With the race for regional council seats heating up in St. Catharines, an important bit of information you need is:

You get six.

In St. Catharines, voters face quite a lengthy ballot when they vote for: 1 mayor, 2 city councillors in their specific ward, 1 regional chair, 6 regional councillors to represent all of St. Catharines, and their school board trustees (the number of which varies depending on which school board you’re registered to vote for). Continue reading “You get six” →

With Niagara Regional Council set to debate another extension of Councillor Petrowski’s leave of absence (and make it retroactive) at this evening’s Council meeting, there are a number of things that need to be considered, especially the piece around accountability.

Continue reading “Accountability” →

We should not be paying someone to not do the job for which they were elected.

We should not be without appropriate representation at Regional Council.

On Thursday, June 14, 2018, Regional Council is scheduled to debate extending Councillor Petrowksi’s leave of absence for another three months. Just for 2017 and 2018, this will have left the citizens of St. Catharines without proper representation for at total of approximately 11 months.

This is also 11 months’ worth of salary that we can anticipate the Councillor has been receiving, as you can bet someone would have told us (or leaked to the media) if Council had done the responsible thing with taxpayers’ money and also suspended Petrowski’s pay. Continue reading “St. Catharines deserves better” →

During election campaigns, we hear candidates speak a lot about respect for taxpayers, but we rarely hear them speak about respect for citizens.

What’s the difference, you ask?

Well, here’s how I see it:

Respect for taxpayers is about ensuring that politicians are appropriately spending tax dollars they collect from property owners. Continue reading “Respect for citizens” →

The citizens of Niagara elect 31 people to represent them on Regional Council.

Those 31 people, then, in the course of doing their jobs as elected representatives, spend money we pay through our taxes. Often, they’re making decisions about spending that money on housing or policing or public health initiatives or road construction. Sometimes, they’re spending that money on lobster dinners or driving to the Region (which most of us would say is their place of work). Continue reading “Expenses should be public knowledge” →