For about four minutes on Thursday evening, the North Frontenac council chamber had something it has not had for a long time: an open argument, on the public record, about the process that produced the April 10 by-law amendment. That by-law restricted Public Forum participation to comments only and excluded journalists from asking questions. The motion that opened the May 21 argument was procedurally polite. The substance was not.

Hermer: housekeeping wasn't housekeeping

Councillor Vernon Hermer had put a Notice of Motion on the May 1 agenda. By May 21 the operative text sounded routine: "Council instructs the Clerk to review the process for amending Township by-laws passed under the Municipal Act and report back to Council." Then Hermer was given the floor, and told council which by-law amendment process he was talking about, when it happened, and what he believed had been done wrong.

The story he laid out begins on January 16, when he asked for the agenda to be amended to allow a discussion about councillor attendance at open and closed meetings. He was told that could not be done from the floor; it had to come back as a notice of motion. He filed one. Discussion came back on February 1. On March 20 the amendment to the procedural by-law was accepted, and on April 10 the resulting by-law (#2026-23) received first, second, and third reading and passed.

Hermer thinks the Public Forum restriction itself is wrong. His complaint at the meeting focused on a different question: how it got into the by-law.

"Someone, some unknown person or persons decided to ride along on that motion and amend an unrelated bylaw, which certainly can't be done," he told council.

And he was clear about what the housekeeping rule for by-law amendments cannot do:

"Two major amendments that cannot be made, from what I can discover, are amendments that may change the intent or purpose of a by-law, and secondly anything that may restrict or prevent public participation. Both of these incidents happened."

Mayor Gerry Lichty pushed back. He told Hermer they were really talking about one by-law, the procedural by-law, with two amendments inside it. Hermer disagreed. The councillor-attendance change reaches into the Municipal Act, he said, and section 66 of the Act, which the township cannot itself amend. The Public Forum change is a township-level matter sitting inside the same procedural by-law. Two changes, two doors.

"The notice of resolution," Hermer told council, "if you look back, it said specifically to discuss counselor participation. It did not mention anything about public forum."

The Mayor's compromise was the resolution as it stood. That carried.

There is now a council instruction asking the Clerk to look back at how the April 10 by-law was amended and report whether the process was correct. The resolution does not name April 10, does not name #2026-23, and does not promise any reconsideration. The discussion does. Hermer named the date, the process, and the Public Forum change as the second amendment he believes should not have been folded into the package.

Until May 21, the April 10 by-law was on the books with no councillor publicly challenging the path it took to get there. Now there is one.

ALTO: a process motion that two councillors pushed toward action

The second motion that turned into a substantive discussion was the Mayor's own. The substance moved in a direction the resolution did not.

ALTO is the federal high-speed-rail project still in its corridor-selection stage. The preferred-corridor announcement is expected in the fall. North Frontenac is one of the townships sitting under the candidate hydro-corridor route through the Madawaska region.

The May 21 resolution directed the Manager of Community Development, Brooke Ross, to work with the Mayor to "prepare a strategy with respect to the ALTO project to ensure the Township is prepared to organize a response and to ensure residents remain informed." It does not direct the township to oppose the project. It directs the township to prepare to respond and to keep residents informed.

That detail matters because North Frontenac already has an opposition resolution on the books, passed February 6. The May 21 resolution does not re-state it. By the time of the May 21 meeting, opposition resolutions had also been passed by South Frontenac (Feb 3), the Eastern Ontario Wardens' Caucus (Mar 19), Tay Valley (Mar 24), Lanark County (Mar 25), the United Counties of Prescott and Russell (Mar 25), The Nation (Apr 13), Mississippi Mills (Apr 14), the County of Frontenac (Apr 15), Northumberland County (Apr 15), the Quinte Source Protection Authority (Apr 16), and Greater Napanee (Apr 28). On April 30, twelve eastern Ontario mayors and reeves representing roughly 215,000 residents signed a joint letter to Prime Minister Carney. North Frontenac did not sign it.

Renfrew County moved in the other direction. After rejecting the EOWC motion on April 14 as "premature," it passed its own resolution supporting the project on May 1, with Mayor Rob Weir of Greater Madawaska as the lone dissent.

Lichty told council on May 21 that the township needed to act because "the comment period for ALTO has closed," and because "out of sight, out of mind, there's a tendency to forget." He asked: "Do we have a responsibility? I think we do. But what should that responsibility look like?"

Councillor Fred Fowler took the urgency further. He told council he had bought a road map of Ontario, drawn a straight line from Ottawa through Peterborough to Toronto, and noted that the line "goes through Snow Road." His conclusion: "As far as I'm concerned, it's coming, and we have to be prepared for that."

Councillor Mike Hage told council a constituent of his had described what awareness of the project looks like outside the township. The constituent, Hage said, has a "seasonal trailer" and "lives somewhere in the GTA." According to Hage, the constituent "told me there is more awareness and opposition in the GTA than here. He drove here to his trailer. Not a single opposition sign anywhere on the road. No 'no ALTO' sign, nothing. Which was kind of surprising."

Hermer's claim that the "expropriation process" had reached "up to the Quebec Ontario border" is not supported by the public record. ALTO chief executive Martin Imbleau has stated, per CBC reporting, that the company is operating on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis. No formal expropriation has commenced. The federal Bill C-15 framework that would govern expropriation when it comes is the subject of NFNM's national investigation, publishing Friday.

Lichty said he had approached the Mayor of Central Frontenac twice and "didn't get any support." He had also spoken to "Tony Fish from Addington Highlands"; he told council Fish had said "we're waiting to see what you do," adding, in his own words, that he might be "paraphrasing that a little."

It was Hage who carried the opposition-signaling argument that produced the amendment. Posting an ALTO information link on the township website, without context, could read as endorsement: "If we just put it out there, it might signal that we are for it." His answer: "We have to at least signal our opposition. We need to have a resolution. But we can put that in that initial one or two paragraphs." The amendment added to the motion came out of that exchange: that the strategy be developed "including legal advice on what is permitted."

What council did not do on May 21 was pass a new opposition resolution, sign the twelve-municipality coalition letter to the Prime Minister, or formally align with the County of Frontenac's April 15 opposition. The Mayor's motion stayed at communications-strategy. The push to make the township's own strategy carry the weight of the February resolution came from Hage on the floor. The resolution text itself stayed narrower.

The Compliance Audit Committee: a number that did not get asked

By-law #2026-33 appoints the Joint Compliance Audit Committee for the 2026 municipal election. The Joint Committee hears applications to audit candidates' campaign finances. Four townships share it.

The staff report on the May 21 agenda (pages 39-41 of the packet) recommended appointing four people: Wayne Robinson, Sam Arraj, Alida Moffat, and Angela Woodland. By-law #2026-33 as drafted (page 178) appoints three: Robinson, Arraj, Moffat. Angela Woodland's name is not in the by-law, and the alternate slot is left without a named person. Staff did not explain the discrepancy on the public record.

Lichty asked the geography during the Item 11(c) discussion: "I know who Wayne Robinson is, but where are the other three come from?" Clerk Tara Mieske answered that one is from South Frontenac, one from Central Frontenac, and that one of the appointees is "the former treasurer in a different municipality."

The question of why the staff report recommended four names and the by-law appoints three was not raised on the public record. Nobody asked. The by-law passed late in the meeting, bundled with By-law #2026-32 for first, second, and third reading.

The Election Reserve Fund that pays compliance-audit costs sits at an estimated $1,449. If a compliance application is received against a North Frontenac candidate, council instructed the Treasurer in the same motion to transfer the required funds from the reserve.

Public Forum: nobody

When Lichty opened the Public Forum, he framed it for council and the public watching online: "We will entertain anyone who wishes to make comments about agenda items specifically discussed today. Questions are included in that." The April 10 by-law his council passed restricts Public Forum participation to comments only. No one came to ask anything. If the public has been told they cannot ask questions, why would they? The Forum closed and council adjourned into closed session.

Where this goes

The Clerk now has homework. Depending on how the report-back is carried out, the Hermer motion could either close out the April 10 question quietly with a procedural report or reopen it with a recommendation to look again at by-law #2026-23. The next regular meeting is June 11.

The ALTO file sits between two postures: a township that has opposed the project on paper since February, and a Mayor who has just been given a council instruction to prepare a communications strategy. Whether the eventual strategy reflects the floor arguments from Fowler and Hage or the Mayor's narrower resolution text is the question their pressure was meant to open.

One more thing: a quiet seat change

Fred Fowler showed up twice on the May 21 record. Once on the ALTO road map. Once in the OPP Detachment Board annual report, which listed him as North Frontenac's representative on the board in the seat Stephanie Regent vacated when she resigned from several committees last year. The substitution itself is from 2025. Its acknowledgment in this year's annual report was not discussed at the meeting.