Official Candidate for Mayor of Owen Sound

Platform

Andrii Zvorygin is an official candidate for Mayor of Owen Sound in the 2026 municipal election. His platform is built around three pillars: transparency, participation, and compassion. The goal is a city where residents can understand decisions, take part in caring for their neighbourhoods, and work through hard problems together for the long-term good of Owen Sound.

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This page begins with the three pillars, then explains how those pillars apply to neighbourhood representation, resident participation, food security, housing, local resilience, and county-level leadership.

Contents

The Three Pillars

Transparency

Transparency is more than publishing documents. Residents should be able to see what decisions are being made, what services cost, how city spending connects to outcomes, who represents their neighbourhood at council, what meetings are happening, and what the results were.

Residents should also have public civic spaces where local needs, concerns, ideas, and proposals can be discussed openly. Private submissions to council should still be supported, but public discussion should also be easier for residents who want to participate in the open.

Andrii has already worked toward this through helpos.ca, which makes Owen Sound agendas, transcripts, meeting results, local articles, and civic discussion easier to access.

An online civic forum can help make residents' needs more visible, rather than leaving participation limited to private emails, individual complaints, or formal delegations.

Read more about neighbourhood representation.

Participation

Participation means rebuilding the civic capacity of Owen Sound. As fuel, machinery, materials, insurance, infrastructure, policing, and service costs rise, Owen Sound cannot rely on tax increases to stay liveable.

Residents should have safe, voluntary, well-organized ways to help prevent problems early, care for neighbourhoods, strengthen local food systems, support vulnerable neighbours, and reduce pressure on expensive reactive services.

This shared stewardship should be city-approved, voluntary, and designed with residents, staff, labour representatives, local organizations, and trained responders. It should respect safety rules, liability limits, collective agreements, and professional responsibilities while adding civic capacity around core public services.

At its best, participation helps people feel that they belong to the city, and that the city belongs to them. It gives residents practical ways to contribute their gifts, care for the places they love, build trust with neighbours, and help Owen Sound become more resilient, connected, and alive.

Read more about shared stewardship and civic participation.

Compassion

Compassion means approaching hard public problems with care for everyone involved. When new, stressful, or unexpected situations arise, people can naturally react with fear, anger, blame, or a desire for control. If those surface reactions guide public decisions, they can create separation, division, and a loss of community cohesion.

Andrii believes Owen Sound should develop safeguards and guidelines that help residents, council, and city staff work through difficult issues with steadiness, respect, and emotional maturity. The goal is to slow down enough to look beneath the first reaction and understand the love, care, grief, responsibility, vulnerability, or desire for belonging that may be underneath it.

A compassionate city still makes practical decisions. It looks for the love and human need inside the moment, then responds with forgiveness, compassion, and clear action. This means asking what systemic or incidental changes could help bring greater cohesion, unity, dignity, safety, and longevity to the community.

Compassion should include everyone affected by a difficult situation: residents, staff, vulnerable people, neighbours, businesses, taxpayers, landlords, tenants, police, service providers, and future generations.

Possible platform actions:

Neighbourhood Representation

Neighbourhood representation applies all three pillars.

It supports transparency because residents can see who represents their area, where to bring concerns, and how neighbourhood needs are being handled at council.

It supports participation because each neighbourhood has a clearer place for residents to organize ideas, identify local needs, support local improvements, and grow future civic leadership.

It supports compassion because neighbourhood councillors would be expected to take a compassionate approach when dealing with citizens, staff, local concerns, and difficult situations. That means using the campaign's compassionate civic process: slowing down, looking beneath surface reactions, seeking the love and human need behind the conflict, and working toward decisions that build cohesion over time.

Andrii supports exploring seven neighbourhoods, with one councillor per neighbourhood, so representation is clearer and accountability is easier to follow. The mayor would still represent the whole city and advocate for Owen Sound at Grey County and higher levels of government.

Read the full neighbourhood representation plan.

Shared Stewardship and Civic Participation

As fuel, machinery, materials, insurance, infrastructure, policing, and service costs rise, Owen Sound cannot rely on tax increases to stay liveable. Local property taxes are already high by Ontario city standards, so the city needs more civic capacity, stronger prevention, and better ways for residents to help care for the places where they live.

Shared stewardship should give residents clear, practical ways to help care for Owen Sound without needing to wait for every problem to become a formal complaint, expensive repair, or emergency response. The goal is prevention, belonging, and local care.

Possible programs could include:

These programs should be voluntary, city-approved, and designed with staff, residents, labour representatives, local organizations, and trained responders so they add civic capacity while respecting safety, public workers, and professional responsibilities.

Neighbourhood Stewardship Credit

Andrii supports exploring a legally reviewed Neighbourhood Stewardship Credit: a local civic-credit system that could work like a small local currency for verified contributions to city-approved projects.

Residents could earn credits by helping with approved neighbourhood stewardship work, such as public-space care, community food projects, neighbourhood cleanups, local resilience work, or other civic contributions. Those credits could then circulate locally under clear rules.

Possible uses could include municipal program credits, recreation credits, local vouchers, participating local businesses, rent-credit arrangements, or limited property-tax-related credits where legally permitted.

This would need careful design so the credits have real local value while supporting public services, renters, property owners, local businesses, municipal workers, and the wider community.

Program safeguards should include:

Land, Housing, Food Security, and Local Resilience

Food security, housing affordability, firewood, local business, and local resilience are connected. As land, energy, fertilizer, machinery, transportation, and housing costs rise, younger generations need a credible path toward affordable homes, practical skills, family life, land-based businesses, and low-input food and firewood production.

As mayor, Andrii would represent Owen Sound at Grey County. He already knows many of the mayors and has made progress before at the County level on policy and cooperation, so putting forward practical motions on land access, food forest communities, community land trusts, and village-scale housing is a realistic path to pursue.

Making Existing Homes Available

Owen Sound should make full use of the homes it already has.

When homes sit empty while residents are looking for places to live, the city loses twice: families struggle to find housing, and neighbourhoods lose the life, care, and stability that occupied homes bring.

Andrii supports a vacant home tax to bring empty homes back into active use as rentals, owner-occupied homes, or homes for sale. The goal is simple: more homes lived in, more stable neighbourhoods, and more people able to build their lives in Owen Sound.

A city should reward homes being used for people, families, and community. Homes are for people.

High-input farming can save labour, but it depends on fuel, fertilizer, machinery, chemicals, debt, and long-distance transport. When those inputs rise, food costs rise with them.

Low-input farming, edible landscapes, gardens, orchards, greenhouses, woodlots, and small farms can reduce dependence on expensive outside inputs while creating more meaningful local livelihoods. Grey County will need thousands more low-input farmers, growers, tree stewards, firewood producers, food processors, preservers, and local distributors.

Andrii would bring forward a motion to open a path for suitable farm buildings or farmhouses to become shared amenity buildings: places with kitchens, washrooms, laundry, workshops, storage, gathering space, and room for people to build daily life together. Around those shared spaces, families and growers could start with simple, lower-cost homes such as yurts, cabins, tiny homes, or modular units, with land nearby for gardens, orchards, firewood, food forests, and small farm businesses.

The goal is not just cheaper housing. It is a believable path into land, home, companionship, useful work, and community: people growing food together, sharing tools and meals, helping raise children, caring for elders, and building places where love, kindness, responsibility, and belonging are part of ordinary life. Community land trusts and long-term leases can make this practical while protecting property values under today's land-as-investment-asset rules. At the same time, Andrii would advocate to provincial and federal governments for a longer-term shift toward land as a foundation of life.

To help people succeed, community land trusts could include a basic land-readiness course or certification covering low-input food growing, homesteading skills, shared tools, safety, stewardship, and community responsibilities. Like a boating card, the point would be to make sure people understand the basics before they take on land; people with existing knowledge could challenge the test without taking the course. Longer-term support could connect residents with agricultural federations, growers, mentors, workshops, and local organizations instead of leaving people alone on land without guidance.

Affordable Housing Signup

Read the full article: The Yurt Hamlet: Affordable Homes, Productive Lifeways, and Food Security for Grey County.

Homelessness, Substance Use, and Land-Based Recovery

Homelessness and substance use in Owen Sound are visible signs of deeper systemic failures. People need more than emergency services and enforcement: they need space, safety, relationships, purpose, responsibility, and a believable path forward.

The Rat Park study challenged the older addiction model where a rat was trapped alone in a small cage with little more than water or drugged water to choose from. In that isolated cage, drug use looked compulsive and deadly: the confined animal kept choosing the drug until overdose and death. In Rat Park, mammals were given space, social connection, stimulation, and a livable environment. Even after forced opiate exposure, the reported result was dramatic: the rats returned to ordinary water instead of continuing to choose the drugged water. Humans are mammals too. Recovery still needs real support, but environment, community, and meaningful purpose can change what choices feel possible.

Single-room occupancy housing shows the danger of repeating the cage model with human beings. Vancouver's experience with SROs has been marked by isolation, concentrated poverty, and hundreds to thousands of overdose deaths. A room that leaves someone alone, disconnected, and surrounded by despair is not a humane recovery model. People need homes connected to land, community, support, and purpose.

For people with addiction issues, Andrii supports a first-stage land-based recovery model: rehabilitation farms where people can stabilize, learn food-growing skills, participate in community life, and receive support from nurses and other trained staff. This would be similar in spirit to the broader community land trust model, but with specialized support to help people get started.

There are successful precedents for long-term therapeutic communities. San Patrignano in Italy combines long-term residence with farming, food production, trades, shared meals, education, peer support, and gradually increasing responsibility. Its strength is that people are given enough time to rebuild healthy habits, practical competence, relationships, dignity, and a meaningful role in a functioning community.

This is very different from short-term treatment that stabilizes someone for a few weeks and then sends them back into housing insecurity, isolation, poverty, trauma, purposelessness, and ready access to drugs. The US National Institute on Drug Abuse often cites relapse rates around 40-60%, but that should not be presented as a long-term recovery rate. In one five-year follow-up of conventional inpatient treatment, 29.8% of participants remained continuously abstinent, while 70.2% relapsed at least once.

Long-term therapeutic communities have reported stronger sustained outcomes. San Patrignano reports about 72% recovery among residents who complete its full program, with related follow-up research reporting roughly 70% of completers drug-free four years later. These are completer outcomes and should be qualified, but they support the central lesson: recovery improves when people receive years of community, responsibility, meaningful work, and a believable future instead of a few weeks of stabilization followed by a return to the same broken environment.

The proposed Owen Sound and Grey County model would add the next step: a pathway from supported recovery farms into regular community land trusts, where graduates can become growers, builders, food preservers, caregivers, craftspeople, and stewards of shared land. Andrii does not support crowded encampments or small tent zones. The goal is land-based communities sized around carrying capacity, with roughly one hectare, or 2.5 acres, per person as a planning reference, so recovery pathways are distributed within healthy communities instead of concentrated into crisis zones.

Policy tools across land access and recovery include:

Community land trusts can keep land and housing tied to long-term community benefit rather than short-term speculation. Andrii would work with residents, farmers, landowners, housing providers, Indigenous communities, municipal staff, Grey County, service providers, seniors, young families, and younger people to build models that are legal, insurable, financially sound, agriculturally useful, and ready to move from vision into action.

This approach applies the three pillars together: transparency about land, infrastructure, food, and energy limits; participation through shared food and land stewardship; and compassion that gives people real alternatives: stable homes, useful work, food-producing skills, healing, belonging, and a respected place in the community.

County-Level Leadership

The mayor represents Owen Sound at Grey County. County-level decisions affect housing, roads, social services, land use, public health, paramedics, policing pressures, and infrastructure.

Owen Sound needs a mayor who can advocate clearly for local needs while working cooperatively with neighbouring municipalities. County-level leadership should follow the same three pillars: transparent advocacy, participatory regional problem-solving, and compassionate long-term decision-making.

What This Means for Residents

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