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

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 ultimately a community-driven extrovert who recognises the efficiency and resilence of 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 conditions for local small business, aging infrastructure, technological advancements, distrupted markets and fragile democratic institutions.