Doug Holmes has served on Summerland Council for the past eight years, on the board of the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) for the past four years, and on the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB) for the past two years.
In the 2018 local elections, he topped the polls with 70% of the vote. The same year he was named one of the 10 best municipal politicians in the Okanagan by the Penticton Herald and Kelowna Daily Courier.
A dedicated community builder, Doug has long advocated for investment in municipal infrastructure and a Summerland that’s culturally and economically vibrant. He has served as Council Liaison on both the Arts Council and Chamber of Commerce, and he organized ‘Doors Open Summerland’ in 2017 and was one of the founders of the Ryga Arts Festival.
Doug is known for his work on the resettlement of refugees and on furthering local understanding of the plight of people displaced by war, violence and persecution. He is founding chair of the Summerland Refugee Sponsorship Group, which has sponsored refugee families from Syria, Eritrea, and South Sudan. He is former co-chair of the South Okanagan-Similkameen Local Immigration Partnership (LIP) Council, former vice-president of South Okanagan Immigrant and Community Services (SOICS), and he helped organize this year’s ‘Slava Ukraini’ fundraiser for war victims in Ukraine. In recognition of his humanitarian work, the Summerland Rotary Club named Doug a Paul Harris Fellow, the highest honour that Rotary can give to a member of the community.
Doug is a certified tennis instructor who developed the youth program at Lakeshore Racquets Centre. He has coached hundreds of Summerland youth through after-school lessons, summer camps, clinics, leagues and tournaments, and the Summerland Secondary School tennis team. In 2011, Doug received a Tennis Canada award of excellence for developing the game at the community level.
Doug settled in Summerland to raise his family in 2004 after a storied international career in journalism and business. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, he worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and Bucharest and later became editor and publisher of a London-based computer trade magazine, where he was an early advocate for the use of Internet technology in the public sector. He authored the book, e-Gov: e-Business Strategies for Government, which has been translated into seven languages. From 1998 to 2008, he worked for Microsoft Corp as the company’s ‘e-government champion’, helping the company’s public sector customers around the world adapt and digitize service delivery.
Earlier in the 1980’s, Doug worked as a reporter and editor for local newspapers and CBC Radio in Inuvik and Yellowknife, where he wrote his first book, Northerners: Profiles of People in the Northwest Territories.
Doug has visited 90+ countries and every province and territory in Canada. He has a degree in journalism and political science from Carleton University in Ottawa.