Kearns delivers a list of things she wants to do if she is elected Mayor

By Pepper Parr

May 22^nd, 2026

BURLINGTON, ON

Lisa Kearns held an event to tell the community about the planks in election campaign drive to become the next Mayor of Burlington.

She got more than a respectable turnout at an event that offered free food: pizza, breaded chicken and French fries. And a cash bar.

A few more tables could have been added, but this was a very respectable-sized audience.

She told the audience what she wanted to deliver as Mayor.

Service Excellence:

“Excellence is what people expect when they come to City Hall. They expect to be served immediately. They expect to be served fully. How many of you have gone into a business, a restaurant, a service, a retailer, an event, and said, Wow, that was amazing. They anticipated what I needed. They got it done quickly and I didn’t get the runaround.

“Do you know we have people at City Hall who, when they’re on vacation, they stay out of office, contact that person, and it says, out of office, contact that person, and they said, I’d love to contact that person, I’d want to actually contact them. And you end up in a cycle that makes you want to just cry.

“Where do you stop that? We’re going to bring in all the absolute best practises. I know people don’t like that word best practises, but I’m going to be dedicated to absolute excellence.”

On getting building permits:

“There is no logical reason why our roller skating rink can’t open in an empty mall. There’s no reason I can’t get a cupcake shop back into the downtown. There’s no reason why it’s taking 18 months for a coffee shop to open, and they couldn’t even get a scaffolding permit to make a beautiful place of connection in our community. And why can’t a comic bookstore can’t even open without the city’s elected officials getting involved? We have to do a better job.

“These permits are a source of revenue. Those building permits go straight into the back pocket of the city, taking pressure off your local taxes. What we already know is that the building department has had to dig into its reserves because it’s come in under what it’s making. It’s costing more than we’re making in the buildings department. If you have a piggy bank of savings, we’ve had to take a third of those savings out to make the department whole. That is not sustainable. We need to come up with more revenue on the other side, or you need to make a change on the operating cost side. They are out of balance.

Kearns gave a good presentation and then listened to small groups.

“This kind of change starts only at the top, and I promise you it will change at the top.

“Let’s talk about housing, which is a very failed conversation. I want to do away with the divisiveness between developers and the city. We’re really getting sick of getting hauled up to the tribunal all the time. I want to talk to developers in advance and say: Listen, let’s sort this out now.

The platform Lisa Kearns is going to run on to get her elected as Mayor of the City in the October 26th election.

“I have decades of negotiating experience, of getting to what’s called the best possible outcome, or the total cost of ownership. If you are blindsided by either of those two things and you didn’t achieve both of those in every introduction you do, you’re coming up short.

“What we’re going to do is figure out what everything is going to cost. We’re going to take a collaborative approach and find the amenities our community is asking for.

“I won’t be a mayor that is constantly screaming into the sky at the provincial government. I am just here to work with whoever is in office, and just get as much money as possible. I am not writing a thousand advocacy letters.

“I will not fight with them. We need to actually see things happening. This council, did a good job at advocacy, but we didn’t get things built, we didn’t deliver any more enhanced services. We kind of just went around in circles, yelling at the sky. We’re going to stop that. We’re going to work towards our traffic light synchronization and our advanced priority signals for transit.

“I’ll be looking at bringing forward a commissionaire slash by law ambassadors that are going to be helping make sure that everything is in working order here in our community. I won’t put my kids on transit or on a transit shelter waiting for the bus. If I don’t have absolute certainty that that transit shelter is going to be safe and clean and lit.”

Some of this is pretty stiff stuff. To make it work, there will have to be a major change in the culture at City Hall.