Discussion The Great Divide

The Great Divide: Why Nobody Knows What Their Municipality Is Doing and Whose Fault That Is

There is a conversation happening in Grey Highlands every single day. It happens in the local Facebook groups, in the community pages and in the comment threads where residents post about new events or the tax bill.

Thousands of people participate in that conversation. They share frustrations and ask questions and occasionally celebrate things that are working. It is the most active and accessible form of community dialogue this municipality has.

And your elected representatives are not in it.

Go and look.

Not during campaign season, no, but right now.

Go and see their participation in the ordinary run of a council term when decisions are being made and budgets are being set. Search for your councillors in the local groups. Find the posts where they engaged with a resident concern, answered a question about a file, or simply acknowledged that they saw what their community was talking about.

You will find almost nothing.

This is a choice.

The tools are free. The access is universal. The conversations are public and searchable and happening at a scale that every council meeting in the history of this municipality combined has never approached. The elected officials who are absent from those conversations are not absent because participation is difficult. They are absent because they have decided, consciously or not, that the modern town square their community actually uses is not a place they need to be.

That decision has consequences. When council does not show up where residents are, residents do not know what council is doing. Files move without context. Decisions land without explanation. Tax increases arrive without anyone having made the case for them in language ordinary people encounter in their ordinary day. The gap between the institution and the community it governs widens not because either party is malicious but because neither is meeting the other where they are.

Council should know better. They are the ones who were elected. The obligation to bridge that gap belongs first to the people who asked for the community's trust and received it.

But the council chamber has its own empty seats, and they belong to residents.

Voter turnout in rural Ontario municipal elections is routinely below thirty percent. Public delegations at council meetings draw a handful of people on a good night and an empty room on an ordinary one. The budget consultations that are legally required and publicly advertised attract the same small group of engaged residents year after year while the vast majority of ratepayers who will live with the outcome never show up.

This is also a choice, and it is worth being honest about what it produces. A council that governs in front of an empty room is a council with no audience for its decisions.

The administrator who knows that three people attended the budget presentation and none of them asked a hard question has received useful information about how much scrutiny to expect.

The consulting contract that gets approved without a single public question is the one that gets renewed the following year without one either.

Residents who do not show up are not neutral. They are participants in the outcome by their absence. The system that has failed Grey Highlands did not do so in secret. It did so at public meetings that the public did not attend, in budgets that were open for comment and received none. I myself am guilty of this.

The democratic process requires participation to produce accountability and it has been running without it for years.

This is not an attack on residents. It is an honest accounting of a shared failure.

People are busy. The meetings are long and procedurally dense and historically have not produced the feeling that showing up changes anything. Those are real barriers. They are also exactly the barriers that a council serious about engagement would work to remove.

Twenty years ago, a rural community like Grey Highlands had local journalism.

A reporter who covered council meetings, who knew the files and asked the CAO the questions the councillors weren't asking.

That reporter is gone. The paper that employed them is gone or reduced to a fraction of its former capacity. The institutional knowledge they carried, the context for why a decision matters, the history of a file, the pattern across multiple budget cycles that tells you something is wrong... that walked out the door with them and was not replaced.

What filled the gap is nothing. The council meeting minutes are published online for anyone willing to read a procedural document in its raw form. The budget is available for anyone willing to interpret a municipal financial statement without assistance. The planning applications are on file for anyone willing to navigate the municipal office's document system.

The information exists. The translation of that information into something a resident can encounter in the course of a normal day does not. And in the absence of anyone performing that translation the vast majority of residents have no practical way of knowing what their municipality is doing until the tax bill arrives.

The captured system does not mourn the loss of local journalism. It thrives in the silence.

Here is what will happen in a few months when the campaign season begins.

The Facebook groups that have been quiet of elected officials will suddenly become active. Posts will appear. Comments will be written. Events will be attended and photographed. The councillor who has not engaged with a single community concern in three years will show up in your feed with a warm message about the community they love and the work they have been doing on your behalf.

They are counting on something specific when they do this. They are counting on the reasonable assumption, based on years of evidence, that the community's memory is short and its expectations are low and that showing up in October is sufficient to earn another four years of absence.

In most municipalities and in most election cycles, they are right.

The community that wants a different outcome has to decide, before the campaign posts start appearing, what it is going to require from the people asking for its vote. Not enthusiasm. Not recognition.

A record.

Specifically: where were you when this community needed you? What questions did you ask on our behalf? What decisions did you challenge? What did you do with four years of public trust that the community can point to and evaluate? Why didn't you fight another tax increase?

Those are not unfair questions. They are the minimum that accountability requires. The elected official who cannot answer them plainly has already answered them.

The disconnect described in this column is shared. Council did not show up where residents are. Residents did not show up where council is. The journalism that used to bridge the gap is gone. And in the space created by all three absences, the administrative class has been governing without meaningful oversight for long enough that it has forgotten what oversight feels like.

Fixing this does not require a structural reform or a provincial intervention or a generational shift in how rural communities relate to their institutions. It requires residents to raise their floor on what they expect from the people they elect. And it requires elected officials to meet their community where it actually is rather than where the procedural requirements say it should be.

One of those two groups was elected to lead and the obligation to move first belongs to them.

They know where you are.

They will prove it come election time.

The question is whether you will remember that they weren't there before.