Public safety
People should feel safe walking home, riding a bike, taking transit, and opening a shop in the morning. That means visible policing, real support for people in crisis, and following through on the plans the city already has.
Why she's running
Joyce Gillespie has called Vancouver's West Side home since 1994. She and her husband raised three children here, all of them through Vancouver's public schools, with two now in university and the youngest in high school. Watching them grow up and put down roots in this city, through school and sport and the friendships that came with both, is one of the privileges of her life.
A community is its families, and the kids those families are raising. Joyce has spent years on the volunteer side of that work: president of Dunbar Little League, vice-president of the Vancouver Thunderbirds Minor Hockey Association, and an event fundraiser raising money for local charities. It is unglamorous work, mostly done on weeknights and weekends, and hundreds of West Side families know Joyce because she showed up to do it, season after season.
Professionally, she is an entrepreneur. A UBC political science graduate, she co-founded a natural skin care company in 2001, spent fourteen years as a project management consultant, and in 2020 co-founded a technology platform that helps Canadians find work quickly and get paid within 24 hours.
Joyce has been on both sides of housing in Vancouver. She rents her home now, and she has owned one, including a stretch as a landlord. She has opened the rent increase notice that arrives every year, and she has carried the mortgage, the property taxes and the repair bills on a home she rented out. She knows the pressure that rent increase puts on a family's monthly budget, and the pressure a vacancy or a failed furnace puts on an owner's. So when renters or owners talk about what they are up against, she is not hearing it secondhand.
She is running because the things families count on, safe streets, community centres that are open, ice rinks, swimming pools, and playing fields that are looked after, are what a city is actually judged on. Joyce has spent enough weeknights in those rinks, fields and community halls to know when they are working and when they are not.
Good ideas are not enough on their own. Turning them into real change takes tireless work, and that is the work I want to do for Vancouver.