Increase Public Involvement, Encourage Local Food Production and Co-operative Housing

Chris Johnson is a community organizer and social entreprenuer. He is the founder of Pedal to Petal Urban Agriculture Collective; (the pioneer of bicycle powered food waste pick-up), and a co-founder of B Channel News, a locally-focused online news agency.

Chris is a co-founding board member of Vancouver Island Community Forest Action Network, and works with several local community groups and organizations on issues of poverty, homelessness, food security, and land protection.

In addition to running for mayor, Chris is co-ordinating a local food justice organization called Everybody Eats, whose mandate is “to create new models for food security that support local farmers and traditional food practices, increase access to food for low income people, create employment that fits our values, and builds communities.”

Chris has worked in the past at an agency that supports people with developmental disabilities, a large homeless shelter in Calgary, and a non-profit working to protect the wild bison herd outside Yellowstone Park in Montana.

On the People’s Assembly/Occupy Movement

Until this point in the campaign, I’ve had no official ‘opinion/statement’ to give regarding the People’s Assembly in Spirit/Centennial Square, and the larger ‘Occupy Movement’. The only statement I have made in public was in regards to the terminology employed. The basis of the critique was that the term ‘occupation’, is a politically loaded term to say the least, and is used in conversations about colonialism, indigenous sovereienty and local history to refer to white settlement of North America.

Terminology and venacular are political hot potatoes. How we refer to these lands can be perceived as indicitive of our position on the issue of colonialism.