JC RATHWELL — CANDIDATE QUESTIONNAIRE OK, Let’s Vote — Kelowna’s 2026 Election Guide Office: Kelowna City Council Submitted: September 16, 2026, 12:18 PM (time displayed by CRM) Reviewed and published September 16, 2026 Answers supplied by the candidate or authorized campaign representative and published with saved authorization. Private contact details and internal identifiers are excluded. Wording follows the original response; paragraph spacing is normalized. These are attributed campaign statements, not independently audited facts or outcomes. Conditional and undecided answers are not forced into support or opposition. Hypothetical answers about past council motions are not recorded votes. PROFILE AND PRIORITIES 01 · Your candidacy and priorities Answer: Councillor for Kelowna Give a short biography focused on experience relevant to the office. What would you bring that voters cannot learn from a job title? Answer: I’ve lived in Kelowna for over 30 years and I’m not a career politician—I’m a business owner who has actually signed paycheques, managed teams, and dealt with the real‑world consequences of City Hall’s decisions. I’ve built and run multiple businesses across rentals, tourism, media, and AI operations, handled payroll, permits, inspections, and regulations, and seen firsthand how red tape, bad bylaws, and soft‑on‑crime policies hurt workers, families, and small business owners. I’m stepping into this election to bring common‑sense, business‑minded leadership to council, to cut through bureaucracy, and to hold the current Kelowna City Council accountable for the decline we’ve watched in crime, homelessness, and affordability. What are your three highest priorities for the next term? For each, give a first-year action, a measurable result and a realistic timeline. Answer: Crime and public safety – Kelowna doesn’t just have a “homelessness” problem, it has a drug and soft‑on‑crime problem, and until we deal with that honestly nothing else gets fixed. Practical action: Push for a hard shift in enforcement against repeat violent and property offenders, including a public dashboard showing crime stats and how often offenders are actually being charged and sentenced, so residents can see whether council’s decisions are making streets safer or not. Small business and red tape – Small business owners are the backbone of Kelowna, not City Hall, and they’ve been crushed by fees, DCC charges, permits, and rules written by people who’ve never made payroll. Practical action: Launch an immediate “Red Tape Cut‑List” review with small business owners at the table, identify the top 10 anti‑business bylaws and fees, and bring a motion to reduce or eliminate them within the first year, with public reporting on what was actually changed. Accountability and real leadership at City Hall – We need councillors and mayors with real business responsibility, strict term limits, and full transparency on every vote so the public can see who backed failing projects and who fought against them. Practical action: Introduce a package to (a) publish every council vote in a simple, searchable public record, and (b) implement a two‑term limit for mayors and councillors, paired with pay reform funded by cutting the bloated city manager salary, so real business owners can afford to serve and stale career politicians are forced out. How would you handle conflicts of interest, lobbying, gifts, campaign support, closed meetings and recusal? What additional disclosure or independent oversight would you support? Answer: I’m blunt about this: every major decision and every council vote should be easy for residents to see, not buried in PDFs and meeting minutes that only insiders can navigate. I would push for a simple, searchable public record of all council votes and attendance—who voted for what, who voted against it, and what the result was—so people can connect failed projects and bad outcomes directly to the councillors who backed them. On top of that, I would keep my own positions, reasoning, and mistakes visible on platforms like VoteForMeOrDont.com and BRACE for Change, and hold regular open forums where residents can challenge my decisions and see whether I’m living up to what I promised or not Disclose business ownership, employment, directorships, development interests, paid advisory roles or other financial interests relevant to the office. Give public sources and explain how you would handle related decisions. Do not include home addresses, account numbers or confidential documents. Answer: Yes. I’m part of BRACE for Change—Businesses and Residents Against Crime Everywhere—a slate of small business owners and community leaders running to bring safer streets, accountability, and common‑sense leadership to Kelowna City Council. My core interest is defending small business and “the little guy”: I’ve spent decades building businesses here, speaking out against red tape, soft‑on‑crime policies, and insider politics, and I’m running specifically to put business‑minded, awake‑not‑woke leadership into City Hall QUICK POSITIONS 1. The City should shorten and simplify the process for approving new homes. Answer: Yes / Support 2. The City should reduce development cost charges on new housing. Answer: yes - Development cost charges in Kelowna are one of the key reasons real housing for real people is unaffordable, and they hit small builders and buyers hardest; I support significantly reducing DCCs on new housing so we stop using fees as a barrier to supply and start making it possible for business‑minded builders to actually get projects done. 3. Restrictions on short-term rentals should be loosened. Answer: Yes / Support 4. The City should pursue expanded public transit service. Answer: Yes / Support 5. Infrastructure and service capacity should be ready before major additional growth is approved. Answer: Yes / Support 6. The City should advocate for expanded involuntary addiction-treatment capacity. Answer: Yes / Support – Kelowna doesn’t just have a homelessness problem, it has a hard‑drug problem, and pretending everyone can “choose” treatment while they’re deep in addiction is fantasy; I support expanded involuntary treatment capacity with strong safeguards, because getting repeat offenders and severely addicted people into real treatment is the only way we’re going to stop the cycle of open‑air drug use, crime, and street disorder 7. The City should invest in wildfire prevention and preparedness. Answer: Yes / Support 8. The City should carry out additional spending audits or operational reviews. Answer: Yes / Support 9. The City should make individual councillors’ voting records easier to find and search. Answer: Yes / Support 10. Would you have supported the October 27, 2025 electoral-reform study and conditional referendum-preparation motion? This bundled decision did not implement wards. Answer: Conditional / Depends – I support serious electoral reform work, including looking at ward or hybrid systems and ranked ballots, but I do not support half‑measures that burn staff time and taxpayer money without a clear path to real change and better accountability. I would only back a study and referendum‑prep motion if it included a concrete commitment to present voters with a clear, binding choice on wards or other reforms—and if it came with full transparency on how each councillor votes, so people can see exactly who fought for change and who protected the status quo we’re stuck with today. 11. Would you have supported the March 16, 2026 second and third land-use and rezoning readings for part of Kelowna Springs? These were not final adoption. Answer: No / Oppose – I would not have supported moving those readings forward, because pushing industrial rezoning on a floodplain golf course after years of public controversy showed exactly how disconnected this council is from residents, long‑term environmental risk, and community spaces. Any land‑use change of that scale should have waited for full floodplain and environmental work, clearer public support, and a transparent breakdown of who benefits financially; instead, the current council forced through readings that helped trigger an outcome many residents still see as a betrayal of trust, and they should be held accountable for that. 12. Would you have supported the April 20, 2026 financial-plan and tax-funding motion, with its stated average net property impact of 4.40%? Individual bills vary. Answer: No / Oppose – I would not have supported a $1.1‑billion budget with a 4.4% property tax hike when families, renters, and small business owners are already getting hammered by rising costs, fees, and red tape. When council spends 11% more and calls a 4.4% tax increase “reasonable,” it’s clear they’re protecting their own spending priorities instead of cutting waste; my position is that the current council should be held accountable for piling on tax increases without first stripping out bloated management pay, failed projects, and unnecessary bureaucracy. 13. The City should help expand co-operative housing and community land trusts. Answer: Yes / Support – I support expanding co‑ops and community land trusts as part of the toolbox for fixing housing affordability, because taking land out of pure speculation and locking in long‑term affordability can help lower‑ and middle‑income residents actually stay in the city. My condition is that these projects are run with clear, transparent governance, hard affordability targets, and no insider deals—if taxpayers are helping fund co‑ops or land trusts, then the units they create must stay genuinely affordable over time, not drift back toward full market pricing while politicians pretend they solved the problem. Editorial note: Although the answer begins Yes / Support, its explanation sets explicit conditions on governance and permanent affordability. It is retained without a binary match score. 14. The City should strengthen protections for tenants displaced by redevelopment or renovations. Answer: Yes / Support 15. The City should allow more small shops and cafés within residential neighbourhoods. Answer: Yes / Support 16. The City should advocate for a second bridge crossing of Okanagan Lake. Answer: Yes / Support 17. The City should invest in filling gaps in its sidewalk and cycling networks. Answer: Yes / Support 18. The City should expand foot patrols in commercial areas experiencing crime and disorder. Answer: Yes / Support 19. The City should support expanded non-police response teams for suitable mental-health and substance-use calls. Answer: Yes / Support 20. The City should increase access to public washrooms. Answer: Yes / Support 21. The City should prioritize protecting agricultural land when making land-use decisions. Answer: Yes / Support – I support protecting agricultural land as a core priority in land‑use decisions, because once you pave over good farmland you don’t get it back, and BC’s Agricultural Land Reserve exists precisely to stop short‑term development pressure from destroying long‑term food security. Kelowna’s own plans already say agricultural areas should be shielded from urban encroachment, and I believe council should be held accountable any time it votes to chip away at that land base for non‑farm uses that don’t deliver clear, overwhelming public benefit. 22. The City should strengthen protection for existing trees. Answer: Yes / Support 23. The City should limit annual property-tax increases to inflation. Answer: Yes / Support – when council keeps approving tax hikes above inflation year after year, it’s basically using homeowners and small businesses as an ATM to fund its own growth instead of cutting waste and fixing priorities. I support tying tax increases to inflation as a default cap, and forcing council to publicly justify and vote on any exception—so residents can clearly see who is voting to take more than inflation from their wallets and hold those councillors accountable at the next election. Editorial note: The answer permits publicly justified exceptions to an inflation cap. It is retained as conditional for comparison purposes. 24. Mayor and council pay increases should take effect only after the next election. Answer: Yes / Support 25. Would you support a ward system for Kelowna, where residents elect councillors to represent defined geographic areas? Answer: No / Oppose AFFORDABILITY AND ADDITIONAL COMMENTS Which actions would you prioritize to make housing more affordable in Kelowna? Answer: My priorities are blunt: fix supply, cut costs, and target real affordability instead of PR. I would select and focus on these actions: Speed up and simplify housing approvals – the city’s own reports admit that tight supply and slow approvals have helped push Kelowna into one of the most unaffordable markets in Canada; faster, clearer approvals for well‑designed projects are essential to stop choking supply. Allow more housing in areas with infrastructure and services – it’s common sense to add more homes where roads, pipes, transit, and services already exist, instead of pushing sprawl into new areas that drive up costs for everyone. Reduce development fees, with a plan to fund infrastructure – DCCs and other fees are a real cost driver, especially for smaller builders; I support reducing them, particularly for affordable and purpose‑built rental projects, and pairing that with a clear infrastructure funding plan so we’re not just shifting the bill onto already‑squeezed homeowners. Partner on non‑market, co‑op and affordable rental housing – Kelowna’s housing needs assessment says we need a ten‑fold increase in subsidized rental delivery and hundreds of new affordable units every year; partnering with non‑profits, co‑ops, and land trusts is the only way to deliver real affordability at scale. Beyond housing, which actions would you prioritize to make everyday life more affordable in Kelowna? Answer: I would select these three priorities: Review municipal spending to limit taxes and fees – when council keeps approving 4%+ tax hikes and higher fees on top of inflation, they are directly driving up the cost of living for families and small businesses. I would push hard spending reviews, cut waste and bloated management costs, and make tax and fee increases the last resort, not the default. Support local jobs and business opportunities – small business owners are the backbone of Kelowna’s economy, and they’re being crushed by red tape, DCCs, and rising costs pushed out of City Hall. I would prioritize cutting anti‑business bylaws and fees, simplifying permitting, and backing local employers so more people can earn good incomes here instead of being priced out of their own city. Expand affordable public transit – better, safer, and more reliable transit isn’t just an environmental issue; it directly cuts transportation costs for workers, students, and families, especially as fuel and insurance keep climbing. I would support targeted transit expansion on the routes people actually need, with a focus on affordability and security so the system becomes a real alternative to owning a second car. What important issue did we miss? Add any policy position, clarification or response to the existing guide that you want voters to consider. Answer: Please note on my profile that I am running as part of the BRACE for Change slate (Businesses and Residents Against Crime Everywhere) and that my full platform, videos, and detailed positions are available at VoteForMeOrDont.com and BraceForChange.ca. I’d also like it made clear that I’m a blunt, business‑minded candidate who believes the entire current Kelowna City Council should be held accountable and voted out for the state they’ve allowed this city to slide into, and that I support strict two‑term limits for mayors and councillors and full transparency on every council vote so residents can easily see who backed failing projects and bad decisions. SUPPORTING MATERIAL Five video links were supplied for publication or editorial review. Their media content has not been independently verified in this review and is not used to establish the profile or comparison positions. No file uploads were included. PUBLICATION AUTHORIZATION I am the candidate or an authorized campaign representative. I authorize OK, Let’s Vote / Gain Street to review and publish these answers with attribution. I have permission to share the supporting material and have identified any items for review only. My private contact email will not be published.