Colin Smith is running in Vancouver South Granville to champion affordability, attainable homeownership, responsible quality development, and to fight for effective healthcare, education and community services.
Colin is the owner/operator of a construction management firm in Kitsilano with an academic background in law, international relations and sociology. He takes pride in volunteering and serving on community boards including the Kitsilano Area Childcare Society. Colin has lived in the Vancouver-South Granville area for over 30 years and has a deeply personal understanding of the issues constituents face.
Colin is now raising a young family and sees how drastically things have changed. Family outings that used to be child friendly, now littered with drug paraphernalia. School drop offs bearing witness to far too many lost inhabitants experiencing homelessness, mental illness and addiction with no meaningful solutions to care for them–voluntarily or otherwise.
Growing up with his fiercely independent mother who managed a decades long career as a civil servant, but was also paraplegic. Colin watched her community support dwindle as her modest needs grew. The strained and impersonal health care system failed to catch her terminal cancer. These health care concerns continue as Colin’s young family, like many others, struggles to secure a family doctor.
Affordability is top of mind and Colin questions whether his family can continue to thrive in Vancouver in these scarce economic times and in the face of frightening changes in Canada’s international relations, the increasing number of forest fires and the skyrocketing provincial deficit.
Nine years of NDP leadership–and the various brands of conservatism that preceded it–have degraded our quality of life and it’s just not good enough. Political ideology is not a solution to our problems. When our government swings between extremes what little progress has been made is undone only to replace it with more half measures. This fuels Colin’s desire to champion a balanced approach to governance that delivers meaningful, evidence-based solutions and lasting results.
