Jon is a consultant in software whose job involves holding a large amount of highly technical detail and then conveying it to people who have to make a decision without becoming experts themselves. That is precisely the skill a Park Board commissioner needs when a several-hundred-page capital report lands the week before a vote.

 

A Vancouver resident for the last decade, Jon is a recreational swimmer, using public pools several times a week, and a regular at city gyms, mostly at Marpole-Oakridge Community Centre. He views swimming as a life skill, not a luxury. Learn-to-swim, lifeguard training, school programs, masters, seniors and rehabilitation swimmers all compete for the same shrinking pool time, and increasing aquatic resources will be a focus for him.

 

As founding managing director of Protecting Our Vancouver Aquatic Centre Society, he built a grassroots campaign into an incorporated BC non-profit that raised over $110,000 from the public, retained counsel and filed a judicial review petition in the BC Supreme Court against the City of Vancouver and the Park Board over the Aquatic Centre replacement.

 

Jon is running with TEAM because it has been consistent on value of the elected Park Board,  defending it before the abolition attempt was abandoned, not afterwards. TEAM's central argument, that residents should be genuinely empowered in decisions about their own neighbourhoods, is what he has spent two years trying to establish through the courts. He would rather help fix the process from inside the room than keep proving from outside it that the process is broken.