Tom Grimmer

Tom grew up in Northern Ontario, the son of a forest engineer and a French teacher. His extended family has been in BC for three generations. His love for the Comox Valley started on a ski trip in 2003. It’s his happy place for cycling, Nordic and alpine skiing and kayaking.

He moved to the Valley in 2020 after 35 years in Asia, starting in Beijing in 1985, later working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post, the Globe & Mail, and the Financial Post. In 1998 he joined Credit Suisse First Boston and later HSBC, where he was Head of Communications, Asia, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. He is now Senior Partner with Kreab Worldwide, a Stockholm-based public affairs consultancy.

Tom has managed issues in Japan, Indonesia, Australia, India, mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He speaks Mandarin and taught at Fudan University (Shanghai) and Tsinghua (Beijing). Tom graduated in Journalism from Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University, and studied Chinese at Taiwan National Normal University and the National University of Singapore as a Rotary Scholar.

More recently, Tom developed a late-life obsession with energy-efficient design and built one of Canada’s first “passive house plus” homes, which generates more energy than it consumes.

He is married and has three adult children