A South Frontenac resident cannot see who is in the council chamber, who moves a motion, or how their councillor votes. The only recording of their own government's meetings sits on a private platform the township does not control, with no captions the law requires, and it got there without a single recorded vote.
There is no camera in the South Frontenac council chamber. When the township posts what it calls the video of a council meeting, it is not video of the council. NFNM watched the onyl 5 recordings the township itself published of its 2026 meetings. Each one is a Zoom screen-share of the meeting agenda, a scanned document scrolling on screen behind a Zoom watermark, with the audio of voices a resident at home cannot match to a single face.
So a South Frontenac resident watching the official record of their government cannot see who is in the room, who is absent, who moves a motion, who seconds it, or how their own councillor votes. They get a PDF and a soundtrack. That is the substance of how South Frontenac shows its government to the people it governs, and across six years of council minutes NFNM read, no councillor ever voted to do it this way.
The township is also, on its own documents, failing two rules it is bound by. Its own records by-law says recordings like these cannot legally be thrown out and must be kept. Ontario accessibility law requires the township to caption a replay like this for deaf and hard-of-hearing residents. South Frontenac keeps no copy of the recordings it controls, and the only captions on them are Facebook's, which NFNM found extremely inaccurate to the spoken words, we would say unintelligible. This is what the township's practice looks like measured against the township's own obligations.
Nine videos, a five-year hole, and a record the township doesn't keep
The recordings are not an archive in any ordinary sense. When NFNM reviewed the township's Facebook page in June, the page carried nine council meeting recordings in total, roughly five from May and June of this year and four from 2020. Between them sits a gap of about five years, 2021 through most of 2025, with no council meeting video on the page at all. The recordings of those meetings are simply gone from the only place the township ever put them.
They are posted as Facebook Reels, dropped in among the township's promotional content: a Summer Music Festival card, a Family Day post, a Snow Social, a St. Patrick's Day clip. They carry no date in their titles. A resident cannot tell which meeting they are watching without opening the agenda image inside the video.
Now set that against what the township's own records by-law requires. By-law 2022-68 sets retention periods for municipal records, keeps council minutes permanently, and states in its own schedule that where no disposal authority is provided, records "cannot legally be disposed" and "must be retained until the schedule is amended." The Municipal Act (s.254) requires a municipality to keep its records in a secure and accessible manner. NFNM's reading is that the video of a public meeting is such a record. The only copy of these recordings lives on Facebook, on infrastructure the township does not control. Under Meta's own terms of service, in force since January 1, 2025, posting content grants Meta a broad, worldwide, sub-licensable licence over it, lets Meta remove or restrict access to it, and lets Meta suspend or delete the account holding it.
The township has YouTube. But chooses to not use it.
South Frontenac does own a neutral, public video platform. Its YouTube channel, youtube.com/@SouthFrontenacTownship, is live, and it holds exactly three videos: a 2023 holiday lights tour, a clip titled "25 Years Stronger Together," and one called "Simply Fabulous South Frontenac." All are roughly two years old. None is a council meeting.
So the township has the tool that would fix most of this and uses it to advertise itself rather than to show residents their government. The neighbours made the other choice. North Frontenac, Central Frontenac, Frontenac County, and Frontenac Islands all run YouTube archives of their council meetings on channels anyone can open without a youtube account. Among Frontenac-area municipalities, South Frontenac is the one that puts its meetings only on Facebook. A trend in our government that is plaguing our Canadian society.
The usual reasons a small township gives for Facebook are real ones. It is free, it is easy, residents are already there. None of those reasons require Facebook to be the only home of the record. Facebook Live streams only to Facebook, and a recording left there is a recording the township does not keep. YouTube Live is just as free and just as easy, and the neighbouring councils prove it every meeting. Nobody is asking South Frontenac to leave Facebook. The argument is that Facebook should not be the only door. NFNM has tested this theory on our own Facebook page. We posted an entire recording of a North Frontenac council meeting. Facebook deleted the reel once views dropped off and 30 days passed, citing its length as the reason.
The captions are Meta's, the law wants the township's, and the township provides none
For a deaf or hard-of-hearing resident, the record is worse than incomplete. The recordings carry a closed-caption toggle, but the captions are Facebook's automatic ones. The township supplies none of its own, and NFNM found Facebook's badly inaccurate. Pair that with a video that shows only a scrolling agenda, and a resident who cannot hear gets a silent, unintelligible document.
This is where the law is explicit. Ontario's Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation under the AODA (O. Reg. 191/11) requires every designated public-sector organization, which by the regulation's own definition includes every municipality, to make its public web content conform to the WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility standard. That standard requires captions on pre-recorded video. The regulation lists its exemptions, and the only captioning carve-out it grants is for live broadcasts (success criterion 1.2.4), not for pre-recorded ones. South Frontenac's archived replays are pre-recorded. They carry no township captions, only Meta's broken auto-captions. Captioning that archive is a legal accessibility requirement under O. Reg. 191/11, and the township is not meeting it. (A separate provision, s.12, also obliges the township to provide an accessible version on request.)
The walls around an open meeting
There is a wall at nearly every entrance to a South Frontenac council meeting. A resident without a Facebook account, or who does not want one, hits a login prompt: NFNM confirmed that a logged-out visitor to the township's page is served a "Log into Facebook", if not already logged in. Watching the live meeting on Zoom instead requires registering in advance for that specific meeting. On none of these paths is there a township-held copy or a platform-neutral place to watch without going through a company's front door first. To watch a public meeting of their own elected council, a South Frontenac resident must first hold an account with a private, foreign-owned company and accept its terms of service. A public record should not sit behind a foreign corporate login.
One national fact sharpens the point. Meta has blocked Canadian news content on Facebook and Instagram since 2023, a block the federal broadcast regulator CRTC said in December 2025 it would not act against. So a resident sitting on Facebook to watch their council cannot be served a news link about that same council. The platform the township routes residents onto is the platform that blocks journalism about government. And the same council who then sit back and ask "where have the journalists gone."
To be fair to South Frontenac, the township at least still leaves the comment field open on its Facebook posts, a genuine point in its favour, if the bar is low enough. The township's website is not the problem either. South Frontenac launched a modern, redesigned site in July 2024, and it is neither broken nor neglected. The township has every tool it needs and chooses not to use them for this. The site carries the statutory planning and zoning notices the township is required to post, while the day-to-day civic storytelling and the council video have migrated to Facebook. The township's own website tells residents to follow its Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and LinkedIn accounts "to stay up on news and events." Researchers at Georgetown University's Knight-Georgetown Institute have documented that engagement-ranked feeds, like Facebook's, surface what an algorithm predicts will hold attention rather than what a resident set out to find. NFNM's concern is structural: routing public information through a login-walled, algorithmically curated private, foreign owned platform, is fundamentally in opposition to our Canadian definition of democracy.
What NFNM is asking, and why we are telling you we asked
This newsroom will put a set of questions to the township and its clerk: where the master copy of council recordings is held, how long they are kept and under what schedule, whether any council decision ever adopted the Facebook model, and how a resident without a Facebook account, or a resident who cannot hear, is meant to follow a public meeting. Beyond the reporting, NFNM intends to pursue the matter through Ontario's records and accessibility avenues, a records remedy through the Information and Privacy Commissioner and the accessibility question under the AODA. No complaint has been filed, and neither step has yet been taken. In plain terms, NFNM is both the outlet reporting this and a party that intends to seek a remedy. We disclose that openly because the alternative, reporting it while quietly driving it, would be the dishonest version.
The asks are narrow on purpose. NFNM is not calling for a broadcast studio or a camera crew. It is asking the township to do two things it is already most of the way toward: keep a township-controlled master copy of the recordings it already makes, and provide a captioned, account-free, durable public archive of them. The township already owns the YouTube channel that would carry it. NFNM intends to see this practice end, and will report every step until it does.