By Pepper Parr
November 24th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
While the direction the Burlington Economic Development & Tourism corporation (BEDT) is sort of on hold until sometime in April when the City CAO, Curt Benson, gets back to Council with the options that can be considered.
The issue is whether BEDT continue to exist as an arms length not for profit or does it be brought in-house and operate as part of the city administration.
One of the documents that got this significant review before the public was a scathing report from a group of consultants that operate as Rubicon Strategy.
Some members of Council want to know who hired this firm and what do we know about the work they have done in the past. They are not on the list of preferred servce suppliers.
We are advised that the CAO made the decision.
Organizations that won millions of dollars in grants from an Ontario worker training program are at the centre of a political storm. Labour groups have hired professional lobbyists over the past five years, including several government-relations firms with close ties to Premier Doug Ford.
The fund and the role of lobbyists have been the subject of questions from opposition parties at Queen’s Park since the release of a report by Ontario Auditor-General Shelley Spence last month. Her audit concludes that the distribution of $1.3-billion in grants under the program, which gives money to organizations to train workers, was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”
The report says the Labour Minister’s political staff overruled evaluations by non-partisan bureaucrats and doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations with lower scores on their applications, while higher-ranked applicants were overlooked. Plus, the audit said, dozens of groups hired professional consultants to lobby the Labour Minister or his department before they were selected. But the report did not name lobbying firms or recipients.
Rubicon Strategies has been heavily involved in the Skills Development Fund (SDF). They were lobbyists involved in convincing the Ministry of Labour as to who would be given grant.
Many wanted to know who Rubicon Strategy is. Now we know.
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The Rubicon Report reads like two reports glued together: solid findings on one side and a recommendation that ignores them on the other.
The findings are clear:
External, arm’s-length economic development agencies consistently outperform internal municipal departments. They move faster, attract outside funding, land investment, and operate with the flexibility cities simply don’t have. Windsor, Waterloo, Ottawa—proof is everywhere. Even Burlington’s own EDC once punched well above its weight when staffed with top-tier private-sector talent.
Internal departments, by contrast, are slower, tied to annual budgets, limited in who they can hire, and less entrepreneurial. The report admits as much.
And yet, after laying out that reality, the recommendation is to dissolve Burlington Economic Development and pull the whole operation inside City Hall. It even warns that economic development risks becoming a “lower priority” internally—and then recommends exactly that structure.
This isn’t fixing a problem. It’s burying it.
The review notes the real issue: the relationship between City Hall and BEDT is “broken.” That’s a governance failure, not a structural one.
When a relationship is broken, you repair it. You don’t dismantle the only model built to compete in a region where every neighbouring city is moving faster.
Burlington is boxed in—lake, escarpment, highways, rail.
We don’t have the luxury of slow-footing economic development. We need talent, speed, and partnerships, not a feel-good advisory committee chaired by the City Manager.
The findings point in one direction.
The recommendation goes the other.
Council should ask itself one simple question before it acts:
Are we solving the real problem, or the convenient one?