A Cochrane family, and a career inside local government
My family has been in Cochrane for three generations. My wife’s family has been here just as long. Our roots here aren’t a talking point. They’re the reason I care how this town is run and who it’s run for.
For more than twenty years I’ve worked in technology for municipalities and healthcare organizations across northeastern Ontario, most recently as a chief information officer at a regional technology firm serving public-sector clients. That work put me inside the machinery of local government: the budgets, the records, the service-delivery systems, and the people who keep it all running. I’ve seen what good administration looks like, and I’ve seen what happens when the basics slip.
It’s not glamorous work, and I’ve never really minded that. A town doesn’t run on slogans. It runs on staff who know their files, budgets that get passed on time, records that are kept properly, and decisions that residents can actually follow. Those are the things I’ve spent my career on, and they’re the things I want to bring to the council table.
What the job actually is
A councillor doesn’t run the town. Staff do that, and a council that forgets it creates problems for everyone. Council sets direction, approves the budget, passes by-laws, and holds the organization accountable for results. That is a narrower job than people sometimes expect, and I think being straight about it matters, because a candidate who promises things a councillor cannot deliver on his own is either misunderstanding the role or counting on you not to notice.
What makes someone good at it comes down to a few unglamorous things. Listening to staff, because they know how the work actually gets done and where it gets stuck, and because the person closest to a problem usually already knows the answer. Listening to residents, because they are the ones paying for it and living with the result. Doing the reading, because agenda packages run to hundreds of pages, financial statements are dense, and a surprising amount of what people want to know is already sitting in them if someone takes the time to look. And being willing to think past the standard answer, because a town our size doesn’t get to solve every problem the way a city does, and an approach that works somewhere bigger often needs reworking to fit here.
Those are the parts of the job I am most confident about. The research and reading side of it is close to what I do for a living, and nearly everything on this site came out of doing exactly that: reading the town’s own documents and writing down what they say.
Why I’m running now
I’m running because I think Cochrane can do better on the fundamentals, and because I don’t think you should have to take a candidate’s word for it. Over the past few years the town has lost a lot of experienced people, and that costs us more than most residents ever see. I want a council that steadies the ship: one that keeps good people, spends carefully, and shows its work.
So that’s what this site is. Not just a list of promises, but actual proposals you can read and argue with, several of them posted right now, in full, with the sources. If I’ve gotten something wrong, tell me. That’s how this is supposed to work.
