Six years of council records, and not one vote shows who voted which way

The wrong question

Since I entered this race, I keep hearing the same worry. One new mayor. Six councillors already sitting there. People put it to me straight: why would they work with you?

The question assumes council is a private club, and the job is to get along with it. Council is seven seats, and your vote fills every one of them. You hire us. You pay us.

So the real question was never whether council will work with me. The real question is how we make sure council works for the people. The answer gets built one piece at a time. The simplest piece is letting you see the work.

Credit first: what already works

You can already watch every council meeting. The Town streams them live, and the recordings stay up on its YouTube channel. Agendas are posted before each meeting. Minutes, the written record of what council decided, are posted after they are approved. That part of the job is being done right, and the people who set it up deserve the credit.

Now try to answer one simple question

Open those minutes and try to find out: how did my councillor vote on the budget? You cannot. My Open-the-books page shows the count. Six years of the council's own records are public. They hold 404 resolution vote blocks. That is 404 separate votes in the record. Not one of them shows a count of who voted which way. The pattern is the same every time: who put the motion forward, who backed it (the minutes call that seconding), then the result in one word. Carried. It passed. This is entirely lawful. The law only writes the names down when a member asks for it. Nobody asks. That does not prove everyone agreed. It only proves the record is silent.

Votes that show who voted which way: not one.

404 resolution vote blocks

Moved by

Seconded by

Carried

So today, the only way to learn how your councillor voted is to sit through the video of the whole meeting. Nobody can check a three-hour video with no index. A vote you cannot look up is a vote nobody answers for.

The tool to fix this is already sitting in the law. Any single member of council can require a recorded vote, on anything council votes on, just by asking. That is a vote where each councillor's name and how they voted go into the record: who voted for, who voted against. The rest of council cannot block it.

The law adds one more thing: on a recorded vote, a member who is in the room and does not vote is counted as voting no. Nobody can hide in a recorded vote.

Three commitments, and the lever for each one

1. My pen I ask, every time. Starting day one. From my first meeting, I will request a recorded vote on every big decision council makes: the budget, your tax rate, every contract that comes to council, every sale of town property, every time the Town borrows money. My Open-the-books plan already promises this for the money that builds things. This plan extends that promise to everything major. I will start with my own motions, so my name is the first one anyone can hold to account.
2. Council vote Then make it the rule, not a favour. A habit lasts only as long as the person holding it. So I will bring a motion to change the Town's rulebook for meetings, what it calls its procedure by-law. The change is simple. On those same big decisions, the vote is recorded automatically. One member is enough to ask for a recorded vote. Making it automatic is a bigger step, because the rulebook protects itself. A change needs notice at one meeting, then a yes vote from two-thirds of the members present at a later one. That is five votes of seven when everyone is there. None of the six neighbouring councils whose rulebooks we read has made it automatic yet. Mississauga's council already records its votes automatically on the business that matters. Hawkesbury would be the first of them to make it the rule.
3. My pen Publish it where you can find it. After every council meeting I will publish a recap in plain words, in both languages, with the vote table for every big decision. What was decided, who voted how, what it costs, what happens next. Our neighbours in Russell put out a recap after every regular meeting. Elsewhere in Ontario, a town smaller than ours publishes every councillor's voting record on its website, where you can search it by name. It takes no new spending.

The closed doors: a fourth commitment

Some things must happen behind a closed door, and the law says which ones: people's private business, land deals still being negotiated, talks with the Town's employees, legal advice.

But the Ontario Ombudsman, the province's watchdog for council meetings, has already had to remind our town where the line is. The Municipal Act is the provincial law that sets the rules councils have to follow. In December 2024, council went behind closed doors for a discussion the law said had to be public. In March 2026, the Ombudsman found that this broke the Act. Council did not contest it. It voted to put the recommendations in place. That deserves respect.

My commitment is to watch it, every time: a door closes only when the law truly calls for it. The exact legal reason is named out loud before the door closes. And when we come back out, we say in the open meeting everything the law lets us say.

Any person can ask the Ombudsman to check a closed meeting, for free. You do not even have to live here.

What I cannot promise, and what I will try

I cannot promise that council will always vote the way the crowd in the room wants. You elect seven people to study the files and use their judgment, and sometimes honest judgment goes against the crowd. What I can promise is different: you will see every vote, and they will owe you the reasons out loud. A councillor who votes against what the town clearly wants may have a good reason. Then let them stand up and give it. That is the job.

I cannot open the doors the law itself keeps closed. What I will try for is every closed meeting kept as short and as rare as the law allows, and told to you afterwards in as many words as the law permits. And I will not pretend recorded votes are required by law today. They are not. Making them the habit takes a mayor who asks. Making them the rule takes five votes of seven. I can guarantee the first on my own. The second, I will put my name on and fight for in the open.