That is the plan. Getting it in front of people costs money, and every dollar comes from a neighbour.
Chip inFor twenty years this town paid big-town bills with too few shoulders to carry them. Every new home built here adds another household to share the Town's bills. It feeds Main Street. And it proves to the next investor that Hawkesbury is worth building in. Here is the land, the rules, and the people I will put to work.
Between 2001 and 2021, Hawkesbury went from 10,314 people to 10,194. We shrank. In those same twenty years the county around us grew 25%. Russell grew 58%. Casselman grew 36%. Clarence-Rockland grew 35%. Almost every neighbour grew.
Why does that matter to your wallet? Because the Town's bills get divided among the households that live here. This year's levy is $14,258,000. The levy is the money the Town raises in property taxes to pay for its own year. It lands on 5,080 households. That works out to about $2,807 per household. Now say we had grown at the county's pace over those twenty years. The same bill spread over more households would come to roughly $2,244. About twenty percent lighter. That is an illustration, and I will always call it one. Nobody can promise your taxes drop the day a house goes up. A town that does not grow divides the same bills among fewer, older, more tired shoulders. The median age here is now 54.8. That means half of us are older than that.
The province expects Prescott and Russell to grow by about half again between 2025 and 2051. The only question is whether any of it lands in Hawkesbury. Or whether we keep watching it drive past on the 417.
Hawkesbury is an old industrial town, and old industrial towns sit on old industrial land. The province is on our waterfront right now, cleaning the lagoon at the old mill. In April it told the Town it would haul roughly 45,000 tonnes of fill. Fill is loose earth and rock. That is about 2,500 truckloads, most of it this year. By the province's own plan the lagoon becomes green space, with a trail and a footbridge, and the law keeps a closed waste site out of use for decades unless the Minister approves. A clean riverbank with a trail is worth more to Main Street than one more empty lot. The homes belong on the land beside it that is ours to decide. And in October 2025 the province rewrote its own site-cleanup rules. It gave one reason: to build homes faster by clearing the obstacles that stop old commercial land from becoming places people live.
Now the one I will be asked about at every door: the old municipal garage land on Main Street East. This year's budget borrows $250,000 to tear the building down. Ask what comes next, and the Town's own answer is that it "will be up to council." The Town's own paid engineers have already written about that land. It sits against houses. It is too small and too close to the river to rebuild a garage on. And it is contaminated. Those are their words, from the Town's own report. Deciding the demolition before deciding the use is backwards. Ontario requires a higher cleanup standard for homes than for a town garage yard. So a town that demolishes first and thinks later risks paying twice. I will argue at a public meeting for one order of work. Decide the use first. Clean once, to the standard that use requires. Then put the land back to work. The use I will argue for is homes that pay taxes again, with a public strip along the water. I say that because the Town's own report says you cannot build to the river's edge anyway. The land gets sold at a price backed by a public appraisal. An appraisal is a professional's written estimate of what the land is worth. It never gets given away. And every dollar that land ever produces goes against the garage debt, never quietly into general spending. The old garage helps pay for the new one.
The toolbox for the rest of our old land already exists. Years ago the Town adopted a community improvement plan. That is a Town plan council can use to help get certain properties fixed up and back in service. Its own text covers a district for old industrial land and for old buildings put to a new use. It carries programs for environmental studies, downtown housing, and turning empty commercial space into homes. It has been sitting quiet, and the downtown levy behind it has not gone up in six years. The province will even match a council that uses it. The province cancels the school part of the property tax bill on a cleaned-up site, for up to a decade when the result is housing.
So here is the offer, and it is the same offer for everyone. The Town's plan already lets council hand back part of the new taxes a project creates, for a set number of years, and cover part of the fees on the way in. Towns like Cornwall give ten years. Ours gives five, on paper, with no money behind it. I will write a budget line for it into my first budget, bring the ten-year term to a public vote, and publish the whole menu in both languages, so a builder in Montreal or Ottawa can read it before ever calling me. Every award is a council vote in the open, with a recorded vote and a yearly report of who got what.
I have sat on the builder's side of the counter my whole working life. Every line below comes from the Town's own by-laws, which are the rules council writes and council can change. To build an apartment here you must provide almost two parking spaces per unit. A bachelor apartment needs the same as a family-sized one. There is no option to pay into public parking instead, because the by-law's own text admits the Town owns none. Building something the current rules do not allow takes a rezoning, and it can require up to 14 separate technical studies before the Town's clock even starts. The only speed the Town promises anywhere is ten working days to check whether your file is complete. The Town's own price list runs $3,400 to $5,700 for a zoning change. A site plan, the drawing of what goes where on the lot, runs $2,600 to $4,500, plus a $7,000 deposit. On top of that, when the Town hires an outside expert to look at your file, it sends you the bill, with no limit on the amount, plus 15% for handling it. Passing those bills along is lawful and common in Ontario, and in practice the Town billed far less than it could have. But a builder cannot predict what a yes will cost here, or when it will come. The industry's own national study says approval speed and predictable fees decide where builders go. So they go elsewhere.
Council can fix most of this by itself, without asking anyone, at almost no cost. Ontario's 2024 change to the parking rules never reached towns like ours. So our parking rule is entirely council's to change, and Toronto, Edmonton and Kingston have already changed theirs. The province already allows up to three units on a residential lot, with no rezoning needed. Our job is to make sure our own by-law's wording never trips a builder the province has already said yes to. And Cornwall, a town in Prince Edward Island smaller than ours, collected about $4.3 million in federal money for bringing exactly these kinds of rules up to date. There is no public record that Hawkesbury asked.
Nearly half of this town rents: 2,465 of our 5,080 households. For years, people looking for an apartment here have found almost nothing sitting empty. Now walk Main Street and count the dark second-floor windows above the open shops. Those floors sit empty for reasons a builder can name from the sidewalk. Walls and floors built to hold back a fire. A second way out. Sprinklers. And one more that used to be on the list: a tax system that charged apartment buildings more than houses. That extra charge ended in 2025. The rest is work a council can lead. The community improvement plan already carries programs written for downtown housing and for turning commercial space into homes. Cornwall, Ontario, has been running the same play for years. And my Main Street plan (Point 2) needs exactly what this delivers, because a customer who lives above the shop shows up seven days a week. A renter in a new upstairs apartment also frees up a house on a side street for a young family.
Hawkesbury sits roughly an hour and a bit by road from downtown Montreal and from downtown Ottawa. We are at the one road bridge over the Ottawa River between them. Our town pipes have room to grow, and that is written down in the Town's own report. The province just paid to grow them further, out of a fund whose whole purpose is enabling new homes. I have spent thirty years building businesses between these two cities. I will put my own network of businessmen and organizations across Montreal and Ottawa to work on Hawkesbury's file. I will start with the people who are already building one town over on this same corridor. I have already begun those conversations about housing and development investment, and more of them start the week after I win. No names on a campaign page. A serious investor gets a table at Town Hall, a written offer that is the same for everyone, and a council vote in public.
And one more tool from my trade that this town has never had in the mayor's chair. I know contractors, and I know the large corporate contracting world, on both sides of the river. A consultant's price estimate lands on the council table for roads, for pipes, for a building project, for a cleanup. I can pick up the phone and get a real second quote. That is to check the bill. How the Town buys stays with staff, in public, under the rules, and every award is voted in the open. A town that cannot check a number pays whatever it is told.
Every promise on this page comes from the left column. If you ever catch me promising from the right column, hold it against me.
I manage residential buildings for local owners. A housing plan from a man in my line of work deserves your hardest look. So here is the rule, in writing, before a single vote is cast. If anything ever comes to council that touches a property connected to my work or my clients, I declare it in writing and I leave the room. Every single time. I name no site, on this page or in office. The rules for choosing go public. Staff run the process. Any owner can put land forward. And the appraisal is public before any vote on Town land. That protects you from me, and it protects me from the accusation.
I cannot promise a number of homes by a date. I cannot name buyers or prices before appraisals and environmental work are public, and no mayor controls mortgage rates or the price of lumber. What I can promise is to try for every home this town can carry, in public, on a clock you can watch. The by-law changes brought to council. The applications filed. The land decided in open meetings. My network on the phone. And a straight answer either way, within days, when something says no. Other candidates in this race care about housing too, and where their ideas are good, my door is open.
I build for a living. The first thing you learn is that a foundation carries everything or nothing. This town's foundation is its land, its pipes, and its people. All three are readier than we have been told. What has been missing is a mayor who reads the by-laws like a builder and answers the phone like a businessman. I am both.
Clean the land. Build the homes. Share the load.