Nominations closed Friday afternoon and my name is not on the ballot. A few people have asked, and they deserve a straight answer rather than a shrug, so here it is.
Last November I wrote an editorial in this publication asking people in their twenties, thirties and early forties to run for council. I said we needed more candidates than seats. I said a true choice is the foundation of local democracy. And I said this: "I will not be asking you to do something I am unwilling to do myself. I have already made my own decision about next year, and my name will not be staying off that list."
I meant it when I wrote it. I did not do it. That is worth saying plainly before I say anything else.
I spent the last year inside this township's politics about as deeply as a person can get without holding a seat. I read the packages. I sat in the room. I went through the by-laws line by line, filed the requests, and put questions to people who would rather not have been asked. And somewhere in the middle of that year it became obvious to me that I cannot do both jobs. Not because there is a rule against it, and not because anyone talked me out of it. Because they are genuinely different jobs, and doing either one properly takes everything you have.
A councillor's job is to sit at a table and build enough agreement to move something forward. That takes patience and it takes compromise, and there is nothing wrong with either. My job is different. My job is to go and look, and then to tell you what I found whether or not it is convenient for the people at that table. Those two things pull in opposite directions. I could have done both badly. I would rather do one well.
So I am staying where I am, and I am going to be honest about why. It works. This publication put the Plevna battery storage proposal in front of people while it was still a proposal, and put direct questions to Alectra on this community's behalf instead of passing along a sales pitch. It gave both sides of that argument room to make their case in public. It argued for tiny homes here before the township had a policy on them, and Plevna now has a tiny house lot program. It reported that council had shut the public out of its own official record. It reported that the township committed $97,294 to a regional corporation whose minutes residents have never been shown. That work came from reading what was already public and asking the questions out loud, not from a seat at the table. I have watched that work land. I am more use to you doing that than I would be as one vote out of seven.
Now the part I am glad about. In November I asked for more candidates than seats. Twelve people put their names forward for seven seats. Three of them are running for mayor. Whatever else is true about this election, people did not wait for someone else to do the brave thing, and a lot of them are new. If saying I would run helped even a few of them decide to put their names down, then that editorial did its job, and I am not going to stand here and pretend I wish I had said less. Getting people off the sidelines was the whole point. It worked, and it worked better than one more name on a ballot would have.
There is one more thing I should address, because it is public and it will come up. Council spent about six thousand dollars of township money, by the mayor's own accounting at the August 13 meeting, on an Integrity Commissioner investigation. A good deal of that file was about me.
You will not find my name in it. The Commissioner anonymized the complainant and every witness, and he was right to. I am telling you plainly, because I would rather you heard it from me than worked it out later. The file is public, part of it is about how I do this job, and you can read it and draw your own conclusions.
So what am I doing instead. Two things.
The first is this. I am covering this election, all of it, from now until the vote on October 26 and past it. Every candidate, every ward, every forum, and the claims that get made about this township between now and then. I am not endorsing anyone and I am not going to. What I will do is tell you what is on the record about the people asking for your vote, and give any of them the chance to answer before it runs. Nobody else here is doing that meeting by meeting, on the record, at this depth.
The second is that this township needs an economy, and I am going to put my own effort into building one. Starting things is what I am actually good at. I can take an idea and have a working business out of it faster than most people can write the plan for one, and that is a skill this place could use more of. We do not need another study telling us that young families cannot afford to stay. We need work here that pays, and somebody has to go and make some. I would rather be one of the people who does that than one of the people who talks about it at a meeting.
Everything NFNM has published up to now was season one, and the election is the finale. The morning after the vote a new council wakes up with the job, and season two begins with a newsroom that has had a full year to get better at this: more records, more beats, faster coverage, and the same rule as always. If it happens in public, in your name, with your money, you get to see it. Whoever wins these seats should know that the watching does not stop on election night. It starts over, sharper.
None of this is a retreat and I want to be clear about that. I am not stepping back from this township's politics. I am staying exactly where I have been for the last year, which is close enough to see what is going on and far enough out to say so.
I want to say something about leadership, because I think we have the word wrong.
A leader is not a person who wins an election. Elections pick representatives, and representation matters, but the two are not the same thing and we have fallen into the habit of pretending they are. A leader is whoever turns up when the hall needs a roof. Whoever plows out a neighbour before they plow themselves out. Whoever sits on the fire hall board for eleven years because somebody has to, and does the unglamorous part, and keeps doing it when nobody is watching or thanking them. A leader is an anchor. You already know exactly who those people are in Ompah and Plevna and Cloyne, and almost none of them have ever held office.
I am not there yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I have a website, a year of hard reading, and a stubborn streak. That is not the same as being the person this place leans on when something goes wrong. Before I ever ask you for that seat, I want to have earned it out here first. Doing the work. Getting dirty. Being useful when it is inconvenient and there is nothing in it for me. That is the order it is supposed to go in, and I had it backwards in November. I am putting it right.
To everyone who put their name on that list, including the people who are going to disagree with everything I write between now and October, thank you for doing it. It is not a small thing to let your neighbours judge you in public. My job for the next nine weeks is to make sure the people voting on you have the facts. That is a promise I can keep.
Maybe in four years.