By Ezra Klein

February 2, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

 

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

    Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. …

    All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to —

    Michael Kirk: What was the word?

    Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be King. His plan this time is to first play King on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team.

It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal workforce as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters.

Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple of months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

Ezra Klein is an American liberal political commentator and journalist. He is currently a New York Times columnist and the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and formerly was the website’s editor-at-large.

By Pepper Parr

February 1st, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

 

The practice at City Council meetings is to have each member of Council  comment on what is happening in their ward.  They have up to two minutes.

At the last Council meeting City Chief Administrative Officer Hassaam Basit got five minutes to report on what he has been doing and what Staff have done.

He started by assuring Council that he wouldn’t be more than five minutes

“ I’m going to start by reading an email that came in just two weeks ago, January the 13th.

“I’m just writing to send a very heartfelt thanks to the people in the event I witnessed this past weekend, I was so touched I had to ensure I reached out to share. My elderly neighbor needed to go to the hospital during the heavy snow on Saturday morning. So this was two weeks ago when the fire department arrived. They shoveled the entire driveway, including the sidewalks of their property during this time, the snow plow had come and cleared snow on that side of the road, but had to skip my property and that of the neighbors. Shortly after the ambulance left, the snow plow returned and cleared the snow on our side of the street. I was so blown away by the immense care and compassion, and I’m hoping that my message gets passed along to those involved. Thank you so much to the fire department and the snow plow driver. My children learned an important lesson about caring for others, as well as taking initiative in your community from watching the whole thing unfold at the window. Thank you so much, City of Burlington.

Basit continues:  “A few other quick updates. Healing Forest is now being featured at the Paletta Mansion, and it’s open for the community to enjoy. There’s information on our website. Just like to again, thank city staff who worked with a community organization to make that happen.

“The City of Burlington has been providing transit services since 1975 which makes this our 50th year. To commemorate this event there will be a Burlington Transit branded PRESTO Card.”  Basit suggested that these cards might well have some value in another 50 years. He did not say who was covering the cost of these branded cards nor did he say how people acquire one of these cards.

On the RCC, Recreation, Community and Culture side.  “The City of Burlington youth programs was successful in securing nearly $30,000 from Halton Region for building safer communities project by Public Safety Canada. These funds will support enhancing the youth belong program with new furnishings for equipment and for youth friendly spaces, staffing to boost youth engagement and social events, connecting youth with community partners in our services.

“You  heard the importance of reaching out and connecting with the community from the Police Services this morning. Even though a lot of social services responsibilities are with the region, the city does play a role, and it’s important to highlight when we are successful.

“Over the holidays, the Burlington Teen Tour band performed in 12 Christmas parades across southern Ontario, with each drawing about 25,000 attendees, and the one in Toronto attracting an estimated 750,000 spectators.

“Switching gears to HR, equally fun, the city filled 191 full-time regular contract positions in 2024. We’ve heard from council that when funding is approved for positions, they need to be filled  and we’re endeavoring to do that.

“The city has moved the needle immensely over the past 12 months on that front; to give you an idea, filling 191 full-time regular application jobs meant going through 18,000 applicants. Those are being boarded onto our Work Day system, which is making things much more efficient. We are continuing to see these recruitment process improvements in the part-time hiring process as well, especially within the RCC group, leading with faster hiring, minimizing the amount of manual entry, and improving candidate experience. The city is committed to employee development and growth and continues to offer a variety of opportunities.

“I’m pleased to share that in 2024, 34 employees qualified to receive tuition assistance, up to a maximum of $2,000 to help support educational pursuits that were identified as increasing both the individual and the city’s capabilities, especially on Legal and Legislative Services Division. That may sound like it’s not good news, but it actually is.

“The City legal team, working with the building department staff, was successful in obtaining convictions on 13 charges relating to building code violations at a single high rise building. This was a significant result, both in terms of obtaining compliance with the building code and thereby increasing the safety of the building’s residents.  Significant as well was the significant fines imposed by the court: $150,000.

What Basit didn’t say was – who the developer was that got whacked with the fines.  Any Guesses?

“The Committee of Adjustment meetings are now hybrid. I would like to congratulate everybody that worked on that,

The 2020 Lake Shore Ontario Land Tribunal hearing (Waterfront Hotel site) decision favoured the city.  I know you’ve all read the detailed decision that was released. The thing of note is that the tribunal confirmed that the objective should not be to maximize the number of persons and jobs that can be accommodated on any particular parcel of land, but rather it is about finding the right balance as to what represents good planning. These reasons will assist the city in evaluating and responding to other development applications within the downtown and elsewhere.

“Canada’s community canopies fund from Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which I’d like to thank councilor Nesson for bringing to our attention.

“There is now an invasive species fund for remote sensing technologies to monitor invasive species across the city.

“We were also successful in receiving baseline funding for Burlington transit, which many of you were at that announcement.

“The Finance department has compiled the total funding dollars earned by the city through these types of grants for 2024 – they are just over $16 million for 2024

“On the communication side, I know that all of you contribute to City Talk.  During the postal strike, staff pivoted and released a digital version of it that increased traffic to the City Talk website, web page by 1100 so people do read what you write in those newsletters.

“We had 800,000 City Talk ad views across the website.

“Burlington’s website experienced significant growth among active users, increasing by 7.1% to 1.55 million active users; sessions increasing by 4.1% to 3.2 million sessions – previously the number was s3 million sessions.

“On the engagement side, RCC and com staff have launched a new public feedback automated device that’s in place, which is generating lots of strong engagement. We’re going to pilot and expand that project across other areas of the city.

“The city’s communication and engagement efforts resulted in almost 100,000 visits to city initiatives on the Get Involved Burlington page with an engagement rate of 18.6% to give you a benchmark, the industry average is 10% so that’s almost 20,000 surveys, completed documents, viewed, items, downloaded and questions asked between the city and its residents. That’s outstanding engagement.

“Switching to Finance. I know, through Permit to Pipeline and other metrics, we’ve all heard about the number of units that are that have been approved. So the other side of that, or related to that, the city in 2024, collected $11 million in development charges, that will  assist the city, with the development of growth growth-related infrastructure,

“Tax staff have successfully completed the first interim billing utilizing our new property tax software, and they are now in the process of generating 69,380 tax bills. About a third of our residents, 35% of the properties right now are registered for pre-authorized payment plans – we’d certainly like to see that percentage go up significantly.

“On the Burlington Digital Services (BDS) side investments continue. Of note, the BDS team continues to reduce our technology debt, and that’s one of the recommendations that came out of the audit committee.  They have decommissioned several systems, three in particular, just in the last month. They are also continuing to upgrade our network across various city locations, and one that may not come to mind, the Greenwood Cemetery.  It’s important to have digital services connectivity networks there as well. So they’ve done that.

“We’ve also continued to invest in our cyber security, bringing on the Microsoft Sentinel deployment, which will allow us to better capture events across our architecture.

“And lastly, City staff hosted a design charrette with key landowners and urban design professionals to discuss opportunities for the future development of Appleby go MTSA. Appleby go MTSA represents an important growth node for the city.  A Charette, which is a fancy word for a collaborative design workshop, allowed multiple developers, including the city, to work together to explore how specific design elements can be incorporated into forthcoming developments to get the best possible outcomes from mobility, walkability and place making for this important growth. Note, that initial feedback from this pilot from participants has been very positive, and there was general agreement among the landowners around the need for specific design considerations to be built into future development plans to actually achieve these outcomes. This approach is a new one for the city.

And with that Chief Administrative Officer Hassaam Basit ended his presentation – there was no applause – that kind of behaviour is not permitted in the Councl Chamber

 

By Tom Parkin

December 17th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

 

There’s no path forward for the Liberals under Trudeau but he still has some cards to play in his succession.

Over the past few days Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tried to pull one of the clumsiest internal Liberal purges ever. He’s pulled a few before. Never well.

Trudeau gambled everything that Finance Minister Christian Freeland would volunteer to destroy herself in order to save him. The PM told Freeland he was going to demote her, but first she would hang a $61 billion deficit on herself. Then he’d sack her and bring in Mr. Clean Up, aka Mark Carney.

It’s incredible that he believed she would play her role in his script. But evidently he thought she would, or at least might.

Now his plan is a shambles.

Cornered, Trudeau’s only call is whether to quit or be fired
There are no opportunities for the opposition to vote non-confidence in Trudeau before the Commons rises for a winter break later this week.

But Trudeau has got to go soon.

It’s unlikely he can hang on more than a couple weeks as he and his Liberal MPs let it sink in that his time is up.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday called on Trudeau to quit. If Trudeau refuses and is still prime minister when the Commons returns from its break, the NDP will vote non-confidence when the opportunity arises. Trudeau will shortly after be fired by the Canadian people in a snap election.

Especially after what’s just happened, surely that’s a terrible option for the Liberal Party.

The Commons is scheduled to return on January 27. While Trudeau can delay the return by proroguing, using the controversial tool just to avoid the Commons a little longer changes nothing except to make it worse.

Trudeau has some say over the succession process

The alternative is to quit. A party leadership race would take at least a couple months to organize and complete, and could be a reasonable use of prorogation, but there are dangers.

Given the Liberal Party’s loose membership rules, a contested leadership vote could become a gong show. But it might be the preferred process if the goal is to give a better path for an outsider to take the reins.

The alternative is for caucus MPs to make an interim selection. Usually, an interim leader doesn’t compete for the permanent job. But there’s no rule.

In mid-November 2008, Stephan Dion announced his decision to resign pending the selection of an interim leader. In mid-December 2008 the Liberal caucus selected Michael Ignatieff as interim leader. In May 2009 Ignatieff won the Liberal Party vote as the sole candidate with 97 per cent support. And the rest is history.

The route of a caucus selection followed by party coronation is probably preferred by Chrystia Freeland. But it depends on Trudeau agreeing to it. Announcing a resignation is not resigning. The leader remains the leader until the position is vacated or replaced.

Trudeau can choose to resign in favour of a caucus-selected interim leader. Or hang on until the party makes a permanent selection. No doubt there will be appeals to Trudeau on both sides of this question and in the end the decision is his.

Members of the Liberal caucus refusing to talk to media after listening to what the Prime Minister had to say.

Liberals will be focused on themselves

No matter what process Trudeau decides on, the transition will soon become the central Liberal focus.

And the opposition will not fail to repeat that the Liberals are focused on their own problems, not the problems of Canadians.

But there is no scenario in which Trudeau continues to be prime minister for much longer. And his announcement on the timing of his resignation and the process for his replacement has even less time.

By Pepper Parr

December 12^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

We erred.

We tripped over Peter J. Van Dyk and his son Peter W. Van Dyk  Both are part of PV&V Insurance Centre Ltd.,  a family owned and operated insurance brokerage based in Burlington, Ontario.

Peter J. Van Dykwas was at one time actively involved in Sound of Music. Peter W. Van Dyk has never been involved with the Sound of Music organization.  He is however a musician.

Our apologies to Peter W – we missed the differences.

The Burlington Performing Arts Centre Board of Directors named Peter W. Van Dyk their new Board Chair by acclamation at their meeting on November 28, 2024. Van Dyk replaces Ken Smithard, who has served on the Board since 2016 and whose term concluded at the end of November. Van Dyk was born and raised in Burlington and is an insurance professional with PV&V Insurance Centre Ltd. Prior to starting his career in insurance, he was active as a musician locally and toured Ontario and Canada.

“On behalf of the Board, staff, and volunteers, I want to thank Ken for his dedicated service on the Board over the past eight years, and especially for his steady guidance through the transitions of the past year. He leaves the Board well positioned for 2025 and will be missed. BPAC has an amazing team of staff and volunteers, and I look forward to announcing our new Executive Director early in the New Year, to lead BPAC into its next chapter,” says Van Dyk.

In addition, Jim Thompson has been acclaimed to the position of Vice Chair and Chair of the Governance, Ethics and Human Resources Committee; James Sweetlove has been appointed to the position of Corporate Secretary; Deirdre Flynn has been appointed Recording Secretary; Carrie Gervais has been appointed Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee, and Stephen Bell has been appointed Chair of the Development and Relationship Committee.

The Board, staff and volunteers at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre look forward to welcoming patrons from the Burlington community and beyond to our holiday concerts and the second half of our season in 2025.

Lucy White, is in place serving as Interim Executive Director.

Peter W. Van Dyk has in the past served on the Board of the Sound of Music. We have not been able to reach Mr. Van Dyk for comment.

The Gazette has heard from people who are volunteers.  The comments they made in the Gazette are set out below.

This was never more true than in 2018 when a mass exodus of volunteers, staff (and all of their collective knowledge) occurred because a corrupt board fired the long serving ED who was running a very successful and fiscally responsible festival. That entire group could not bring ourselves to bust our collective @$$es all year long for the clowns who took over the BoD. We tried to bring this forward by writing a very detailed letter to council and the mayor back then, but they either said that it was too big to fail, we were blowing it all out of proportion, or flat out ignored us. 6 years later, none of us are surprised by this. We are all sad for what has become of a festival that we all loved.

 

Interesting…none of this was an issue when Dave Miller was Executive Director, before he was canned by the board.

 

 

By Pepper Parr

December 11^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

 

During the December 10^th Council meeting Mayor Meed Ward raised two Points of Privilege.

In Robert’s Rules of Order questions of privilege affecting the assembly may include matters of comfort, amplification, or safety. For example, it may be difficult to hear the speaker. In this case, a question of privilege could be raised to close the doors and windows.

Without naming the people she was referring to the Mayor appears to have decided that her personal preferences come first, so she did the following:

“I will take this opportunity in relation to the special meeting of council to speak to a point of privilege. And I’ll do that now before calling the vote as part of our respect commitment to a respectful workplace.

“I would like to address comments made at the Special Council meeting on the budget. This is the soonest opportunity, as I was not at that meeting due to attending a funding announcement at the hospital, one of the delegates mused that perhaps our CAO knowingly misrepresented the budget increase percentage. Now normally I don’t repeat personal attacks or defamatory statements, but it’s critically important to clarify what is in bounds and out of bounds when we are aiming for respectful dialog and respect in the workplace.

“Comments opposing the tax increase, suggesting cuts, offering suggestions around communications or an improved process, these and more are not only appropriate but welcome, however, attacking the personal integrity, honesty and character of anyone, whether a council member, staff or another member of the community, is not welcome our procedure by law, Section 44 two states that no person will speak disrespectfully to or about anyone in council chambers, and that’s what happened here.

“I do want to acknowledge Councillor Nissan for also speaking to this on a recent online post. This has exposed him to unwarranted criticism and misinterpretation of what he was calling out, which is specifically the personal attack on our CAO. Being exposed to such criticism discourages anyone from speaking out and calling us to a higher standard of engagement.

“We have guidelines for conduct in our meetings that are aimed at promoting respectful debate and dialog on the issues we face. This is especially important when there are different viewpoints and opinions among staff council and our community. We want everyone to feel heard and safe to speak their views, however unpopular, this is critical to a healthy democracy.

“People won’t run if they’re exposed to personal attacks and a toxic workplace. People won’t apply to work in municipal government and residents won’t come forward to speak. We all lose when these voices are silenced. We need to be vigilant in upholding a respectful workplace and modeling it. We all have a role to play to foster a respectful workplace in service of a healthy democracy. We need to model respect in our own comments and encourage others to do so. My comments are to that end, and my commitment is to do my part alongside all of you. Thank you.”

When introducing a delegation that took place on Tuesday Mayor Meed Ward said:

“Delegates must be respectful of staff, council members and other members of the public who may have a different perspective on the item, personal attacks, innuendo, slander will not be tolerated, and I’ll stop you if that occurs, we do have a respectful workplace, which includes council chambers. So please focus on the issue you’ve registered to delegate to, and if you did speak at committee, try to bring new information forward and not repeat what you said at committee.”

Then twenty-six minutes later the Mayor called for a second Point of Privilege.

“There were some things said that the audit committee is failing in their duties and that staff are failing. There is simply zero truth or evidence to that, and it’s not going to be tolerated if staff, if members of the community, have any concerns about the behavior of staff, there are appropriate independent avenues to follow. We don’t just simply allow allegations that are unfounded to be set in council chambers.”

What I believe we are seeing is a Mayor who has wandered again from serving the public that elected her and pressing her own interests and preferences.

Back in July 2022, people watching a Council meeting webcast heard the MAyor attempt to bully a member of Council into apologizing publicly for something she did not do. It was the most outrageous bit of grandstanding I have ever seen take place in the Council Chamber.

The Gazette recorded that event – remind yourself as to just how bad that performance was – Click HERE

For those who want to decide for themselves if either Eric Stern or Anne Marsden were out of line, their delegations are set out below.

The Eric Stern delegation:

Delegation Monday, November 25, 2025

Good morning and thank you for your time today.

The “Stop the 7​.​5% Burlington Property Tax Increase” petition has been presented to council. Twelve hundred and forty-seven people signed the petition asking for a zero percent tax increase. The multi-year forecast called for 8.9%, by asking for zero we were hoping to meet somewhere in the middle, at 4.4%, oh well.

I have to say I was surprised to see Burlington get out early again this year with the fictional “4.97%” overall tax increase.

It was interesting to watch Mr. Basit present a 4.97% on November 4th when the Halton Police budget had been made public on October 30th. Did Mr. Basit knowingly misrepresent the truth?

On November 18^th I listened to Leah Bortolotti talk about 6.7 million people visiting the website annually. I did another double-take. For a dose of reality, only 200,000 people live in Burlington. Are we expected to believe that every person in Burlington visits the website an average of 33 times a year? How many of these visits are to book the kids into a swim class? More confusing is that the budget document states on page 48 “our website—with its 1.5 million annual users”.

You have approved $148,000 for an SEO Marketing position. What is the payback?

Will there be a staff reduction in Service Burlington because people can find information themselves? Will there be KPIs to monitor this or is this just another overhead cost?

What residents need is information, not marketing spin, Google can make that information searchable. Adding a web marketing SEO position will slow down the posting of information making that information less accessible to taxpayers. Do you remember the taxpayers?  The people who pay for this.

The mayor talks about training bus drivers and then those drivers take jobs in other cities as a justification for higher pay. This statement is not supported by the 5.3% turnover number presented on November 4^th. A rate of 5.3% is lower than any private sector group except for heads of organizations and executives at 3.8%. This indicates the city has the right mix of salary, benefits and working conditions. An average, across-the-board, salary increase of 4.58% when inflation is 2.5% sounds high.

My theme today is clarity. Residents deserve factual information, clearly presented on the city’s website, by staff and the council, without the deft hand of a communications department spinning that information for the benefit of our elected representatives and city staff. I resent being taxed to pay for information to be marketed to me.

Looking ahead to 2026, what considerations are being made for a conservative Federal government and severe cuts to the housing accelerator fund? Much of the expected $21,000,000 may evaporate.

In terms of provincial funding, what happens if the city does not meet its housing targets and no provincial funds are available?

Burlington is building out community centres, transit, etc. for people who may or may not move into the community. What happens if the builders don’t build and the people don’t materialize? Is it time for more prudent cost controls?

The Burlington Residents’ Action Group submitted to this council, in writing, 14 pages of possible cost savings and economies of scale that the city could consider.

I’ve watched many council meetings, people who ask for money often receive money, and people who ask for cuts often receive nothing.

Why are lower tax increases important?

Lower increases leave people with more money for heat pumps and EVs.

Lower increases reduce renovictions by landlords who, through rent control, can only increase rents by 2.5%. This will reduce homelessness and help to “solve the crisis”.

Lower increases leave more money in people’s pockets, reducing food bank visits and crime, and lower the overall cost of policing.

I’ll conclude with, Your Worship, you win, for now, you hold all the cards, residents are not given enough time to review the budget, the budget does not include explanations for the programs, or what the return on the “investment” will be, and requests for details go unanswered.

Congratulations on passing another huge budget increase without the community understanding what the percentage is or what the dollars are for!

The Marsden delegation:

That document will be included when Ms Marsden has made it available.

By Pepper Parr

November 26^th, 2024

BURLINGTON, ON

 

It will be a while before the citizens fully understand what BRAG managed to pull off this year when they took City Council and some senior staff members to task on how engagement was limp at best.

Every really engaged community is made of small, dedicated people who work very hard – and get less than a heartfelt thank you from  Council or for that matter the Chief Administrative Officer.

Maybe – just maybe the Mayor and the CAO will say publicly that the budget that finally gets approved was better due to the effotrs made by community groups.

Back in 2018 ECoB was formed and was part of what put the current Council in office.  Under the direction of Penny Hersh, who did a lot of the work herself – there were people who helped out and Penny was gracious in thanking them.

Few realized at the time that Lisa Kearns, who was part of ECoB from the beginning, – not something she would admit to in the early days.  The motivation for Kearns was the chance to win the ward 2 Council seat.

Marianne Meed Ward was running for Mayor – so her seat was available.

What was truly marvellous was the way ECoB captured the imagination of the public – all that was needed was some kind of structure to get things moving.

This time around BRAG and its members were the ones to rise to the challenge.

At a budget meeting in 2023, Dan Chapman was delegating and he was mad as hell and didn’t want to put up with any more tax increases.  At the end of his delegation, he strode the few steps to his ward Councillor and shoved a copy of his tax bill into the hands if Kelvin Galbraith – who was stunned and didn’t know what to do.

It was the unconscionable tax increase of more than 15% over the previous year that  pushed the small group into organizing.

One of the elements of a politically healthy community is the existence of concerned and committed parents.

We saw something very similar when the Halton District School Board decided to close two of the seven high schools.  Parents packed the room Trustees met in.

It is clear now that BRAG has moved the needle.  For the first time in my experience with Burlington City Council (all 12 years of it) this is the first time I’ve seen a citizen group produce a well researched document that challenged the city on 25 different budget items and presented them as part of a delegation.

Councillor Sharman made a point of asking the Chief Financial Officer Craig Millar to commit to answering the questions that were asked.

Millar said that he would do so.

Expect BRAG to be nipping at his heals if the response isn’t in their hands by the end of the first week in the New Year.

Expect as well to see a Draft budget made available to the public sometime early in September of 2025  for the 2026 budget.

Given that 2026 is an election year – Council will look for and find ways to reduce the tax bite.

The City issued a media release yesterday afternoon that was first class public relations spin. In the words of Eric Stern: “From the Mayor’s perspective, the communications team deserves every penny they earn. From my perspective, they should all be fired.”

That Eric, isn’t going to happen – but they will be on their toes going forward.

BRAG managed to move the needle.