Wellington Advertiser Candidate Night: My Full Answers

The biggest challenge facing this township right now is that growth is being decided for us faster than we can plan for it responsibly. That growth affects our roads, our water and wastewater systems, our housing supply, and ultimately your tax bill if we don't get ahead of it. My whole platform is built around answering this challenge: set predictable rules upfront for housing density, for planning approvals, and for infrastructure capacity, so growth happens on our terms instead of becoming a crisis we react to one application at a time.

We need to set the standard for developers on the style of housing and the design of roads we want in this community. By not managing that, we've allowed developers to put houses so close together you could pass butter between them with a canoe paddle. Density ratios are set by jobs or houses per hectare. We have a business park, paid for by the previous council, with 40 companies on a waitlist to purchase lots — yet as of today, only one lot has been sold, and another was transferred in a land swap for affordable housing.

Selling those lots, letting existing businesses grow, and bringing new businesses to town to build a local economy on something other than tourism all help relieve the density pressure. It also lets larger employers grow and release staff to serve on our volunteer fire department — small employers are carrying more of that load right now, and it hits harder when a small business loses an employee to an emergency call than when a large one does.

Residents setting the rules for what subdivisions should look like, and pushing staff to sell out that business park and bring in the jobs that build a healthy community — that's what we need to do. For four years we've deferred and deferred and deferred. Now we need to act.

Yes — two consecutive councils have said no to this, and I was on one of them. Let me clarify something, because I've been accused of both supporting cannabis stores and standing against them. The original motion was awkwardly worded and was turned down based on its first section. The third section of that motion was "vote no, but revisit" — and that's where I stood, for this reason: I'm not against cannabis stores, or the people who want to use cannabis. What I'm against is upper-tier governments — the province and the federal government — making all the money from this and sending all the problems to the municipality.

We don't get to control the number of licences sold; the province does, and they collect $25,000 per licence. You can tell by how many cannabis stores get approved in every community that they'll take as many applicants as apply — after all, they make $25,000 per application. The federal government collects tax revenue from the manufacturers. We don't get to say where the stores go or how many there are, and as far as money flowing back to us: we get zero. We collect the same property taxes on those commercial buildings as we would on any other tenant — zero additional income, and 100% of whatever problems come with it. That's a stacked deal, and I'll be against it today, tomorrow, and until the rules change.

If the province keeps shrinking what development charges can cover, and shrinking development charges themselves, we're in trouble. Development charges exist so that growth pays for itself instead of taxpayers footing the bill. When the Premier announces, as he did on March 30, 2026, that we don't get provincial money unless we lower our DC charges first, that's a bully tactic, and it matters to this community — the amount of money we've been offered and the amount of growth we've been handed are wildly disproportionate.

This is a fight worth having. Our taxes are already high enough; if development costs aren't recovered through development charges, the cost of those services falls onto existing residents. The Development Charges Act already allows us to reduce or eliminate charges to encourage affordable housing, and I support that. Any further reduction beyond that needs serious scrutiny before it happens.

Here's what I will commit to today: I will not use the shortcut in Bill 17 that lets a council quietly cut DC rates without a public meeting. Residents get the same public process the law used to require, whether or not Queen's Park demands it. Ontario law already requires a fully funded 10-year asset management plan — cutting DC charges without replacing that revenue underfunds that plan and pushes out the timeline for repairing our assets. That means we fix them later, in inflated future dollars, and our costs go up significantly.

I will stand by my tax commitment of no more than 3 to 5%, tied to documented costs, not politics — and I will not let Doug Ford's bullying turn Centre Wellington into the next Peel Region: cut first, get stiffed later. If the province's money is real, it will still be real after it clears our bank account. Give us the money first, and then we'll cut DC charges.

With only four vehicle crossings connecting our urban centres, congestion is only going to get worse as provincially mandated growth continues. Waiting to address it makes the problem worse, not better. The County's Transportation Master Plan has already identified two new river crossings under study, at Beatty Line and Wellington Road 29, specifically to improve north-south connectivity, take pressure off our existing bridges, and improve access to the new hospital site. I support advancing those environmental assessments now. Highway 6 itself is provincial jurisdiction, but that doesn't mean we wait passively — it means the township needs to be at the table pushing for it. And longer term, my Community Planning Permit System ties new growth approvals to confirmed infrastructure capacity, including road capacity, so we're not approving thousands of new units without first knowing whether Fergus and Elora's streets can handle them.

In my first six months, I will launch the public engagement process for the Community Planning Permit System in the Fergus and Elora-Salem growth areas. This isn't a new idea — it's the core of my platform, and the tool that ties everything else together: predictable zoning rules set upfront instead of a rezoning fight for every application, design standards for gentle density decided with residents before a single proposal arrives, and infrastructure capacity confirmed before growth is approved. We'll start with the downtown cores to set standards and zoning that give us a grip on growth there, then move outward — so developers aren't the ones telling us where this community grows. Getting that public co-design process started in the first six months means residents help build the rulebook before it's used, not after.

Current council is voting next week — as I said at the last debate, and I'll repeat it — on an interim control bylaw that expires in a year and can be renewed once. We don't have an application at the County or the Township for an AI data centre yet, but we're all certain one is coming. We need to start working with our planning department now on what kinds of businesses we're going to allow to operate within the Township, and then let residents comment on that. We should have started that four years ago, and we didn't. We need hard facts if we don't want this: how do we prevent it, what are the economic factors, and what are the environmental factors? In my opinion, trying to pre-emptively ban something before we even have an application in front of us is the cart before the horse, and honestly, I believe it's political theatre.

While we're working through what we want and what we need: if an application does come in, we use the interim control bylaw process to hold it while we finish our research. Personally, I can't see a way that a project with this few jobs, this much energy consumption, this much land use, and this close to a residential area would pass any development test.

Tourism is a real economic asset for Elora and Fergus, but it comes with real costs, and pretending otherwise doesn't serve anyone. On lodging, that's exactly why I pushed the short-term rental bylaw through as chair of the Economic Development and Healthy Growth Committee — protecting long-term rental stock from being converted into investment properties is part of managing tourism pressure responsibly, not separate from it. On parking, our minimums and downtown parking rules were written for a different era, and they need to be revisited as part of the same zoning work I'm already committed to for gentle density. And on traffic, it's the same river-crossing capacity problem tourism adds to, which is why advancing the Beatty Line and Wellington Road 29 crossings matters for residents and visitors alike. The balance isn't choosing between tourism and livability — it's making sure the infrastructure and rules underneath tourism actually keep pace with it, instead of residents absorbing the cost of growth we're not planning for.