Bio

Gary McKenna is a Vancouver writer and researcher with a focus on urban affairs, civic governance and urban planning.

Gary currently works as a Senior Writer and Researcher for the Tri-City News, where he covers urban affairs in Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam.

Gary is an M.Urb candidate in Simon Fraser University’s Master of Urban Studies program, a interdisciplinary program focusing on policy, planning, development and governance in urban systems designed for professionals across these industries. His thesis examines municipal campaign funding in the Lower Mainland through an urban regimes theory perspective.

Gary also has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Simon Fraser University, where he completed an extensive two part research, analysis and reporting project initiated as a self-directed project for academic credit. Over two semesters Gary took an idea he found interesting  – the question of what effect donation sources( rather than donation amounts) have on a political candidates hopes of becoming elected in smaller scale municipal elections – and turned that idea into a statistically supported research report. Gary collected, analyzed and summarized over 700 campaign finance reports from cities across the Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. You can find this work here.

This site contains Gary’s online portfolio of published writing and other relevant media and communication work.