By Donald Morton
North Frontenac News Media asked the Township of South Frontenac for the video recordings of three of its own council meetings, and the Township released them. It released them only after a freedom-of-information request, a statutory fee, and a password, and when the files arrived they did not show the council. The paperwork about the meetings is public. The meetings themselves are not.
South Frontenac hands residents its rulebook for free. Its procedure by-law and its records-retention by-law are public documents that anyone can download, but the recording of what council actually said and did required a formal request under provincial law to pry loose. This is what that request turned up, and why the Township's own answer does more damage to its position than anything this newsroom could say.
What we asked, and what came back
On June 15, 2026, NFNM filed request 2026-FOI-009 under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and it asked for two things. The first was the video recordings of three regular council meetings, held October 17, November 7, and December 5, 2023. The second was any record showing where the master copies of council recordings from 2021 through 2025 are kept, along with the retention schedule or disposal authority the Township applies to those recordings.
On July 14, Clerk James Thompson signed the decision, and Item 1 was granted in full. The three 2023 videos were released through a password-protected Frontenac County file transfer, with the password supplied in the covering email. The Township waived the discretionary fees for searching out and preparing the records, so the only charge NFNM paid was the $5 application fee, a sum set by provincial regulation that the Township has no power to waive. Item 2 was denied, and the Township invoked section 15(a) of the Act, which lets an institution refuse a record that "has been published or is currently available to the public," redirecting NFNM to two public by-laws. What it did not do was claim the videos themselves were already public. It released them through the freedom-of-information process instead, and releasing a record that way is itself the admission that the record was not publicly available.
What the recordings actually are
NFNM has now viewed all three released files, and they are not what most people picture when they hear the words "council video." There is no camera in the council chamber, the video never shows the councillors or the mayor, and it does not show who is in the room, who moves a motion, or how anyone votes. What the files show instead is a screen-share of the Township's CivicWeb document portal, the agenda and staff reports and presentation slides scrolled on screen while the meeting audio plays over top, and sample frames pulled from each of the three 2023 meetings confirm the same thing every time. A resident who wanted to watch their council govern, filed the request, paid the fee, waited the month, and typed in the password, receives a recording of a document being scrolled. You can hear the meeting, but you cannot see the people you elected.
Their own by-laws answer the rest
The two by-laws the Township pointed to settle the rest of the story, beginning with custody. The Township's own index of records describes Item 1 as "any video recording, in the custody or under the control of the Township of South Frontenac," and the decision letter states, "Enclosed are copies of records to which you have been granted access." In writing, the Clerk confirms the Township holds council video, which closes off any notion that these recordings are not the Township's records or that they live only on someone else's platform.
Records Retention By-law 2022-68 sets out, class by class, how long every kind of township record is kept, and it marks council minutes, motions and resolutions, and reports to council as permanent, never to be destroyed. Nowhere in that schedule is there a class for an audio or video recording of a council meeting, and the only moving-image record it contemplates is unrelated short-term security-camera footage. That gap matters because of a rule the by-law states plainly on its own third page: "Where specific authority is not provided in this schedule, records cannot legally be disposed. They must be retained until the schedule is amended." On the Township's own logic, if there is no disposal authority for a council recording, then the 2021 through 2025 master recordings cannot lawfully have been destroyed and must still exist.
The Township denied Item 2 by pointing to By-law 2022-68 as the public authority governing retention, but the only class in that by-law that touches a meeting's substance, C04 Council Minutes, is confined to "minutes of the proceedings of Council meetings ... attachments to the minutes and voting records," and it does not list a recording. The very by-law South Frontenac cited to answer the retention question is the record that proves there is no answer. A recording is unmistakably a record in any case, because the same by-law's definition includes "a sound recording, a videotape, a machine-readable record," so the Township cannot wave a council video away as some ephemeral byproduct when its own instrument names the format.
Procedure By-law 2025-21, the Township's current rulebook for how council operates, tells the other half of the story. It is a full rewrite that took effect April 1, 2025, signed by Clerk Thompson and Mayor Ron Vandewal, and it says nothing about recording meetings, streaming them, broadcasting them, archiving them, or captioning them, and it never names Facebook, Zoom, or YouTube. The only record it requires anyone to keep is the Clerk's written minute book. So the Facebook-and-Zoom arrangement that governs public access to South Frontenac's meetings was never chosen by a vote, and when this council rewrote its own rulebook last year, it left public access to the recordings unaddressed.
Our view: a wall nobody voted for
Everything above is the Township's own paperwork and its own released files, and what follows is NFNM's assessment of it, offered as our opinion. In our view this is an open-government failure, a wall between residents and their council that no councillor ever moved and no resolution ever adopted, one that hardened into practice and simply stayed there. It belongs to this council and not to some old habit inherited and forgotten, because the current council reopened the procedure by-law in 2025, reworked it from top to bottom, and left the wall standing. South Frontenac has abdicated a basic duty of local government, the duty to keep public business public.
None of this is inevitable, and the neighbouring councils prove it. Central Frontenac, North Frontenac, Frontenac County, and the Frontenac Islands all post their council meetings to open, free YouTube archives that anyone can watch, with no request, no fee, and no password, while South Frontenac's council content lives as Facebook Reels and the Township's own YouTube channel holds three promotional videos and not one council meeting. Five years of council video, 2021 through 2025, is missing from public view. The tools are the same for every township, and South Frontenac is the outlier by choice.
What we are asking
Residents have real cause for concern here and every right to demand change, and NFNM's asks of council are concrete and reasonable. Make the council-meeting recordings publicly available in a free, township-controlled archive, the way the neighbouring councils already do. Put a real camera in the council chamber, so residents can watch their council meet and see who says what and who votes how. And update the Township website with a photo of every councillor and the mayor, so residents can at least see the people who govern them.
There is a fourth ask, and it is aimed not at the Township but at every resident. South Frontenac holds a municipal election this October, and between now and the vote, residents can ask every incumbent and every candidate to commit, publicly and on the record, to these fixes, and then weigh in October who would and who would not.
Coming in Part 2
NFNM has now asked South Frontenac for a copy of every council recording it holds, for every meeting and every year, across the full stretch its own by-law says it cannot have thrown away. The narrow question of three meetings from 2023 is settled, and the open question is what South Frontenac does when a resident asks for all of them. If the masters exist, as the Township's own by-law says they must, producing them is a matter of will, and if any do not, the Township will have to name the disposal authority that let them go, which by its own schedule does not exist. What the Township does with that request will tell residents whether the wall around the record was an oversight or a choice, and Part 2 will report the answer.
Disclosure: NFNM's publisher, Donald Morton, has announced his intention to seek the office of Mayor of North Frontenac in the October 2026 election. He has not filed a nomination and is not a registered candidate. That office is in North Frontenac, a different municipality from South Frontenac, which this article examines and where Morton holds no office and seeks none. He filed the freedom-of-information request behind this article and directed its reporting, which rests on the Township of South Frontenac's own decision letter, its by-laws, and the recordings it released. North Frontenac News Media does not endorse candidates.