West Kelowna City Council Candidate

I am a West Kelowna city council candidate in the election on Saturday, October 17, 2026. Here is the honest version of why.

Every organization I have walked into over the past fifteen years had the same thing hiding inside it. Money going out the door for results nobody was measuring. When I arrived at Focus College there was no CRM, no conversion tracking, and campaigns nobody could evaluate. I implemented Keap from scratch, rebuilt the workflows, and set up tracking that actually reported. Cost per conversion dropped 73.8% and leads went up 121.5%. Nothing was cut to get there. The spending just started landing where it worked.

That is the instinct I want to bring to the table. Six councillor seats are up this fall, and I am asking for one of them.

Why I am running as a West Kelowna city council candidate

My family is the short answer. My wife and I are raising three young boys here. I was born in Vancouver and I have been in the Okanagan since I was five, so this is not a place I moved to for the view. It is the place my kids will grow up, learn to drive, and hopefully be able to afford to live in.

The longer answer is that I keep seeing local government problems that look exactly like the problems I get paid to fix. A process that takes four steps when it should take one. A budget line nobody has questioned in six years. A service that residents complain about where the actual failure is two departments upstream of the complaint. That work is not glamorous, but it is where the money is.

I want a council that treats every dollar like it belongs to the household it came from, because it does.

What I actually do for a living

I am the Chief Operating Officer at CanScribe Career College, where I own marketing, admissions, student services, IT, and accounting. I also run Chapman Digital Marketing, a small agency I founded in 2021, and Chapman Outdoors, an e-commerce shop selling fishing flies and lures.

I have a Bachelor of Management from UBC Okanagan with a specialization in marketing and data analysis, plus a semester at the University of Birmingham studying leadership and management theory.

The common thread across all of it is operations. Systems, data, process, and the unglamorous work of making an organization do more with what it already has.

Efficiency is not a code word for cuts

I want to be very clear about this, because “find efficiencies” has been used as cover for gutting services in plenty of places. As a West Kelowna city council candidate I am not going looking for services to remove.

When I modernized systems at CanScribe, including a new CRM, a new LMS, and a new phone and texting platform, time to technical resolution fell by 50%. Students got help faster. Nobody lost a service. In the same period our student withdrawal rate went from 10.2% down to 6.5% and graduate employment sat at 88% within two weeks of graduation.

Before that, as Vice-President, lead generation went up 31.1% on a flat budget and fraudulent ad clicks dropped 70%. Same money, better outcome, plus we stopped paying for clicks that were never real people.

Every one of those numbers came from measuring something that was not being measured, then changing where the effort went. That is the version of efficiency I am running on.

The four things I would push for

Every West Kelowna city council candidate will tell you they want value for taxpayer money. Here is what that actually means in practice for me.

1. Measure it before you fund it

If a program cannot tell you what it produced last year, that is the first problem to solve, not the budget line. I have never once been able to improve something I could not measure. I would rather spend a month building the reporting than a year arguing about a number nobody trusts.

2. Fix the friction residents actually feel

My instinct is to look for the step that takes longer than it should. Permits, service requests, getting a real answer from the right department. Residents do not experience a budget, they experience a wait time. Those are usually process problems, not funding problems, and process problems are cheap to fix compared to almost anything else on a municipal agenda.

3. Count the cost of doing nothing

Deferring a decision has a price, it just does not show up on the same page as the spending. Water infrastructure, wildfire readiness, road rehabilitation. I have built enrollment and revenue forecasting models and pipeline decision frameworks, and the discipline is the same: put a number on the option where you do nothing, then compare honestly.

4. Let staff fix what they already know is broken

The people who know exactly where a process wastes time are the people doing it every day. Atlassian runs a quarterly 24-hour event called ShipIt, where staff from every department, not just engineering, drop their normal work and build a fix for something that bothers them. I have been obsessed with that idea for years.

City staff are residents too. They pay the same taxes and sit in the same lineups. Give them a real window to say what is actually broken and take a run at fixing it, and you will get better answers than any consultant will hand you for six figures. My job would be to ask for that list and then clear the way.

Where I have done this outside of work

I coached youth soccer in the Okanagan for more than fifteen years and worked with over a thousand young athletes. With Lake Country Youth Soccer Association I was the club-wide goalkeeping coach for all 20 teams, then Vice-Chairman, then Chairman in 2014 and 2015. That is where I learned governance: a volunteer board, real money, and real accountability to parents who will find you in the parking lot.

During my tenure we brought in an Okanagan-first partnership with Whitecaps FC, made coach training mandatory, and hit record enrollment. In 2023 I took a Westside Youth U16 team that had not won a game in two seasons to the semi-finals, mostly by rebuilding trust and confidence in a group that had stopped believing it could win.

In 2024 I spent three months on Stephen Johnson’s federal campaign in West Kelowna-Peachland. I built the website, ran the digital advertising strategy, set up lead collection and donation funnels, and knocked on doors. He finished as the most voted for Independent candidate in the province. Doors are not glamorous either. You learn more in an hour on a driveway than in a week of reading reports.

What I am not

I am not a planner, an engineer, or a lawyer. I am not a developer or a designer either, although I did build and ship a live subscription software product this year using Claude Code. I know enough to direct AI and direct experts, ask better questions, and recognize when an answer does not add up.

I have never held elected office. What I have done is sit on a volunteer board, chair it mid-term when it needed someone, and run operations for organizations where the numbers were public and my name was on them.

How to vote on October 17

General voting day is Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. West Kelowna elects one mayor, six councillors, and one school trustee for the 2026 to 2030 term. The final list of every West Kelowna city council candidate is posted after the nomination deadline closes.

Key dates for the 2026 West Kelowna general local election. Confirm details on the city’s election page before you plan your vote.

Polling stations on general voting day are at Glenrosa Elementary, City Hall, Constable Neil Bruce Middle School, and Hudson Road Elementary. Advance voting happens at City Hall only. Full details are on the City of West Kelowna 2026 election page, and Elections BC’s general local elections page covers the province-wide rules.

What I am asking for

Talk to me. Tell me which interaction with the city cost you an afternoon it should not have. Tell me what you think we are overpaying for. I would rather hear the specific complaint than a general one, because the specific ones are fixable.

There are more names on the ballot than there are seats, so ask every West Kelowna city council candidate the same hard questions. I will be knocking on doors between now and October 17. Bring them to me too.