🚪 Chris Logstrup Learned to Knock on Doors With His Grandfather. Now He's Running for School Board Trustee.

The first time Chris Logstrup knocked on a stranger's door, he was a kid in Brockville and his grandfather had brought him along. It was something to do together on a spare afternoon. He remembers it being fun.

He is twenty-one now, the doors are in Kingscourt and Williamsville, and this time the name on the ballot is his own.

Somebody once showed him this was something a person could do. He is now showing everyone else.

Chris Logstrup is a marketing student at St. Lawrence College and a candidate for trustee on the Limestone District School Board, running in Countryside, Kingscourt-Rideau & Williamsville. Election day is October 26, 2026.

Ask Chris what pulled him into politics and he will tell you it was gradual, no single moment. Then, a minute later, he arrives at a moment.

It was his grandfather who used to take him along. He was too young to care about the politics. What he remembers is that it was something the two of them did together, and that he liked it.

Those grandparents later retired to Kingston, which is part of why he is here now.

The writing starts about as early. As a kid he wrote short stories, then folded and stapled the pages down one edge so they would hold together, and called the result a book. English was his best subject and stayed that way.

He never really stopped. Chris now writes for Rabble. An essay of his this June asked what people expect when they turn on the kitchen tap, and made the case against handing Ontario’s water systems to private companies. He has also written for the Kingston Crow.

He sits on the national communications team at Young Politicians of Canada, a non-partisan group that gets Canadians aged fourteen to twenty-four involved in politics. He is one of about nine people who put together their weekly newsletter, aimed at a reader of about sixteen, in plain language.

He registered as a school board candidate in August, after two years of volunteering on other people's campaigns and knocking doors in the 2025 provincial and federal races.

Chris is not running against the current board.

He said so twice, unprompted. He thinks the board has done a good job under a lot of pressure, on some of the hardest challenges facing our schools. It is not that they are doing anything wrong. What is missing, he thinks, is the view from where the students sit.

Take AI, which landed in classrooms faster than almost anything before it. Chris has read the Limestone board's policy on how AI gets used in its schools, and he thinks it is impressive and responsible. He has nothing bad to say about it.

His ask is narrower than that. He wants a way for students and parents to say what the policy feels like from inside a classroom, and for those answers to come back to the board on a regular schedule. A recurring survey, in other words, feeding into the decisions about classroom technology and what counts as academic honesty. It would cost close to nothing, and he thinks it could be running almost immediately.

Then there is ASPEN, the system Limestone families use for registration and student information. It does not work properly on a phone. If you own a laptop that is a nuisance. If your household does not, or if you are doing this on a break at work, it is a wall between a parent and their kid's schooling. It also lands on school staff, who end up absorbing the extra work when a parent cannot do something themselves.

Ask Chris to sum up his campaign in a few words and he says "building power for students."

Start with the student trustees. The board has three of them. Chris wants more than three seats, for a simple reason. Three people cannot speak for a district this size.

The Limestone District School Board, or LDSB, describes itself this way on its own website:

He wants Student Voice Forums twice a year at every high school, with the ward trustee there to listen rather than to present.

He wants a public dashboard: a page anyone can look at that shows what students and families have raised, and what the board did about each one. Right now you can raise something and never hear back. He wants that to stop being normal.

And he wants the AI survey, which is the same idea wearing different clothes.

Every item on that list is really about one thing. When a decision is going to land on you, you should have a way into making it. Chris has made that same argument about drinking water, and about the price of groceries, in articles he has written. Schools are just where he is making it now.

Chris is studying marketing at St. Lawrence College, and it shows in how he talks about knocking on doors.

About three doors in ten open. Of those, roughly half close again within a few seconds. Politely, usually. People are making dinner, or they have just got in from work, or they simply do not want to talk to a stranger on a Tuesday.

He does not take it personally. He thinks it is the same problem as somebody scrolling a feed on their phone.

A post gets a second or two before the thumb moves on. A person standing at their own front door gives you about the same. Either way you have almost no time. And either way, you lose them the moment you start talking about yourself.

So he does not start with "hi, I'm Chris and I'm running for school board trustee." He starts with a question. Something real, about their street, or their kids' school, or whatever is going on nearby. Something that makes it a conversation instead of a pitch.

In March, Chris was in a room in Winnipeg when Avi Lewis was elected leader of the federal NDP.

Lewis spoke about his father from the stage. Stephen Lewis was in hospital, and unwell, and hanging on to see his son take the job. He died two days later, at eighty-eight.

Stephen Lewis was before Chris's time, and he says so. He led the Ontario NDP and served as Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. After he left politics he spent decades working on HIV and AIDS in Africa for the UN. What struck Chris is that people who disagreed with almost everything Lewis believed still respected him. It was Stephen Harper who appointed him to the UN.

That is the part Chris keeps coming back to. As he puts it, Lewis showed there is a lot more to your advocacy than just running for office.

You can see him taking that seriously already. Alongside the campaign he is working with local climate groups on a new bylaw. It would set a limit on how hot an apartment can get in a heat wave, for people who have no air conditioning. None of that is a school board matter. It is just a thing he thinks somebody should be doing.

Win or lose on October 26, that work carries on.

We ask everyone we feature to name a local business, cause or person they think deserves more attention. Chris named NORTHSIDE espresso + kitchen, at 198 Princess Street.

Not for the coffee, though he rates the coffee.

At the end of July, wildfires were burning across northern Ontario and the smoke reached as far south as here. For ten days NORTHSIDE gave every dollar from their brewed coffee to the Kingston Native Centre and Language Nest, and matched what came in. Their own post about it started this way: here it was only smoke. Elsewhere people were losing everything. They raised a thousand dollars.

Chris had watched the coverage of communities up north evacuating by boat with the fire already at the shoreline, and it stayed with him.

Asked to point at something local, he pointed at a coffee shop that used its own till to help people twelve hundred kilometres away.

Nobody asked him about this. He brought it up near the end of our conversation.

A lot of young people, he said, look at politics and see a club. Something closed. A place other people are already inside, behind a door somebody has to let you through. He does not think that is true, and he wants people his age to know it.

His own version of getting in was not complicated. He volunteered on other people's campaigns first, knocking doors in 2025 for candidates who were not him. Before that he wrote things. Before that he was a kid in Brockville, knocking on doors beside his grandfather.

If you want to do something, he says, contact your local riding association. Any of them. Go to a meeting of a group working on something you care about. They are not hard to find and they are not guarded. They want to hear from you.