About Jeff

A boy on four continents

I was born in Regina, raised in Victoria, and shaped by long summers spent with my extended family in Venezuela and Colombia. Spanish was my first language. Before I was old enough to understand what borders meant, I had crossed several of them — and that left a mark. To this day, the question I instinctively ask about anything is how do they do it elsewhere?

I have since lived on four continents and worked on three. Every move has taught me something different about what works, what doesn't, and what's possible when a community decides to do things differently.

The long education

I started in mechanical engineering at the University of Victoria in 1989 — the science and the discipline of practical problem-solving — and then, in 1993, took a sharp turn into philosophy at the Dominican University College in Ottawa, where I spent four formative years living and studying with the Dominican friars. I was contemplating joining the Order. I came out the other side with a Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours) in 1997 and a much clearer sense of the higher-order values that make a life worth living.

Out of school, my first research job took me to Rome. Working under Fernand Tanguay, the Canadian ambassador to the Holy See, I researched the history of Canada-Vatican relations from primary documents in the Vatican Secret Archives. I spent the summer between contracts backpacking across Europe — another classroom.

Back in Canada, I picked up two more degrees, both Bachelors of Social Science from the University of Ottawa: one in economics, one in political science. By the time I was finished, I had built up a deliberately wide-ranging education — engineering, philosophy, economics, political science — because I had become convinced that the problems that matter most don't sit inside any one discipline.

Working entrepreneur

I have always run my own businesses. The first was a residential painting company in Victoria when I was twenty-two. After the Dominicans, I bought and managed two residential rental buildings in Ottawa. From 2003 to 2011, I lived in Korea — another formative chapter, where I watched a society navigate rapid change — and worked there as a private tutor. When I came home, I rebuilt the property-management business in Kingston.

The trades, the property work, the tutoring: all of it taught me the same lesson the philosophy and the politics did. Things that last require somebody who shows up day after day to keep them running. The work is in the maintenance, not the announcement.

The call

I never planned to run for office.

What changed my mind was a pattern I kept noticing — friends, neighbours, constituents calling their councillor for information or for help, and getting nowhere. The chamber felt distant from the street. The street felt unheard by the chamber. I decided that if I ran, I would be more available than anyone else on Council. That promise became the Sunday coffee hours I have kept nearly every week, in every season, since 2014.

Building inside the chamber

In my first term, I helped pull two Kingston institutions back from the brink. KEDCO, our economic development agency, had become tangled in feuds and questionable spending; I joined the board, co-chaired the Review Committee, tightened governance, narrowed the mandate, and set up Tourism Kingston as its own focused organization. Both have been stable and effective ever since. Sustainable Kingston was, frankly, dead when I joined the board: one volunteer, no plan, no money. The remaining board members and I revitalized it, focused it, and rebuilt its service-level relationship with the City. Today it operates beyond Kingston into Brockville and Belleville and brings more federal and provincial dollars back to our region than it ever has.

Most of my public-health work has been on the KFL&A Public Health board, where I served twelve years across three council terms. Toward the end of that period I sat on the merger committee that brought two adjacent public-health units into KFL&A — building a stronger regional public-health institution out of three legacy ones. Building a new institution from three existing ones is harder than building one from scratch. We did it. And for four years I served on the Kingston Police Services Board.

These were the kinds of fights that don't make headlines. They make institutions.

What I learned in Helsinki

In 2025 I went on a study tour to Finland. I wanted to understand how a country that once had one of the worst homelessness problems in Europe became the only European country where homelessness is going down.

What I found there reshaped my thinking. It was not a clever policy. It was a posture — a different way of thinking about the relationship between government and the people it serves. Co-design with the people most affected, not for them. Government as servant, not gatekeeper. Dignity as a hard constraint, not a soft value. Housing first; stability after; services that follow the person.

I came home convinced these principles would work in Kingston, and equally convinced that Council was not going to adopt them just because I thought it should. So I started doing the work where I could.

Building outside the chamber

That is how the next chapter began. I am the founding President and Board Chair of Limestone City Co-operative Housing, a $100M+ co-op housing project with an integrated commercial vertical farm — Canada's first. I co-founded Kingston Food Rescue, the technology and volunteer network that moves surplus food from grocers, restaurants, and farms to community fridges, shelters, and the institutions that feed Kingstonians who would otherwise go hungry. I co-founded Good Neighbours Co-Housing, an affordable co-housing model built on compatibility-matching with a community Weathering Centre in every home.

Each project applies what I learned in Helsinki. Each can stand on its own. Each one would go further, faster, with Council finally pulling in the same direction.

What else I do, and what I have done

For more than a decade I volunteered weekly at the Seniors' Centre — eleven years there, plus stints with the Oasis Senior Support Living Program and at Collins Bay Institution where I taught philosophy to inmates. Those were good years and I am grateful for what they taught me. My volunteer attention now is concentrated on the three projects above.

I am also the founder and moderator of the Philosophy Hammer, a local philosophy discussion club. The Hammer is on pause while the three projects move toward delivery. It will return.

What hasn't changed

I am still a property owner in Meadowbrook-Strathcona. I still run my businesses. I still keep Sunday coffee hours, every week, 3:00 to 4:00 pm at the Kingston Coffee House in the Kingston Centre — no appointment needed.

The promise I made when I first ran in 2014 was that I would be more available than anyone else on Council. Twelve years later, I am still keeping it.