What Patrick will bring to the Park Board: Broad business experience covers a huge swath of Vancouvers industries, from high-tech to urban agriculture. His experience as a co-owner in both capital markets firms as well as bookkeeping firms gives him a solid grasp of finance. Extensive travel and work abroad have given him a wealth of knowledge about different ways to attack problems we face as well as a very healthy respect for engaged democracy and responsible governance. Data-driven skill sets for looking at our parks and amenities with less bias and a desire to use those skills to chip away at more significant problems like climate change and community mental health with tools uniquely at the Park Board's disposal. As a downtown resident living at the tail end of the Granville Entertainment District, he has a strong interest in seeing a safer, greener and friendlier downtown accessible to all. Career-wise: Patrick has worked in information technology, finance and business development for more than 25 years, much of that in leadership roles. His background has touched a large number of fields, from computational biology to near-real-time satellite wildfire detection; a surprising number of those fields are useful in solving some of the more complex issues the Park Board faces. Several of his startups have been in the fields of crowd-sourcing, polling and opinion analysis, giving him a healthy respect for the latent knowledge in our electorate.  Passions: As someone who learned to program computers at a very young age, he regularly contributes to the Open Source Movement and is an active privacy advocate. He's a HAM - VE7XBC Patrick and his wife Erin run a film production company currently working on short films and animations focussing on the strange and interesting intersection of horror and comedy.  There's More to Life: Living in one of the craft beer capitals of the world, you can often find him enjoying a wild sour or some excellent nitro stout from one of our many local brewers. He loves exploring the fascinating history of our great city. It's rich, grotty, beautiful, raucous and sometimes just plain strange, but it's always interesting. More than anything, he enjoys meeting new people and hearing their stories.