By Pepper Parr
January 4th, 2026
BURLINGTON, ON
OPINION
As I was working through what the Gazette had published in 2025, one question kept popping up in my mind.
There wasa some nice stuff on how well some of the students had done, consistent reporting on what City Council had done and failed to do.
Following the senior staff changes could have been as funny were it not really serious.
Stable senior leadership is critical, and ensuring the right people are in the right job is a task delegated to the City Manager (CAO), a job the city delegates to the City Manager, now called the CEO.
Tim Commisso, served the city well if you forget the conversion of Bateman High School into a $100 million community Centre
Burlington just keeps burning through them: Meed Ward followed through on her promise to rid the city of James Ridge when she was elected Mayor in 2018 – no mention on what that cost the taxpayers. The City would have to cover the cost of his returning to British Columbia. Meed Ward then brought in Tim Commisso who served the city well but didn’t want to put up with the verbal backstabbing that took place. Weeks after getting a salary increase, he advised the city that he would not be renewing his contract.
Hassan Basit
That introduced Hassan Basit to the city. His five-year contract ended 16 months after he took on the job. There were greener pastures at Queen’s Park – Deputy Minister and Chief Conservation Executive
The Mayor needed a new CEO quickly – Curt Benson, a solid planner in his own right, got talked into taking on the job until the end of this Council’s term of office next October.
Hard for a vision to develop roots that are critical for growth which Council knew was coming.
In 2010, when Meed Ward was a Council member there were 18 property owners in the football. It was possible then do some remarkable with the football. The developers moved in quickly and began assembling the property. Hardly a single lot left for development. An unfortunate missed opportunity.
The 2018 promise to limit growth in the Downtown core was lost when the Nautique won its Ontario Land Tribunal case. The tragedy with that situation was that the city was in a position early in the LPAT Local Planning Appeal Tribunal, (preceded the OLT) hearing to have it stopped in its tracks. They failed to take advantage of the opportunity.
Meed Ward did manage to get the Urban Growth centre moved north and making the MTSA’s (Major Transit Service Areas) the focus for development.
Can anybody point to a serious plan for any of those MTSA’s: They are built around the three GO stations: Aldershot, Burlington and Appleby Line.
The three GO stations made sense. The transit station at the bottom made no sense. They never were major transit points – it took losing an LPAT appeal for the city to learn that.
There are development applications either in the process of going through planning or already approved. At this point, no one is building residential housing, be it high rise or single-family dwellings.
Bronte Meadows had hoped to break ground before the end of the year. There are no stakes in the ground – never mind shovels.
The public wants to know what their city is going to look in five to ten years – different is all this city Council can say.
Whatever the vision is, and I’m not at all certain that there is one, the best that can be said is that it is adrift.
And that is not what leadership is about.
Perhaps that is what the October municipal election will be about.
How do you do a photo op about a vision?
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I guess we’re all wasting our breath and time commenting about the (non) performance of this mayor and council. Hopefully their stay is limited by the upcoming election.
Calling it “planning” doesn’t hide the fact that council abandoned the lakeshore to developers without a fight.
Burlington’s waterfront used to belong to residents; now it answers exclusively to developers and city hall enablers.
They didn’t protect the lakeshore — they auctioned it off, one developer at a time.
The other thing I should have added to my comment was that all Municipalities that were updating their Official Plan ( which Burlington was) had one (1) year to change the locations of their MTSA’s. This was between 2017-2018.
When I found out about this after speaking to Metrolinx I was so certain that this information had not been passed down to one of the councillors. I emailed and asked if they knew about this. I was told “yes, but I didn’t think that having the John Street Terminal as an MTSA was a problem”.
What more can I say?
“Meed Ward did manage to get the Urban Growth centre moved north and making the MTSA’s (Major Transit Service Areas) the focus for development”
I hate to sound like a broken record but it was ECoB who went to then MPP Jane McKenna prior to the 2018 election to ask if it would be possible to move the Downtown Urban Growth Centre and to un designate the John Street bus terminal as an MTSA.
We posed these questions to her and her associate who was on the phone from Toronto. We were told “no one had asked these questions” but they would find out.
That August Jane McKenna put out a newsletter that went to all Burlington households indicating that this was possible.
It took the Mayor months to act on this. Precious time that allowed development applications to continue to be received by the City.
The overdevelopment of the downtown has continued. In addition to the 2 new high-rises on Lakeshore Road/Martha and Lakeshore/Pearl we are now dealing with a proposed hotel/ condo in the football area. This is only the first one for this area.
There was a time when past and present councils could have designated the football area as one that should not be developed. By not doing this they have once again failed to protect the Waterfront.