By Donald Morton, EiC

On Saturday afternoon, under an article on this paper's Facebook page, a woman I have met in person twice and consider a neighbour, as I would consider anyone else in North Frontenac a neighbour, tagged three candidates for council underneath one of NFNM's public articles and asked them a question. "Art Hannigan Rob Lesperance Mike Hage Do you all really think this is the kind of new outlet our residents should rely on? How can you continue to promote it?! I'm baffled."

Her name is Angela Case. She is not a candidate or an official. She is a resident who pays taxes and raises her kids here, which is how she described herself. She had every right to post it, and I am going to quote her, because she said in public, under her own name, the thing I have been describing for almost two years without ever being able to point at a person of any standing, with a house here, a tax bill here and kids here, rather than a page admin with none of those, who said it out loud.

"It's not about you - like it's literally NOT personal. I don't know you personally. But you are loud in my town."

"I feel ashamed for our township of this is what people land on when they search for news and opinions about our township."

"I'm not voting for or endorsing politicians who want to see more of this. Thats my right."

Read those together. The article is not engaged with. Not one sentence of it is disputed. The ask is that three men running for office account for the fact that they talk to me, and that voters hold it against them today if they keep doing it. That is the whole mechanism, written out by the person operating it. It was theory until Saturday. Now it is a record. I want to thank her for that.

I have been barking about this for over a year. In August of 2025 I wrote about a Plevna Facebook group that turned an audit of a councillor's record into a campaign about my character. In December I quoted an admin of a group of nearly eighteen thousand members saying "I helped Regent win last election, but not this time." In February I wrote about being removed from a community group shortly after the man I had argued with and I had apologized to each other.

Your watchdog barked. It came in the fence anyway. It did not hurt me first. It hurt the homestead. And you chose to try and punish the watchdog for barking at all. All that proves is that the farmer is incompetent. At some point the watchdog is going to bite back, and when he does, the only thing that has failed is the farmer.

Start with the good, because we need to remember it. The all-candidates meetings, the canvassing, the coffee meetups all went well. I watched people who disagree stand in the same hall, take turns at the microphone, and go home. Signs got wrecked. Signs have been getting wrecked since signs were invented. C'est la vie.

Now the bad. The one thing, without a shadow of a doubt, that stained this election is Facebook, and the small, clicky echo chambers inside it. Every township in this county was as guilty as the next. The groups are not a conversation. They are a one-way broadcast with a comment box underneath, and going against the broadcast has consequences in real life. Friendships ended this year over threads. People were told, in so many words, who they were allowed to be seen with. Three candidates were asked on Saturday to answer for the company they keep.

It is not only the random commenter. Two days earlier, the president of the Kashwakamak Lake Association wrote under one of our articles that it was "an outright misrepresentation of the KLA" and told me to "get your facts straight if you want to be considered a 'journalist'." Minutes later this paper was banned from the association's page, which she administers. The article quoted a letter to council that sits, word for word, in a council agenda. Her quarrel was not with a fact. It was with the evidence, and her answer was to close her page to this paper. One person, holding the keys to a page that calls itself a community, deciding who is allowed in. I call it dictatorship. If that word is too big for you, find me a smaller one that still fits.

The mayor blocked me from his mayoral page. The Township blocked me and this paper from the Township's own page. Two letters later I was unblocked from both. That happened, and no one gets to curate the narrative and pretend it did not.

Let me be very clear. Canadian law defends reporting on public information, in the public interest, done responsibly. That does not mean I can make things up. Not one sentence gets published here until the screenshot, document or recording it rests on has been catalogued, hashed and archived with a timestamp. That might be why, in nearly 200 articles, no one has once come to me with different information. Every criticism I have had from Plevna and Ompah has been about me for writing it at all. My motives. My mental health. My family. Never the words. And you call that pride? My company is named after the township. That is pride.

Speaking of pride, I do not eat at North of 7 anymore. I would rather go to bed without dinner than sit in a room where I do not trust the people bringing me my food. That is what two years of this does to a person in a place this small.

Angela wrote that it makes us look bad when people search our township and NFNM comes up first. She is right. I make sure of it. If Google says North Frontenac has a housing problem, an economic problem, a school problem, it is because we do. The articles are not judgments. They are the problems we have right now, on a record that will outlast all of us. You have no say in that. You do have control over it. Give me a township with nothing but good things to write about and I will write nothing but good things.

I was raised in the generation that was taught to fight bullying. Racism, exclusion, the cold shoulder at the hall, the group that decides you are not one of them. One umbrella. I was also raised to value the neighbour who tells me I am wrong to my face and shows me why. I have never once turned that person away.

The bottom of the barrel is not the end. If someone ten years from now reads about a problem we had, and then reads about the fix, that is us writing our own history in real time. The past was once a now. The future will be a now. What matters is now.

I do not do this for any of you. I do it for Drayden, my son, and the world he will grow up in.

So this watchdog will keep barking. And now, when I say something is coming through the fence, I can point at it.

DISCLOSURE: I wrote the articles described here. I am the person the comments quoted above were addressed to, and the accounts blocked and banned from the pages named are mine.