Frank de Jong is a candidate for Toronto City Council in Ward 18 - Davenport in this year's municipal election.

Member of Active 18. Participant in The New Bloor Street Festival. Teacher with Toronto District School Board. Past leader of the Green Party of Ontario. On board of Schalkenbach Foundation. Year round cyclist. Amateur opera singer. Organic gardener.

Frank has lived in Toronto, in Ward 18, for 12 years with his partner, writer and artist Kelley Aitken.

Frank was born in Ontario in 1955 to Dutch immigrant parents and grew up on a dairy farm north of Guelph. He earned his B.A. from the University of Western Ontario and a B.Ed. from the University of Ottawa. Throughout the 1980s de Jong was active on the issues of nuclear weapons, pro-choice, Ontario's old growth forests, and Central America solidarity.

In the early 90s he became involved in Green electoral politics and now argues for accurate cost pricing, green tax shifting, renewable electricity, preventive health care, organic agriculture, a citizen's dividend to reduce poverty, funding for non-religious public schools only, minimal tuition, walkable communities linked by rail, bio-based manufacturing and zero garbage.

Frank takes a strong stand on the issues that are important to Torontonians:

"Climate change, peak cheap oil and smog require that we redesign most of Toronto's housing stock, transportation, electricity, production and space heating infrastructure."

"We should tax resource use, pollution and land values, not incomes and businesses and allow the invisible green hand get us to a sustainability society."

"Net-zero energy construction should be the standard for all renovations and new buildings."

"Infrastructure -- like transit, community centres, parks, schools, hospitals... -- could be mad self-funding if governments collected the rise in land values generated by that infrastrucutre."

"Farmers should be encouraged to farm without pesticides, serve local markets, produce bio-fuels and invite city people to their farms."

"Ontario should follow the lead of Quebec, Manitoba and NFLD, and merge the Catholic and the public school system, no longer dividing children along religious lines."

"We should compensate northern communities to sequester carbon and preserve habitat, water, soil and biodiversity."

"Proportional Representation gets rid of strategic voting, artificial majorities, wild policy swings and throw away votes."

"Tuition, which is a tax on education, should be reduced to a minimal fee like in European countries."

"Preventive health is the best health care system, so that fewer people get sick in the first place."

"Ontario's cities need to be re-organized into walkable neighbourhoods linked by clean-fuel transit so people won't need cars."

"We don't have a garbage crisis, we have a design crisis. Everything should be designed to not end up in landfill or incineration."