Andrea Reimer

MPPGA Teaching Faculty; SPPGA Fellow

CK Choi Building #361

Democracy and Citizenship | Social Justice and Human Rights

About

Andrea Reimer is an Adjunct Professor of Practice and Fellow at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, where she was the school’s first Policy Practitioner Fellow, and the founder of Tawâw Strategies, where she works with governments and organizations on power, strategy, policy development, and governance.

Her teaching centres on power literacy: why bold ideas so often fail to survive contact with the systems meant to enact them, and what it takes to move an agenda from vision to implemented and accountable policy. It is a frame she built over more than two decades of public life in Vancouver and the metro region, working with residents to build green, reconciled, and genuinely democratic communities.

Andrea began as a community organizer on efforts for social, environmental, and economic justice. In 2002, she was elected to the Vancouver School Board, a first for the Green Party in Canada. In 2008, she co-chaired Gregor Robertson’s successful campaign for Mayor, ran for Council herself, and went on to serve three terms on Vancouver City Council.

Over her decade serving on Council, Andrea led some of the city’s most ambitious efforts, including its bid to become the greenest city on earth and its municipal framework for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, a national first. As political lead on community planning and Vancouver’s representative on Metro Vancouver’s Regional Planning Committee, she developed a deep working knowledge of housing, transportation, land use, and the political economy across the region, expertise she continues to apply as a provincially appointed member of the TransLink and Metro Vancouver Transit Police boards.

After leaving municipal politics, Andrea was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she studied and taught urban policy and the strengthening of democracy, work she carries forward provincially on BC’s Climate Solutions Council and the Community Engagement Board at the BC Centre for Substance Use, and globally as an elected Councillor of the World Future Council.

Andrea’s work has been recognized with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and King’s Coronation Medals, the World Green Building Council Chairman’s Award, a place in the Better Politics Foundation’s Democratic Innovators of the 21st Century Politicians’ Hall of Fame, and, in 2025, the BC Non-Profit Housing Association’s Affordable Housing Champion award, among others.

She came to this work by an unusual route, having survived as a street-involved youth before building a career that has spanned service, retail, and manufacturing, a small business, and board service across organizations from a credit union to the Canadian Women Voters Congress. That range is part of what she brings to the classroom: a reading of power that starts from how it actually operates, not how it is supposed to.

Recent Publications