A New Councillor

On Friday, Brighton Council heard short presentations from nine excellent candidates to fill one open seat on council. We asked each of them questions to draw out their strengths and potential points of comparison between them. Each one of them was and is remarkable: it takes guts, passion, and responsibility to stand for a council position, and we are all truly blessed to have a community so rich in people prepared to contribute and lead. At one point I said “maybe we should all quit” in order to see a council made up entirely from this group of applicants. Most of them expressed an interest in running in the next election, so we might just see that! I feel confident that the next council will be in very good hands with such a crowd of wonderful candidates.

But we could only pick one. From the moment we announced that the seat would be filled by an appointment process I had heard rumblings from the community and seen posts on social media suggesting that we quickly and simply appoint a past member of council. There was merit to that idea: we’re in the middle of budget deliberations, and we’re more than halfway through the council term, so picking someone who can seamlessly step in and see out the rest of the term would have been logical and sensible. One person even expressed it by saying that we should choose the most electable person, the person who would have been most likely to win the by-election we opted not to have. That makes sense.

But we chose to accept applications and have a public process for the sake of transparency and accountability, and I didn’t want to assume that someone who’s been on council before would be the best choice — not because they aren’t lovely, but because having council experience is not the only thing that makes for a good councillor. I mused on this blog and elsewhere about what makes for a good councillor, and settled on a few points: attitude, perspective, and the ability to think strategically.

We had good attitudes in spades among our applicants, which is why I’m so pleased so many of them plan to run in 2026. The ability to be open to new information, to change our minds, to admit if we’re wrong, and to disagree well is worth more than any amount of expertise or experience. Experience grows, and expertise can be taught, but attitude either enhances or undermines both of them.

Perspective is, by its very nature, unequal: we all experience the world a little differently, in ways that are impacted by who we are and how we relate to the world around us. I made the comment at the meeting that while the current council is very straight, white, and leaning old, that reflects the general population of Brighton pretty proportionately — but that there is nonetheless a growing diversity in our population that is not represented on council at all. The pool of applicants included a surprising amount of racial, gender, age, and class diversity, and many of the applicants would have added new perspectives that council sorely needs. I am grateful that several of them are already serving on various committees and boards, because their different perspectives strengthen council and the community through that service.

We had a conversation at the council table on Friday about whether or not applicants can be available for meetings. Often, working class people self-select or are discouraged out of even running for council or applying for committees because they do not have the luxury of controlling their own schedules and some meetings happen during the work day. The current council is a mix of entrepreneurs, professional-class people in mid-career who can set their own schedules, and semi-retired people. It struck me that, all other things considered, perhaps one of the biggest differences in perspective in our society are class-based, between those who control their own time and those who do not. Considering how many working-class residents there are in town, it makes sense to have that perspective represented, even if it means that they sometimes cannot make it to a meeting. (Not many of us have perfect attendance records as it is; we’re people, after all, and life happens.)

Finally, on strategic thinking we once again had a wealth of clever and experienced applicants. Many had participated in strategic planning, either through the municipality or through their businesses or other boards. Strategic thinking, or the ability to manage complexity, is itself complex: it’s a mixture of many different skills, sometimes taught and sometimes natural. One of the related skills that’s hardest for humans in general is futures thinking. I’ve had some training in futures thinking, and I’ve trained others in it, and I know that we’re all subject to biases that prevent us from taking the long view of things. Some of our applicants are well-trained in this, but one in particular comes by it naturally due to her particular perspective: young people are inherently better at thinking strategically about the future because it is their primary perspective in life, a perspective that quickly gets drummed out of us as we experience adulthood.

Looking at those three key elements (attitude, perspective, and strategic thinking), I still had a difficult choice to make, and I knew that someone would need to put a name out there. I had an impulse to think carefully about Hannah, perhaps because her life experience was the shortest and I didn’t want to simply write her off on that basis.

Hannah is as strong as anyone when it comes to attitude, being courageous enough to apply for the role and sticking it out even after it was clear she would be competing with people who had 3-4 times her amount of life experience. She certainly brings needed perspectives to council, representing working-class people, young families, and young people in general. And that youthful perspective brings with it an inherent future-orientation that’s so badly needed for strategic thinking and planning for things that will not resolve immediately — a perspective she proved when, in grade 10, she won a science fair that resulted in her presenting on plant-based plastics at a science fair in Abu Dhabi. But still, I hesitated: while I think those three qualities are the most important, the applicants’ resumes still carry weight, and Hannah’s is the shortest by a lot. I started leaning toward the candidates who had previously served on council again; was it in the interests of the community to appoint someone brand new when there were experienced people ready to step in?

I was thinking this through yet again, going through applications the night before the meeting, when my ten year old son sat down next to me and asked what I was up to. I explained the situation, and gave brief descriptions of the different candidates, and asked him who he thought I should pick. He immediately gravitated to Hannah as someone who could represent his perspective, both today and into the future. (He expressed it somehow both more simply and more powerfully than that; he’s wonderfully articulate, and I can’t wait to see what he’ll do when he’s Hannah’s age!)

Yes, she was less experienced than others. But I saw an opportunity: we have less than two years before the next election, a time when councils traditionally begin to settle in and then wind down. Our goals at this point are usually to finish well and prepare for the next term. Thinking about that, I realized that this is the perfect time to take someone who is wonderful in many ways and give them the experience that they currently lack. I firmly believe that Hannah could be an incredible councillor, given the chance. All we needed to do is give her that chance.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, and the easier it was to suggest her name. The candidate presentations helped confirm it: the issues and concerns she expressed aligned very well with the strategic directions we’d given through the Strategic Plan, even though she admitted humbly that she hadn’t read it. After I proposed her name the moment seemed to stretch for me, as I watched my colleagues go through what I imagine was something similar to the thought process I’d had the night before: some excitement at the idea, some hesitance…but ultimately, council agreed to appoint Hannah MacAusland. I have since been told that she will be the youngest woman yet to have served as a councillor in Ontario. I hope her record is quickly broken, and that young people contributing to their community as decision-makers and representatives is normalized.

After the meeting, we all walked over to her workplace to congratulate her. Hannah hadn’t been in the room when we decided; she’d needed to go back to work after her presentation. I felt tremendous pride for having made the choice that we did, and relief that the process of selecting a new councillor was over. But after that I wandered downtown, enjoying the sunshine and feeling some unexpected emotions.

I found myself suddenly weepy. Why was I feeling this way? I thought back to the presentation I had given just a few days before at the Presqu’ile Probus Club, where I mentioned how often we hear activists and politicians attempting to champion young people by saying “it is your generation that will solve climate change.” What a burden to put on children, who have no political agency! Surely it is up to us to safeguard their future by acting now, rather than pass the buck to them to save us. It struck me that by appointing a 20-year old to council we were in some small way undoing that injustice, empowering someone who has shown the gumption to change the world in the ways she needs to in order to safeguard her own future, and that of her child.

Later that night, I also realized that my sudden well of emotion might come from the fact that, while many people have been telling me since my youth that I would be someone who would change (or even save!) the world, not very many people had ever been willing to give me the chance, the empowerment, to actually make a difference. For many years I’ve said (with some bitterness) that by the time the torch gets passed to the Millennial generation we will need to immediately pass it along to the next. On Friday I got to do that, and I felt the catharsis of a promise fulfilled, a promise that I’d made to myself and the people who look up to me.

Hannah is not the saviour of the world, or even of Brighton. I don’t want to put that on her. But she is also not disqualified by her age or experience from having direct input into the decisions that will shape her future. We need her voice, and many more voices like hers. We are made better by them, and we are made better by becoming a municipality that empowers young people. In that regard this might be the most important motion I’ve ever moved, or will ever move. Let’s be a community that embraces, includes, and empowers young people, so that they can shape their own future. Nothing could be more democratic than that.

______________________________

*Note that you can see the whole meeting on our municipal YouTube channel, or hear just Hannah’s presentation and council’s deliberation on Consider This Northumberland.