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Accessibility

Accessibility is an incredibly important issue, and one that’s often poorly understood. What is accessibility, and how does it play out in a small town context? How does our municipality address it? What does Accessible mean? Accessibility, at its core, is about who gets included. The Brighton Accessibility Committee, which just had our first 2023…

The Politics of Snow Removal

Some people think that Canada’s national sport is hockey; I think I was in my 20’s when I was told that it is, in fact, lacrosse. Turns out it’s both. (Yup, there’s a law for that.) But whatever our national sport is, I think it almost goes without saying that our national pastime, official or…

Budgets and the Cost of Councillors

Across Ontario, municipalities are approving budgets. It’s always a controversial time: my top priorities for spending might be your lowest priorities, and there’s always pressure to keep taxes low (yes, I say KEEP taxes low, because whatever you’ve heard our taxes are relatively quite low). Any spending at all is a travesty, according to some.…

Economic Development

Few politicians get elected without promising “jobs, jobs, jobs!” At the same time, it seems like the folks most interested in job creation don’t want to see those jobs be government jobs: there’s a long history in North America of distrust toward the public sector, and a commitment to free markets and privileging the private…

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About Me

Welcome! I will post here about my approach to municipal politics, the values that are foundational to that approach, and some ideas for what that might look like in Brighton. All of my posts here are my own reflections on issues or events, and interpretations of the processes and structures that shape our municipal government. My goal here is to empower my readers to engage in local government by giving them relevant information, with links to authoritative sources. I am not an authoritative source: I do not speak on behalf of the municipality (that’s the Mayor’s job), and my interpretation of a law or policy is my own. Even so, I hope that my posts here can help make the system more understandable and easily accessible, so that you can get better use of it. If you see me here commenting on matters that are confidential, still before Council, or in ways that misrepresent a matter, please drop me a line and I will quickly change it; my goal is to counter misinformation, not add to it!

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