Working for you. Building Kingston's future.

I'm Jeff McLaren. I've represented Meadowbrook-Strathcona on Kingston City Council since 2014. Twelve years on Council have taught me that building things that last is harder than passing motions, and that most of the work happens between the meetings. I'm asking for your vote to keep doing the work — the work of fixing what's broken, building what's needed, and listening longer than is comfortable.

The unfinished work

On the bigger problems, Council hasn't moved at the speed Kingston needs. So I started building outside the chamber.

Limestone City Co-operative Housing — a $100M+ co-operative housing project, 250 attainable units, Canada's first to integrate co-op housing with a commercial-scale vertical farm. I'm founding President and Board Chair.

Kingston Food Rescue — the technology and volunteer network that moves surplus food from grocers, restaurants, and farms to community fridges, shelters, and the institutions that feed Kingstonians who would otherwise go hungry. I'm a co-founder.

Good Neighbours Co-Housing — affordable co-housing built on compatibility-matching, with a community Weathering Centre in every home. I'm a co-founder.

Each can stand on its own. Each would go further, faster, with Council finally pulling in the same direction.

Read more about the projects, and what I learned in Finland →

A track record of fixing broken things

In my first term, two of Kingston's most important community organizations were on the brink of collapse.

KEDCO — Kingston's economic development agency — was tangled in feuds, questionable spending, and competing networks more interested in controlling the agency than running it. I joined the board, then co-chaired the KEDCO Review Committee. We tightened governance, narrowed the mandate, and set up Tourism Kingston as its own focused organization. KEDCO and Tourism Kingston have been stable and effective ever since.

Sustainable Kingston was, frankly, dead when I joined the board: one volunteer, no staff, no money, no plan. With the remaining board members, we revitalized it — first by focusing on what could be done immediately, then on what could be done next, and only then on what a new service-level agreement with the City should look like. Today Sustainable Kingston is financially independent, operates beyond Kingston into Brockville and Belleville, and repatriates more federal and provincial tax dollars to our region than ever before.

That's the kind of result I look for. Not a headline. Not a budget line. An institution that keeps working long after I've moved on to the next problem.

What I'm still learning

Reconciliation has been the hardest learning of my time on Council. I came to it as someone who reads history closely and argues about it — and I had to learn that reading isn't the same as listening.

Two teachers shaped me. Laurel Claus-Johnson, a Bear Clan Mohawk Elder I first met during my 2014 campaign, sat me down in 2017 when the question of renaming Indian Road first came up and gave me thirteen names to call. Through them I learned the principle of nothing about us without us — a boundary, a demand for dignity, and a generous one, because the people who hold to it aren't asking only for their own protection. They're asking that no community ever again experience what theirs has.

Sol Mamakwa, Anishinaabe MPP for Kiiwetinoong and a residential school survivor, walked me deeper through that door in 2022 when we were paired for an episode of TVO's Political Blind Date. Near the end of the video, Sol tells me I am starting to understand. I am still starting. I expect I always will be.

Read the full journey — what Indian Road taught me about reclaiming, not renaming →

What I stand for

• Fiscal prudence — every tax dollar treated with the care of a family budget.
• Non-tax revenue — every dollar raised through non-tax revenue is a dollar that doesn't have to be raised through taxes. I added "pursue new and innovative non-tax revenue" to the strategic plan in 2015, and there's more to find every year.
• Permanent affordable housing — co-operative, co-housing, and supportive housing as core tools, alongside everything else.
• Sense of place — protecting stable neighbourhoods from developments that don't fit, and protecting all neighbourhoods from sprawl that future taxpayers can't afford.
• Openness and accountability — see my full Vote History and District Work.

Sunday coffee hours

I'm at the Kingston Coffee House in the Kingston Centre every Sunday from 3:00 to 4:00 pm. No appointment, no agenda — bring whatever's on your mind. I've been doing this for years. I'll keep doing it.

Send me back to Council

If you live in Meadowbrook-Strathcona — Strathcona Park, Hillendale, Grenville Park, Valleyview, Balsam Grove, Waterloo Village, or Meadowbrook East of Centennial Drive — your vote on October 26, 2026 keeps this work going.

The agencies I helped rebuild are still working. The projects I'm building now need a councillor who's still building them. Kingston needs both. That's what I bring.

613-888-4327 · jmclaren@cityofkingston.ca · or just stop by on a Sunday afternoon.

Map of Meadowbrook-Strathcona