Published poemGaysi Family
Burning Dry
It's burning and bleeding drySaffron, white and greenHues of rainbow in between
A poem on nation, identity, violence, and the colours made to carry them. Only a brief excerpt is reproduced here.
Ideas & writing
A library of arguments, observations, and unfinished questions.
Policy notes, public essays, field writing, poetry, and research ideas at different stages of development. Every item is labelled by what it is, and what it is not.
01 / Policy notes
Research shaped for a decision.
2026Independent policy noteThe Pass Rate Is Not the Outcome
A proposed evaluation framework for asking whether BC's Mandatory Entry-Level Training program produces consistent training, work-ready graduates, and a system that learns from carrier evidence.
The Pass Rate Is Not the Outcome
A proposed evaluation framework for asking whether BC's Mandatory Entry-Level Training program produces consistent training, work-ready graduates, and a system that learns from carrier evidence.
Built from BCTA's public road-test analysis. The note distinguishes test performance from job readiness and proposes four evaluation lenses: provider consistency, first-job transition, early safety performance, and the feedback loop between carriers, trainers, and regulators.
- Evidence available
- Public aggregate analysis and independent evaluation design
- Evidence needed next
- Carrier interviews, provider-level data, early employment outcomes, and safety indicators
The classification and evidence boundary are stated explicitly.
2024MPPA capstoneCommunity Care in Action
A BIA-driven service model for responding to homelessness, mental-health challenges, addiction, public-space safety, and fragmented civic responsibility in Gastown.
Community Care in Action
A BIA-driven service model for responding to homelessness, mental-health challenges, addiction, public-space safety, and fragmented civic responsibility in Gastown.
The project combined research with evidence from businesses and service providers. Rather than erase their conflicting accounts, it identified a shared operational gap: the absence of coordinated, rapid communication between businesses and outreach teams.
- Evidence available
- 16 service-provider interviews and responses from 36 businesses
- Evidence needed next
- Protocol pilot, response-time measures, and participant feedback
The classification and evidence boundary are stated explicitly.
2024Policy evaluationMaternal-Health Access in Bella Bella
An applied research project examining the barriers that rural and remote Indigenous patients encounter when seeking maternal-health information, services, nutrition support, and continuity of care.
Maternal-Health Access in Bella Bella
An applied research project examining the barriers that rural and remote Indigenous patients encounter when seeking maternal-health information, services, nutrition support, and continuity of care.
The work explored how low-connectivity environments, limited local services, travel requirements, and fragmented information shape access. It produced a service concept, not a claim to speak for community members or replace community-led design.
- Evidence available
- Applied research and service-concept development
- Evidence needed next
- Community-led validation, patient journeys, and Indigenous data-governance review
The classification and evidence boundary are stated explicitly.
02 / Essays
Arguments that keep the person inside them.
2026Public essayMore than Stewards
On Indigenous leadership, clean-energy labour shortages, and what a more honest green-transition conversation must admit.
Read context +
The essay challenges language that recognizes Indigenous communities only as environmental stewards while overlooking ownership, governance, workforce leadership, and decision-making authority.
A transition cannot be called inclusive if Indigenous communities appear only in its acknowledgements. Stewardship is not a substitute for authority. The more serious questions concern who owns the infrastructure, who defines the work, who develops the workforce, and who retains the value created on the land.
Edited portfolio excerpt. The argument is presented in its stated genre, not as completed policy research.
2026Field essayThe First Explanation Is Never the Complete Explanation
What field research in Jharkhand and observation in Vancouver reveal about explanations that isolate individual behaviour from land, poverty, gender, institutions, and power.
Read context +
The essay does not claim that distinct places or experiences are equivalent. It reflects on a recurring analytical failure: treating the most visible explanation as though it were the entire system.
The first explanation is often the one a system already knows how to record. A superstition. A disturbance. A failure to comply. Fieldwork begins when that explanation is treated as an opening rather than a conclusion, and when the surrounding questions of land, gender, poverty, authority, and institutional response are allowed back into view.
Edited portfolio excerpt. The argument is presented in its stated genre, not as completed policy research.
2026Personal policy essayInvited, Then Asked to Leave
A first-person examination of how immigration systems welcome educational credentials while labour systems can render the same credentials economically invisible.
Read context +
The argument connects lived experience with occupational classification, underemployment, and the political language of skill. It is presented as an essay, not as completed labour-market research.
The invitation arrived through a points system that could count education precisely. After arrival, the labour market translated the same education into uncertainty. The contradiction is not simply personal disappointment. It raises a policy question about how one part of the state recognizes skill while another economy renders it conditional.
Edited portfolio excerpt. The argument is presented in its stated genre, not as completed policy research.
2026Personal essayBefore You Come to Canada
The distance between migration's public image and the private experience of surviving after arrival.
Read context +
A narrative essay about work, dignity, money, shame, and the stories migrants often protect their families from hearing. The personal account is not presented as representative of every newcomer experience.
There is the Canada described before departure, and the Canada explained quietly after arrival. Between them are jobs not mentioned in family calls, calculations made in grocery aisles, and the strange work of protecting the people at home from the cost of the decision they helped you make.
Edited portfolio excerpt. The argument is presented in its stated genre, not as completed policy research.
For published pieces and new writing beyond this portfolio:
Read on Substack03 / Poetry
Where the argument stops explaining itself.
04 / Open research questions
Not conclusions. Invitations to investigate.
These entries make uncertainty visible. Each one separates a provisional hypothesis from the evidence still required.
01Developing
What does Canada actually mean by skill?
- Why it matters
- Educational attainment, occupational classification, immigration selection, and the work a person can actually obtain do not always describe the same thing.
- Working hypothesis
- Deskilling may be produced not only by employer bias, but by the interaction between immigration selection, occupational categories, licensing systems, and the requirement for Canadian experience.
- Evidence needed
- Occupational mobility data, classification history, employer interviews, immigrant-worker accounts, licensing rules, and wage trajectories.
02Early inquiry
Who is permitted to define safety in contested public space?
- Why it matters
- Businesses, residents, service providers, street-involved people, police, and municipal agencies can experience the same place through radically different forms of risk.
- Working hypothesis
- Safety policy becomes less effective when one group's immediate experience is treated as the complete definition of the problem.
- Evidence needed
- Participatory interviews, incident and service-call data, outreach records, public-space observation, and analysis of decision authority.
03Concept development
What would maternal-health access designed from Bella Bella look like?
- Why it matters
- A service designed around urban connectivity, specialist availability, and short travel distances can reproduce exclusion in rural and remote communities.
- Working hypothesis
- The most useful intervention may be a coordinated information and navigation layer governed with community, rather than another isolated digital application.
- Evidence needed
- Community-led research, patient journeys, service inventories, connectivity constraints, referral pathways, and Indigenous data-governance requirements.
04Developing
When does compliance strengthen a program, and when does it narrow what care can look like?
- Why it matters
- Public funding rules create accountability, but they can also shape eligibility, timelines, documentation burdens, and the kinds of support staff can provide.
- Working hypothesis
- The operational design of compliance systems determines whether accountability and participant-centred delivery reinforce or undermine one another.
- Evidence needed
- Contribution agreements, staff workflows, audit findings, participant journeys, administrative burden, and comparative program models.