#SmartSaanich

Once Upon A Time...#SmartSaanich was my idea for a brand online to tag and capture a few different ideas together:

• The Braintrust of our residents: citizen scientists and journalists, volunteers for crowdsourcing, activating our high average IQ in Saanich, involving our post-secondary institutions, and engaging our well-educated citizenry.

• Political/public debate: focussed on policy (not personality), legislation (not ideology), regulatory and legal nuances (not feelings), performance metrics in programming (not photo-ops), cross-jurisdictional analysis of best practice...

• "Smart" also came from "LiveSmart", "PowerSmart", S.M.A.R.T. and "Smart Growth" + "Smart tech", "Smartphones", etc.

• What I loved about Vic Derman and Rebecca Mersereau in 2014 was how demonstrably intelligent and rational they were. I even saw this quality in Mike Geoghegan in the 2017 by-election (but NOT in the 2018 big-mike anti-StepCode nonsense running for Mayor of Victoria).

Today, I have learned a lot since running in 2018. For one, "identity" and "advocacy" - things I once dismissed as distractions - have a very important role to play. Because "winning the hearts and minds" includes hearts. And minds can be collective, separate entities from strictly rational individual brains, and we need collective wisdom and collective values to solve collective-action problems. And despite my libertarian and reductionist rooted reference points, I am ulitmatley a community-driven extrovert who recognises the efficiency and resilence to collectivism and the folly of individualism. While I used to rail against "belief" in "values" in political rhetoric (and you'll still see my default settings of "know" about "facts") I have become 'woke' to the fact that we all experience the world differently. That there are various "ways of knowing" all of which can be equally legitimate and equally capable of working together and acheiving the same outcomes. And outcomes are something we desperate need more of from our politicians - especially now, in this era of climate catastrophe, affordablity & health crises, algorithmically disparate news sources, effective corporate gaslighting, precarious condictions for local small business, aging infrastructure, technological advancements, distrupted markets and fragile democratic institutions.