Meet Matt

Matt Taylor chose Okanagan Falls. He and his wife moved back to B.C. in 2014 and settled here because they love it — the lake, the pace, the people. Behind the easygoing, plain-spoken manner is a career built on one thing: bringing people together, often people who started as rivals, to solve a shared problem. It’s the skill Matt has spent the last decade putting to work for this community, and it’s why he’s running to be our first mayor — to give our new town a steady, experienced start.

What Matt has done this term

As your elected RDOS Area “D” Director, Matt has delivered real results for Okanagan Falls — not just talk:

  • Secured $6.5 million for Okanagan Falls’ sewer and water upgrades.

  • Led four referendums in a single term — more than any RDOS area ever — giving residents in Heritage Hills, Lakeshore Highlands and Skaha Estates a real say on decisions that had sat unresolved for years.

  • Made sure our town was heard on incorporation. The RDOS and Okanagan Falls weren’t at the negotiating table — but Matt advocated hard at 25 meetings throughout the past year, to protect the name, boundary and parks that we voted on, and to give residents an informed choice through a cost-benefit study.

  • Advocated for speed-reader signs at the town entrances.

Why Matt, why now

Everything about our new town government will be brand new — new council, new staff, new systems, services delivered locally for the first time. Matt is the one person who already knows this town and is already trusted at the RDOS and the Province. He’s spent a career, and the last decade right here, doing exactly what a first mayor needs to do: listen, build relationships, and get things done. That’s what Start Strong means.

Start Strong

Choosing Okanagan Falls

When Matt semi-retired to Okanagan Falls in 2014, he spent a year or two simply watching and learning the community before stepping in — then brought that same coalition-building approach home.

Serving our community

  • Okanagan Falls Parks & Recreation Commission — member, then vice-chair, since roughly 2016.

  • Penticton’s Safety & Security Committee — after helping negotiate the closure of a major downtown drug house, Matt lobbied to create the task force that became the committee, and has chaired it since 2019.

  • Okanagan Falls Community Association (now OFBCA) — in 2018 Matt pulled together community leaders and landowners to work on reversing the town’s decline; the group formally incorporated as the OKFCA in 2019. Through it, the community has:

–    partnered with the RDOS to prepare an economic development plan

–    been a significant supporter of the successful effort to bring back a full-service grocery

–    proposed relocating RDOS offices to Okanagan Falls

–    launched an Okanagan Falls Community Fund to sustainably support future projects

–    led beautification — signage, banners and flower planters.

From the Cariboo to a National Stage

Raised in Vancouver and Victoria, Matt began his career in the livestock industry with five years as a ranch hand on a cow-calf ranch in the South Cariboo. After a few years in banking as a commercial agricultural lender, he returned to school for a degree in Agricultural Economics — and later completed an MBA in Change Management.

He then spent some 35 years with one of Canada’s major national livestock producers’ associations, work that came down to a single, repeatable talent: initiating and supporting coalitions, committees and task forces — many made up of business competitors — and getting them to resolve a common problem together.

Bringing Rivals to the Same Table

A few of the results Matt helped achieve by building those teams and coalitions:

•    Amended a section of the federal Bank Act (c. 1990) to strengthen the security position of primary producers selling fish, livestock and cash crops — uniting East Coast fishermen, the livestock industry and cash-crop growers behind one lobby.

•    Changed Animal Health Act regulations (c. 1992) to better enable the importation of U.S. cattle.

•    Helped form a Cross-Border Animal Health Committee (Canada and the northwest U.S.) that still meets today.

•    Founded a national livestock-health association bringing together national associations and provincial governments — as its founding executive director (c. 2000).

•    Launched emergency-management planning across the livestock industry.

Matt gets competing interests working toward a common goal, and the results tend to last.