I am not a career politician.
I am a system reformer.
The 2026 Vancouver election will not be won by out-shouting opponents. It will be won by making the machinery answerable.
My name is Peter Tu [杜宗驥].
I am an operator, a small business owner, a former claims leader, and a system reformer.
For more than two decades, I have worked where ordinary people collide with broken systems: delayed answers, unclear rules, institutional indifference, complaint escalations, business bottlenecks, and decisions that make sense on paper but fail human beings in real life.
That experience taught me something simple:
A system that cannot explain itself should not expect blind trust from the people who pay for it.
The Question That Started It
My father was a historian. He taught me to ask: Whose voices are missing from the record?
That question became personal after my family experienced devastating loss during the Burnaby Hospital C. difficile crisis. It showed me that institutional failure is not theoretical. It lands on families. It becomes grief. It exposes the gap between official language and human consequence.
That question never left me.
It followed me into insurance claims, where I learned that complaints are not just problems to manage. They are diagnostic signals. They show where the system is unclear, unfair, delayed, or broken. It followed me into small business, where I learned how hard it can be for ordinary people to navigate licensing, rules, delays, departments, forms, and civic processes that feel impossible to trace from the outside.
And it follows me now into public service.
The Machinery of the Fog
Bureaucracy does not always fail because people are malicious. Often, it fails because the machinery stops listening to reality and starts talking only to itself.
That is the Machinery of the Fog.
- • It uses technical language to make simple questions difficult.
- • It uses process to avoid responsibility.
- • It uses delay to exhaust ordinary people.
- • It uses complexity to filter out those without time, money, or insider knowledge.
At City Hall, this becomes a Black Box: residents can see the taxes they pay and the decisions that affect them, but they cannot easily see how the machinery works inside.
Why I Am Running
I am running because Vancouver needs a Glass Box system.
Residents should be able to see line-by-line budgets in plain language. They should be able to trace promises against votes. They should be able to understand rezoning impacts before decisions are made. They should be able to see whether public benefits are delivered after the cameras leave.
And they should be able to participate in languages that reflect the real city we live in.
The Trilingual Bridge
I speak English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
That is not a party trick. It is a structural tool for opening the civic floor. When we say “Canadian,” that should not flatten people into one language, one culture, or one way of participating. The beauty of Canada is that anyone can be Canadian. But that also means civic communication must reach people where they actually are.
A public process that only works for fluent technical English speakers is not enough. We need plain-language, multilingual civic access for major decisions affecting housing, zoning, budgets, small businesses, services, and livability.
The Promise Standard
When I make a promise, I want to know whether it can be kept.
- If it can be kept, show how.
- If it cannot be kept, do not pretend.
- If it must be changed, explain why.
- If it is broken, show the record.
That is what I expect from government. That is what residents should expect from anyone asking for public trust.
The System Reform Platform
My platform is not built on performance politics. It is built on system repair.
Line-by-Line Budgets
If taxpayers pay for it, taxpayers should be able to trace it.
Oversight With Teeth
The Auditor General and independent oversight tools should be strong enough to examine not only dollars, but delays, bottlenecks, procurement failures, and service breakdowns.
Open the Floor
Major zoning, budget, housing, and livability decisions must be explained in plain language and made accessible across communities before decisions are locked in.
Ask Us First
The people most affected by civic decisions must be heard before the machinery moves.
I am not running to decorate the machinery.
I am running to alter it.
To explain it. To make it answerable to the people who live here, work here, pay for it, and endure its consequences.
This city does not belong to an opaque process.
It belongs to the people.
Peter Tu [杜宗驥] • TEAM 2026
TheOpenGov.com
Authorized by the Financial Agent for Peter Tu and TEAM [溫哥華選民行動運動]
”
Appendix: The April 12th Verbatim Testimony
TEAM AGM Foundational Speech
Narrative Context: The “Dr. Ley Moment”
Earlier in the event, Dr. David Ley introduced Peter to the audience, noting his diverse origins tied to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the UK. He awkwardly wondered aloud if Peter held passports for each of those places. Taking the podium, Peter leaned into the joke, grounded his sole Canadian identity, and used an 8-year-old’s memory of the Hong Kong border to pivot to a profound message of unity using John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
“Thank you everyone. To address Dr. David Ley’s first wondering on espionage or even foreign interference—I only have the Canadian passport by the way. When I was eight I was standing at the Hong Kong border and the communist side of things. I always wonder. And now I have a line for it. Because if you have ever heard of John Lennon’s song, Imagine if there’s no country. Because I think we are all the same. All what we want is the same disregard of the packages.
So welcome everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Peter Tu and I’m not a career politician. I’m an operator. I’m a system reformer. And I am a proud generalist. So a jack of all trades.
And for more than two decades, I have worked where ordinary people collide with broken systems, delayed answers and institutional indifferences, seeing what happens when the system, the machinery, stops serving the people.
And I know that personally. In 2012, I lost my father after a catastrophic institutional failure at Burnaby hospital, where about 800 people contracted C. diff. And after many years, I’ve realized the problem is they outsourced the cleaning crew from $27 to something that is a lot cheaper. And these are to cut corners. So my father was a historian. He taught me a question that powerful systems rarely like to hear: Whose voices are missing from the record? And that question never left me. Because when institutions fail, they don’t fail just on the paper, they fail on people. And that failure is also in grief. They fail in the widening distance between what the system says and what the human being suffers.
So after that incident, I left the corporate world where I was handling complex insurance claims escalation, working close with an ombudsperson. And I realized taking complaints is critical to improving systems. Because how could you improve the system without the understanding, listening to the people? That will be equivalent to buying insurance that has no complaint department. So would you buy it? You will never buy that kind of insurance.
So then I started my own small business in wellness because I want to start building something rooted in dignity, clarity and care. So then when you try to operate your own small business through the pandemic and whatnot, then you came into another problem, which is the machinery of the fog. Another name I have for City Hall. Machinery of fog. They have business license delays, administrative bottlenecks. And I’ve learned through this whole process that you can never find the staff directory of City Hall. They have rules that were difficult to decipher, hard to challenge, and nearly impossible for an ordinary person to understand unless you spend a lot of time, money and hope.
And this is where it became clear to me that bureaucracy does not always fail because people are malicious or maybe not, I don’t know. It fails because the machinery stops listening to reality and starts talking to itself. At City Hall, highly trained experts use dense technical jargon to build an artificial filter to build a black box.
I call it a black box. And this black box, it’s a system where they don’t want to explain things and they delay and they have no one being held accountable, so to say.
And when people expect to obey a system that cannot be explained, this is not the reality we want as a taxpayer, we want a system that can be traceable. So I’m running because I want to end that.
I want to open up the system. And I think the best way is to turn the black box system into a glass box system where citizens can finally see line to line budgets, for example, and also things to expand the Auditor General of which is enacted by TEAM. And this is one of the major reasons I’m standing here, because when I make a promise, I don’t want to break it.
So when I join a political party as a non-career politician, the most important thing for me is when I make a promise, is it possible? Or am I just making a wide promise?
And if I keep the promise, how do I keep the promise? And if I have to break the promise, you probably will hear a thesis from me explaining exactly why. And that never really occurs. I only see politicians going around in events, taking photo ops and whatnot. And hardly ever do they sit down and speak to the people. They have to open up that floor.
So my vision is basically to turn City Hall into a glass box system. That’s why earlier I mentioned that I’m a system reformer and I’m trilingual in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. And for the city of Vancouver, I think that’s critical for opening up the floor for more understanding and more interaction with different culture. I’m not saying Chinese are the only culture that we need to interact with, but when you say Canadian, quite often that’s not enough. Because as Canadian, one of the best things we do is when someone says you’re Canadian, you want to ask more because anyone can be a Canadian. And that’s the beauty of it.
So I’m not running to decorate the machinery, I’m running to alter it, to explain it, to make it answerable to the people who live here, work here, pay for it and endure the values. Because this city does not belong to the opaque process, it belongs to the people like us. Thank you.”
