Council Should Lead.
Staff Should Implement.

By-Law 2021-38, passed August 2021, was explicit: the Recreation Committee "shall be appointed annually by Council at their first regular meeting, appointing the Committee for a term of one (1) year." This language had existed since the original 2008 by-law. Annual reappointment was the mechanism through which council was supposed to exercise direction over its committees — setting priorities, refreshing membership, and signalling what each body should accomplish in the coming year.

In practice, staff simply rolled memberships over from term to term without annual appointments. When the 2022 election produced a new council with four new members, the appointment process began before council had even met — staff were contacting existing members about re-appointment while new councillors were still getting oriented. I flagged this in writing on November 9, 2022, citing By-Law 2021-38 specifically, noting "this feels more like a staff decision to ignore the by-law, than a directive provided by council," and requesting my concern be included in the agenda package before the new council voted.

At the very first council meeting of the new term — January 17, 2023 — council passed By-Law 2023-09, replacing "annually... one (1) year" with "at their first regular meeting in a Council term... four (4) years." The practice that had been violating the by-law became the by-law. My November email does not appear in the correspondence record for that meeting.

My email also raised a second concern worth noting: with all boards and committees dissolved at the end of the previous council term, this was exactly the moment to publicly advertise vacancies. People who had run for council in 2022 — and lost — might have welcomed committee experience. People interested in contributing might have stepped forward. Instead, staff reached out directly to existing members. The same faces stayed, no new ideas entered, and the community never knew the opportunity existed.

When the Township's CAO-Clerk resigned in February 2021, council issued a public RFP to hire a firm to manage the recruitment. The staff member responsible for placing and managing that RFP on the Township's behalf was the Acting Interim CAO-Clerk-Treasurer — the same person who ultimately became the successful candidate for the restructured role.

Every significant discussion about the hiring process took place in camera. The advertised role — CAO-Clerk — was quietly restructured into a new position: Municipal Administrator-Clerk-Treasurer, with a different title and different qualification profile. No public explanation was ever given for why the role changed, how the selection was made, or what the RFP process had actually looked like. Council's role, from the public record, was to sign the resolution at the September 7, 2021 special meeting.

I filed a complaint with the Ontario Ombudsman because the entirely closed process made it impossible for any resident to evaluate whether proper governance had occurred. The Ombudsman investigated seven meetings from 2021 and found that council violated the Municipal Act on July 13, 2021 by discussing the Township's hiring plan in camera when it did not meet any of the Act's closed meeting exceptions. Council accepted the finding.

The governance question is not whether the person hired was capable. It is whether council was actually making a decision — or ratifying an outcome already determined through a process it did not design, could not observe, and did not publicly question. The Ombudsman finding confirms that at least one of those closed discussions should have been open. The broader question of how council exercises independent oversight when the staff member managing a recruitment process is also the candidate was never answered publicly.

Full case study with timeline →  ·  Ombudsman report (January 2023) →

In 2022, council approved a multi-system software package totalling $189,218 plus taxes. Over the following three years, the implementation encountered serious problems and was ultimately abandoned. At no point during those three years did council ask a public question about progress, milestone adherence, or problems. The termination resolution in late 2025 came with no public explanation of what had gone wrong or what the final cost to taxpayers was.

A council that was leading would have required regular progress reports, asked what was going wrong, and intervened before three years elapsed. Instead, the project was managed entirely at the staff level. Council approved the initial expenditure and passed the termination resolution — with nothing in between. This is staff-led governance in practice: council approves, staff manage, and when things fail there is no accountability structure to surface the failure publicly.

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In January 2026, council passed Resolution R2026-09 mandating an electronic card system at Township landfill sites, effective April 1, 2026. When a vendor issue arose, the Municipal Administrator made a unilateral decision: purchase interim paper cards and defer the electronic system to September. This directly overrode a council resolution — without bringing the matter back to council for a vote.

Residents found out through informal conversations with landfill staff. No formal update came to a public council meeting. I wrote formally to the Mayor and all Councillors in March 2026 asking specifically why a staff decision had effectively rescinded a council resolution without authorization. The letter entered the public record as Correspondence Item 9 at the April 7, 2026 meeting. Council passed a new resolution extending the deadline — and not one councillor publicly asked why the original resolution had been overridden by staff without a vote.

This is the governance failure in its most explicit form. Council passed a resolution. Staff changed it. Council ratified the change. No one asked why the chain of authority had been bypassed. The absence of public questions is not evidence that nothing went wrong — it is evidence that council did not understand, or did not choose to exercise, its role as the decision-making authority over its own resolutions.

Full case study →