials recycling program for Kingston. I've worked on construction sites and seen the amount of material that gets binned from cutoffs of insulation, drywall, lumber, and more. It's genuinely shocking to anyone who hasn't seen it. Some of this is unavoidable waste, but a lot of it is usable material that ends up in landfill simply because there's no organized alternative. A municipal or municipally-supported collection and redistribution program for construction offcuts could divert significant waste, supply material to community projects and renovators, and model the kind of circular thinking that should be part of how Kingston builds.

Fiscal responsibility

Fiscal responsibility doesn't mean spending as little as possible. It means spending intelligently, understanding what an investment returns, being honest about the risks, and not hiding costs in future budgets that someone else will have to balance. By that definition, my housing platform is one of the most fiscally conservative ideas in this campaign.

Consider what we're actually proposing: the city borrows against its own balance sheet at rates no private developer can access, constructs housing in an industry that will never cease to be needed, charges rents that are calibrated to cover costs and generate a surplus, and retains a permanently appreciating asset. There is no speculative bet here. We are not investing in cryptocurrency. We are not building a hundred-thousand square foot factory and hoping to attract a tenant. We are investing in shelter, something people will always need, and we are doing it at a price point that essentially guarantees occupancy. That is what good capital allocation looks like.

On the tax side: I do not believe Kingston residents should face above-inflation property tax increases to fund the city's base operations. The whole point of building a non-tax revenue stream through municipal housing is to reduce the pressure on the property tax base over time. If the city is growing its revenue through smart investments, it has less need to reach into residents' pockets every budget cycle. That is the connection between my housing platform and fiscal discipline, and it is a deliberate one.

The standard I will apply Every significant capital commitment should be able to answer three questions clearly: Does it service its debt? Does it cover its operating costs? Does it return value to the city? I will publish that analysis for every major project I propose, and I will hold the same standard to everything else that comes before council.