Our Community Challenge

The job of a Council member is to be a representative of all the people who depend on you. That isn’t an easy job.

Sometimes people will call you, or email you, or they meet you in a store or restaurant and discuss the problems they’re having. Most people won’t. When they see you, they chat but they don’t tell you they want something fixed or changed. But whether they tell you or not, they are your constituents, your neighbours and friends, and you should try to do right by them.

It’s easy when people tell you the problem – harder when they don’t – but it’s your job to listen and learn.

To be a good Councilor, you must put yourself in someone else’s shoes – think about their lives, their struggles, their challenges. I do that by reading the national census. That might seem strange but let me explain.

If you look at the 2021 census and the numbers for Central Frontenac, you get the following picture:

- Between 2016 and 2021, Central Frontenac’s population grew by 11.9% That was a bigger gain than South Frontenac (8.3%) and the whole of Ontario (5.8%)

- In 2020, the median after-tax income of households in Central Frontenac was $62,800. With an average of 2.2 wage-earners per household, that’s $31,400 per person

- 16.6% of households make less than $30,000 a year (Ontario average is 12%)

- 31.0 % of households make between $30,000 and $60,000 a year (Ontario average is 23%)

- 15% of households spend more than a third of their income on shelter

- 7.3% of households are in “core housing need”

- 11.5% of households are in what is described as “inadequate housing”

- Nearly 3% of households are in what is classified as “unsuitable housing”

What does that all mean?

It means that if you get in your car and drive a short distance down the road from your house, you will have easily passed the driveways of dozens of people who have less money than you for food, hydro and other bills. They probably do without a lot of things many of us take for granted. They probably struggle to keep their families fed or scramble not to have their phone or electricity shut off.

Remember how I said that the average after-tax income of a household in our township was $62,800? Divide it by 2 and then calculate before taxes, and it’s about $42,000 a year for each person. But remember that a person making minimum wage in Ontario would be getting around $35,000 a year pre-tax.

We all have struggles, but it is not an exaggeration to say that no matter how tight things are for you and your family, you do not have to go far to find someone in far worse shape.

In the time I was on Council, I thought about this.

Every time a proposal to increase fees or property taxes came up, I thought about this.

Every time there was a proposal to make a change that would “only increase what people pay by a small amount,” I thought about this.

I still do, and that’s why I want to talk about a tax burden that households can handle. It’s why I want to talk about growing the economy for all of Central Frontenac. It’s why I am supportive of ‘communal service’ projects that could allow us to provide affordable housing options for working families that can’t afford $350,000 for a house or pensioners who cannot afford $3000 a month for a retirement residence (if they can find one).

I am more than willing to talk about anything – and I won’t shy away from a good discussion – but I have to tell you that the conversations I’m most interested in having are those where we find ways of fixing these numbers.

I will be the first to admit that I have benefited as much from luck as from work. But a lot of us have, and we forget that at our own peril.

Under the right circumstances, any one of us could be in the shoes of someone struggling. Chances are that the things we care about today wouldn’t matter a lot because we would have a whole host of more pressing things to deal with.

I am under no illusion about fixing all of these problems – they are bigger than one councillor or one municipality – but we can resolve to not do things to make life harder, and we can try to lay the foundation for a solution.

With your support in October, I hope to do that.