Roland Tanner

With passion and experience comes great responsibility…

Roland Tanner is a politics and democracy junkie, an addiction that grew out of a childhood in Thatcher’s Britain where the right first began rolling back the hard-won democratic rights created over the previous century. Emigrating to Canada in 2003, he co-founded an academic publishing company that is now a leader and innovator in its field. Starting in 2008 he became involved in progressive politics, motivated by the need for a more radical approach to attacking climate change, and the triumph of the Harper Conservatives over Stephane Dion’s ‘Green Shift’. Over the next decade, he worked as a volunteer for one of Ontario’s progressive political parties, eventually becoming a member of the party executive council—just in time to see that party suffer electoral destruction in 2018.

The same year he decided that damn it all, he was as well qualified as anybody else to run for office and tried his hand as a candidate in Burlington’s municipal election. The results were respectable, but ‘meh’. Teaming up with Joel MacLeod, Roland co-founded the 905er in 2020 to bring more attention to Canada’s most important but misunderstood region—the 905 region outside Toronto. They set out with lively and outspoken by-weekly episodes discussing the things that matter to 4.3 million people, and growing, who call the 905 region ‘home’.