North Frontenac Council Killed Democracy on April 10
By Donald Morton North Frontenac News Media April 13, 2026
Disclosure: I am the operator of North Frontenac News Media and a declared candidate for Ward 3 councillor of North Frontenac in the October 2026 municipal election. NFNM is also the outlet whose publisher the new rule was first applied to on April 10, 2026. A full disclosures block appears at the foot of this article.
At the 2:41:49 mark of the April 10, 2026 regular meeting of North Frontenac council, Mayor Gerald Lichty called the vote on By-law 2026-23. The bylaw amended the public forum section of the township’s procedural policy. Questions were out. Statements only.
Two minutes and four seconds later, Lichty applied the new rule to the first member of the public recognized under it. That member of the public was me.
This is a story about what happened in those two minutes, and about two other moments at the same meeting where the Mayor shut down questions he did not want answered. It is also a story about a pattern several people in this community have now named out loud: councillors asking the Mayor for permission to speak, as if he owns the floor.
How the bylaw got to the floor
By-law 2026-23 did not move cleanly. It moved on the third attempt.
About two hours into the meeting, during the tree canopy item, Councillor Mike Hage flagged that he had concerns on the procedural policy that was coming up next. The flag was set aside for later.
When the bylaws package came back around, Lichty proposed bundling 2026-23 with six other bylaws in a single resolution. Hage pushed it back out. Council then passed the other six bylaws with no debate and the procedural bylaw stood alone on the floor.
Hage then raised three substantive concerns about the bylaw content. One: where had the complaints section from the previous procedural policy gone. Two: had the Emergency Management Program Committee quorum been dropped to fifty percent with no council-member requirement. Three: did moving task force volunteer appointments to closed session comply with the Municipal Act. Those characterizations of the bylaw’s content are Hage’s, made from the table.
On the Municipal Act concern, Lichty’s verbatim reply, at 2:38:45, was: “No, good point. Good point.”
The concern was not answered. He then apologized for interrupting Hage: “Mike, I cut you off. I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to get into a long-term discussion.”
Here is the moment. Hage’s three concerns were on the record, acknowledged, and set aside. Before any motion was called from the floor, Lichty said he was moving the resolution forward, had the clerk read it in, and told the room that if the bylaw passed with unresolved questions, a councillor could always bring it back. His phrasing, paraphrased from an ASR-clustered block because the verbatim contains transcription artifacts (in simple terms, the townships recording quality sucks): a councillor could put it back on the agenda as early as two meetings from now.
Councillor Fred Fowler, still inside that same block, asked the obvious follow-up: “If we pass it as it’s written, we can bring it back at a later date and put the amendment in. Would that be all right?”
Lichty answered without answering, verbatim at 2:39:18: “And that’s the question. So I’m going to move forward with the resolution… if it’s passed, that doesn’t mean that someone can’t bring it back and we can put it back on the agenda. And it can be back on as early as two meetings to now.”
The Mayor restated Fowler’s question as if it were rhetorical, then moved to the vote. The vote was called immediately after.
The clerk read the motion. Hage moved, Councillor Good seconded. At the 2:41:49 mark of the council recording, Lichty said: “No comments? In favor? Carried.”
The bylaw passed with Hage’s three concerns on the record and unresolved.
Former Mayor Ron Higgins, who served North Frontenac from 2014 to 2022, put the process problem in plain English in an open letter to council dated April 13, 2026:
“Introducing, passing and implementing a procedural amendment of this nature within the same meeting. I noticed there were some members of Council expressing reservations on some of the content. Why would Council go ahead and pass a bylaw when there were still some Council questions going unanswered?”
Higgins also laid out the procedural path forward. Under the Municipal Act, council can remove the resolution from the April 10 minutes before approving those minutes at the May 1 meeting. That is the mechanism on the table. The bylaw stands today. Reversal is what residents, the former Mayor, and at least two declared 2026 candidates are asking for.
The Fowler shutdown: a councillor asking a question on behalf of his constituents
Before any of that happened, earlier in the same meeting, Councillor Fowler asked a question the Mayor did not want on the floor.
During the County of Frontenac’s Community Improvement Plan presentation by Frontenac County planner Sonia Bolton, Fowler asked how the CIP program actually benefits the public. The question Fowler raised was the one his constituents had been asking him. A program that provides grants to commercial enterprises. How does the benefit pass back to the public? Bolton was still taking questions from councillors. Inglis spoke in full, immediately after, on the same item.
Lichty’s response to Fowler, verbatim from the transcript at the 0:35:56 mark:
“Mr. Fowler, hang on. We’re not here to discuss the value of the program. We do that every year at budget time. We’re looking at the program itself and the design.”
Fowler’s reply, to the chair, verbatim:
“Just want to be able to give them an answer. That’s all.”
North Frontenac’s own Procedural By-law 2025-35, the bylaw in force that day, does not authorize what happened. Section 4.6(f) of that bylaw bars a member from speaking on a subject other than the one being debated. Fowler was on the CIP item, asking about the CIP program. Section 4.1 covers out-of-order conduct like offensive words. None of that applied. Section 4.4(m) gives the chair authority to order a member to cease behavior that disrupts the order and decorum of the meeting. Asking a policy question during a Q&A, on the agenda item in front of council, is not that.
There was no procedural basis to cut Fowler off. He was cut off anyway.
North Frontenac’s own Code of Conduct, adopted by every member of this council, requires members under s. 4.1(b) to conduct themselves in meetings “in accordance with the Township’s Procedural By-law.” That is the same bylaw that supplied no basis for the Fowler shutdown.
Fowler did North Frontenac a service that morning. The question he raised, how a commercial grant program benefits the public, is on the record because he raised it. The fact that it was shut down is on the record because he tried. Without his attempt, neither would be.
Kevin McCann, a North Frontenac resident and declared candidate for ward 3 Election, writing in the same April 13 community round as Higgins, captured the shape of this for neighbours reading along:
“I understand we’re the exception to the rule in this, most townships don’t allow the give and take at the end of council, and I realize that there needs to be a discussion on the topic; but where was the discussion?”
The forum, and the ban
Two minutes and four seconds after the bylaw passed, Lichty opened public forum. He framed it, verbatim from the transcript at 2:41:49:
“It’s not a question-and-answer period. It’s not a political scrum where reporters get to ask a lot of questions and so on. So if you have a question, please phrase it at the comment…”
That is the Mayor of North Frontenac, seconds after calling the vote that banned questions, naming reporters as the problem the new rule is aimed at. He said it before he recognized the first speaker. The first speaker recognized was me.
Here is what happened next, verbatim from the transcript beginning at 2:43:53.
I began: “Good morning, council. Donald Morton here, speaking from North Frontenac News Media. Mayor Lichty, are you saying I’m not allowed to ask questions right now, and I have to state these as statements?”
Lichty: “Exactly.”
I asked: “Is there a bylaw that says so, or is it just a five-minute limit?”
Lichty: “There was about two minutes ago. It was enacted. Sure. There was a change in the bylaw.”
I said: “You just made a bylaw right now?”
Lichty: “It was included in the procedural bylaw, which we just passed, so it’s enacted.”
I used the five minutes. I restated my items as statements. At the end of my time, I said on the record, verbatim at 2:52:09:
“I’ll note that you’re not letting media interact and ask questions. So thank you for your time today.”
Minutes later, the next speaker in the forum, Kelly Willis, stepped into a back-and-forth exchange that addressed individual councillors by name and ran past five minutes. At 2:56:22, Lichty told Willis, verbatim: “Keep going.”
I am stating the sequence, not a motive. The sequence is: a rule was passed that the Mayor, at the moment of framing the forum, attached in his own words to “reporters.” The first person recognized under it was a journalist. The journalist was told he could not ask questions. Two minutes later, a non-journalist resident in an extended back-and-forth with councillors was told to keep going.
At 2:57:20, with the forum winding down, Lichty himself said, verbatim:
“It’s kind of a learning experience as we move forward. This is the first shot. Okay. So, as we go further, it’ll get a little better.”
The first shot. The journalist. By his own words.
The pattern: councillors asking the Mayor for permission to speak
I wrote a short open statement to councillors on April 13. It lays out, using our own Procedural By-law 2025-35, what a chair can and cannot do. The Mayor chairs the meeting. He does not own the floor. Under s. 4.6(c), a member gets the floor by raising a hand and being recognized. That recognition is procedural, not a veto the chair hands out based on whether he likes the topic. Under s. 4.6(d), a member has up to five minutes on any question. Under 4.6(f), 4.1, 5.1, and 4.4(m), the chair can only cut a member off inside that five minutes on specified grounds: off-topic, out-of-order conduct, or disruption of decorum. Under 4.4(d) and 5.1, a councillor has a right of appeal to council. The chair’s ruling is not final when council overrules it. All seven of those sections exist in By-law 2025-35 where I cited them, and read the way I described them.
I am restating the argument here because it is the point of this article. What happened to Fowler and what happened to me were not enabled by the bylaw in force that day. They were enabled by councillors, in the room, not using the floor they already had.
From the April 13 statement, the line the investigator memo preserved as the backbone of this whole section:
“I keep watching councillors ask the Mayor for permission to speak like he owns the floor. He doesn’t.”
Other voices are naming the pattern too.
Rob Lesperance, declared 2026 candidate for Ward 2, at the end of an April 13 piece on rebuilding trust, listed bringing back the ability to ask questions in public forum as the first action a council that wants to recover public confidence should take. His April 11 statement, still on the record, put the fallout in sharper terms:
“It feels like a direct response to legitimate questions and critical coverage rather than a thoughtful improvement to meeting procedures.”
Art Hannigan, declared 2026 candidate for Mayor, in an April 13 open statement:
“Your right to walk into a council meeting and speak your piece is not a privilege to be granted or taken away based on who finds it inconvenient. It is the foundation of local democracy, and in a rural community like North Frontenac, where the distance between a resident and their local government is supposed to be the shortest it gets anywhere in Canada, it matters enormously.”
Hannigan committed to making protected public participation a cornerstone of his campaign, and wrote that the fact the restriction was attempted at all is something residents should keep in mind.
McCann, closing his April 13 piece with a direct appeal:
“I beg you please, reach out to your councilor this week and ask to repeal the quashing of our voice. It may not be done elsewhere, but we’re not elsewhere.”
A former Mayor. A declared 2026 Mayor candidate. A declared Ward 2 candidate. Two declared Ward 3 candidates. Five voices. All pointing at the same thing. None of them satisfied with how the bylaw got passed. None of them satisfied that it stands. The people raising the alarm here are not the problem. Council is.
Context
This piece is part of a longer pattern. NFNM’s earlier coverage of how the Mayor and the Township Clerk decide who gets heard at council is here: Gerry Lichty and the Township Clerk: To Decide Who Gets Heard and Who Doesn’t.
The question of why a procedural bylaw narrowing public questions came to council on April 10 is not one this article is going to speculate about. NFNM’s FMSC coverage is on the record. So is the April 9 email from the Mayor’s official account accusing NFNM of twisting words and fabricating facts, sent the day before the vote. Both are in the NFNM records archive and will be covered further in their own pieces.
For this article, the record is: the bylaw was introduced, debated, passed, and applied to a working journalist in the same meeting, with reservations from councillors on the record and unresolved; Councillor Fowler was silenced earlier in the same meeting on an accountability question under no procedural basis the township’s own bylaw supplies; and the Mayor’s own framing of the new rule, in the seconds before he applied it, named the press.
What happens next
Council meets next on May 1, 2026. The April 10 minutes come forward for approval that day. Any councillor may move to remove the resolution adopting By-law 2026-23 from those minutes before they are approved, and any councillor may bring a motion to restore questions to public forum. Higgins’s open letter lays out that path. Higgins, Lesperance, and Hannigan have each asked council to take it, and McCann is asking residents to press their councillor this week.
Nominations for the October 2026 municipal election open May 1.
NFNM is providing Mayor Lichty, every sitting councillor, the CAO, and the Clerk with this article and inviting any response. Any reply received will be published in full.
Disclosures
- Donald Morton is the operator of North Frontenac News Media and a declared candidate for councillor of North Frontenac ward 3 in the October 2026 municipal election. NFNM is also the outlet whose publisher the new rule was first applied to on April 10, 2026.
- Ron Higgins is the former Mayor of North Frontenac (2014 to 2022), defeated by Gerald Lichty in the October 2022 municipal election.
- Art Hannigan is a declared candidate for North Frontenac Mayor in the October 2026 election.
- Rob Lesperance is a declared candidate for North Frontenac Ward 2 in the October 2026 election.
- Kevin McCann is a ward 3 candidate and his April 13 statement tags four sitting members of council and carries candidate-intent indicators. As of publication his formal candidacy status has not been confirmed.
