Platform

Vision and Three Pillars

Transparency

Transparency is more than publishing documents. Residents should be able to see what decisions are being made, what services cost, how city spending connects to outcomes, which Councillor has primary responsibility for their geographic Ward, what meetings are happening, and what the results were.

Financial transparency is also a tool for reducing costs. When residents can see detailed spending, staffing, contracts, debt, service costs, and results, many more people can help identify duplication, unnecessary expenditures, better purchasing options, and more efficient ways to deliver services. Those efficiencies can help reduce the amount that has to be raised through property taxes.

Garbage Service and Clean Streets

Owen Sound currently requires a $3 bag tag for each garbage bag collected, according to the City’s garbage and recycling information. Preliminary analysis of currently published figures does not establish a financial case for including one curbside household bag every biweekly pickup. One included bag would represent approximately $514,800 per year in foregone tag revenue at a 6,600-household baseline, or approximately $608,400 using a 7,800-unit upper check, before additional collection, disposal, and administration costs. The policy focus therefore moves to improving the public waste service and reallocating enforcement capacity toward higher-value work. Read the Waste Service & Clean Streets analysis.

Zero-Based Budgeting and Finding Efficiencies

Zero-based budgeting begins each periodic review with the service outcomes residents and Council expect, then asks departments to justify expenditures from the ground up. What are we trying to accomplish? What does it cost? Is the programme or expense still needed? Is there a simpler or less expensive way to achieve the same or a better result?

The review protects spending that produces real public value and identifies spending that can be eliminated, simplified, consolidated, redesigned, or delivered more efficiently.

Local budget researcher Jim Hutton estimates that a properly reconciled comparison with 2011 City spending could reveal savings equal to roughly 5–10% of the municipal tax levy. Because Ontario's strong-mayor framework makes the Mayor responsible for proposing the City's budget, Andrii would use that responsibility to test the estimate through a detailed, software-assisted review and publish the resulting service-level financial information wherever legally permitted. This is a testable estimate, not a guaranteed tax cut. Read the evidence, scope, and comparison. The working budget scenario shows how targeted savings and lower-cost delivery can create room for costed first-year services while reducing levy pressure.

Savings identified through transparent zero-based review can reduce the tax levy, reduce pressure for future tax increases, pay down expensive debt, and create room to protect higher-priority services at a lower overall cost.

See the spending → understand the spending → question assumptions → find efficiencies → lower the cost of government → reduce pressure on property taxes.

Andrii has already worked toward this through helpos.ca, which makes Owen Sound agendas, transcripts, meeting results, and local articles easier to access.

• complete financial disclosure for all municipal and rate-supported services, including water, wastewater, and policing;
• staffing and compensation reporting;
• review of management structure and staffing;
• annual manager goals and results;
• Council-directed administration;
• public tracking of Council decisions from approval through implementation;
• searchable, accessible public records linking decisions, costs, and results.

The Participation Plan explains how residents can use this public knowledge to discuss issues, contribute expertise, and develop solutions together.

Open Council communication: Residents would have a permanent Public Council Forum for questions, proposals, and open discussion with elected representatives. Between official Council meetings, Public Written Council Sessions would give councillors time to examine detailed information and reason together in a searchable public record before decisions are made. Private correspondence would remain available for sensitive matters. Open Council Communication →

Policing cost review and proportionate responder alternatives are covered in the Community Safety & Policing plan.

Learn more about the Transparency Plan

Read the Strong Mayor Powers plan

Read the Lower Property Taxes strategy

Read the A Lean, Empowered and Accountable City Organization plan

Want City finances to be easier to see? Sign the Financial Transparency petition.

Wastewater Infrastructure and Ratepayer Protection

Owen Sound's wastewater system carries substantial debt and expensive repair obligations. The most immediate system-wide capacity pressure comes from wet-weather inflow and infiltration, which can push peak flows far above ordinary daily use. Andrii would prioritize sewer separation, targeted infiltration-and-inflow investigations, contamination detection, automatic sampling, and upstream source tracing.

Identified polluters should face enforcement and recovery of investigation, cleanup, and infrastructure-repair costs. Serious contamination incidents, bypasses, evidence, repair costs, and outcomes should be disclosed promptly. The City should also audit odour sources and existing digester-biogas use, prioritizing practical on-site energy recovery before considering vehicle-fuel options. It should investigate safe, provincially compliant independent wastewater options for suitable properties, while preserving the principle that lawful system users pay for the services they use. Read the detailed Wastewater Infrastructure and Ratepayer Protection plan.

Participation

Participation means giving residents practical ways to help govern, maintain, and strengthen Owen Sound.

Transparency produces usable public knowledge. Participation turns that knowledge into civic action by giving residents ways to contribute expertise, organize locally, propose solutions, and build capacity together.

Participation can also reduce pressure on property taxes. Residents can help with safe, voluntary neighbourhood stewardship where appropriate, while local hiring, import replacement, repair capacity, co-operative enterprise, and locally controlled technology can reduce dependence on expensive outside suppliers.

Every dollar the City spends creates demand. Where practical, competitive, and legally permitted, Owen Sound should publish recurring purchasing and repair needs so local businesses, tradespeople, makers, schools, farms, and co-operatives can develop competitive local alternatives. The goal is to keep more of the money Owen Sound already spends circulating locally while building the skills, businesses, tools, and civic institutions needed to provide better services at lower long-term cost.

Public Document Forum

Using information published through the Transparency Plan, the Public Document Forum would give residents ways to discuss reports and proposals, contribute expertise, compare alternatives, and follow decisions through implementation.

Open-Source Civic Problem-Solving

Like contributors to open-source software, residents, workers, tradespeople, businesses, financial professionals, makers, and technical residents can identify problems, contribute expertise, and improve solutions. The full Participation Plan connects this process with Wards and Local Areas, shared stewardship, Grey Bruce Makers, Affordable Rural Communities, local businesses, farms, schools, co-operatives, and community organizations.

Research behind the plan

Read more about shared stewardship and civic participation.

Compassion

Compassion means responding to difficult problems with love, kindness, and clear thinking. Public decisions should leave fear, anger, stigma, and blame behind while considering everyone affected: a person experiencing homelessness and the resident whose neighbourhood is affected; a person caught in addiction and their family; a person accused of an offence and the victim; downtown businesses, taxpayers, service workers, police, tenants, landlords, and future generations.

Good policy should seek the long-term wellbeing of the whole community by recognizing each group’s needs and choosing responses that improve safety, dignity, affordability, and opportunity for everyone over time.

A large part of compassion is prevention. Severe material insecurity and social isolation can contribute to cycles involving homelessness, petty offending, emergency services, policing, hospitals, and the justice system. Stable access to housing, food, support, recovery, and community can reduce the pressures that contribute to desperation, petty offending, homelessness, and repeated crises.

A city is a shared home. The purpose of local government is to help us care for that home and for the people who live in it. Compassion means helping residents while there is still time to solve a problem, keeping homes and public spaces usable, and making it easier for neighbours to care for one another. The Local Representative plan gives each Local Area of roughly 150 households a nearby elected neighbour who can listen, organize neighbours, carry concerns through City Hall, and connect them with the Ward Councillor when more help is needed. Residents would be encouraged to choose a representative who lives in the Local Area. Because residents elect the representative at the neighbourhood gathering, the role would naturally tend to be held by someone who knows the community directly. Read the Ward and Local Representation Plan.

Timely civic help also makes it easier for residents to care for their homes. Owen Sound’s Yard Maintenance By-law sets a maximum ground-cover height of 15 centimetres beginning June 1 each year, with exceptions for gardens, certain rural or agricultural areas, and areas approved for naturalization. Clear guidance and timely communication can help residents understand the standard and address property concerns while a practical solution remains available.

Compassion in everyday municipal service includes a clean, usable city. Residents should have an easy lawful way to manage ordinary waste, with collection that works for households and cleanup that responds promptly when dumping occurs. The Waste Service & Clean Streets plan sets out the service priorities, public-bin policy, cost analysis, and scorecard.

Compassion in practice follows a clear progression:

1. HELP NOW. Many people who are unsheltered live at Owen Sound’s edges, including in wooded areas, and travel downtown for meals. A mobile meal and screened civilian crisis-response pilot would take prepared food, service navigation and lower-risk support to scheduled locations near where people are staying. It could also deliver meals to struggling seniors and people with disabilities who face barriers to travelling to a fixed meal site, easing immediate pressure on downtown services while the wider housing pathway develops.
2. KEEP PEOPLE HOUSED. Better use of existing homes, the proposed vacant-home tax, and tenant-rights information can help residents maintain stable lives. Vacant-home revenue and low-cost prevention can support the first phase and reduce downstream costs.
3. AFFORDABLE LIVING. Affordable Rural Communities could give workers, families, seniors, young adults, growers, renters, and other residents access to modest homes, productive land, shared infrastructure, community economies of scale, and lower recurring housing and food costs through household and community investment enabled by planning.
4. VOLUNTARY RECOVERY. Council should direct staff to develop one voluntary rural rehabilitation pilot offering people seeking help with addiction a stable environment with professional and peer support, meaningful routines, practical work, community, and a credible path toward independent life. Provincial, grant, and recovery-provider partnerships would fund the Phase 4 model.

Community safety and policing: retain and strengthen Owen Sound’s local police service while building a multi-level response and dispatch model that matches civic, paramedic, civilian crisis, fire, and police response to the situation. Support a properly governed body-worn camera programme that protects officers and residents, strengthens fair review, and improves service quality. Measure safely reduced police workload, use zero-based budgeting to improve service and control long-term costs, and remain open to future OPP evidence when a formal process becomes available. Read the Community Safety & Policing plan.

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Ward and Local Representation

Ward and Local Representation

Ward and local representation applies all three pillars.

Owen Sound currently elects its Mayor, Deputy Mayor, and seven Councillors at large. The immediate plan keeps that electoral system. After the 2026 election, Council would organize the seven Councillors around seven geographic Wards, assigning each Councillor primary responsibility for learning about one ward, communicating with its residents, and bringing its concerns to City Hall.

In this plan, a ward initially means a geographic area of responsibility within Owen Sound’s existing at-large electoral system.

Every Councillor would continue to be elected by voters across Owen Sound, represent the whole city, vote on every citywide matter, remain available to residents from every area, and exercise independent judgement. A Councillor could take responsibility for a ward regardless of where they live.

Each ward would contain about 10 Local Areas, with roughly 150 households in each. Each Local Area would hold an annual voluntary neighbourhood gathering and accessible election process where residents can meet neighbours, discuss local concerns and projects, identify local helpers, and elect their Local Representative for the coming year. Residents would be encouraged to choose a representative who lives in the Local Area. Since nearby residents elect the representative at the neighbourhood gathering, the role would naturally tend to be held by someone who knows the community directly. The Local Representative would hold an elected office in a resident-governed neighbourhood association, connect with the relevant Ward Councillor for at least one hour each month, carry neighbourhood concerns and priorities forward, share City information locally, and help follow issues through City Hall.

At-large election → seven Councillors → one geographic ward assigned to each Councillor → about 10 Local Areas per ward → Local Representatives connected with residents

It supports transparency because residents can see who represents their Ward, where to bring concerns, and how local priorities are being handled at Council.

It supports participation because each Ward and Local Area has a clearer place for residents to organize ideas, identify needs, support improvements, and grow future civic leadership.

It supports compassion because Ward Councillors and Local Representatives would be expected to take a compassionate approach when dealing with residents, staff, local concerns, and difficult situations. That means slowing down, looking beneath surface reactions, seeking the love and human need behind conflict, and working toward decisions that build cohesion over time.

Local Representatives would hold elected offices in resident-governed neighbourhood associations. Residents would govern the elections and representative mandate, while the City and Council would continue to govern municipal services, budgets, bylaws, staff, and statutory decisions. The Mayor and Deputy Mayor would retain their citywide roles and Grey County responsibilities.

During the 2026–2030 term, residents and Council could evaluate the geographic ward system. Closer to 2030, that experience could inform a public consultation and statutory process on whether to adopt electoral wards, under which residents in each ward would elect their own Ward Councillor.

Shared Stewardship

Shared stewardship would give residents voluntary, City-approved ways to prevent problems, care for public spaces, and support neighbours. It would be designed to supplement paid municipal work and would operate within safety, liability, collective-agreement, and professional-responsibility requirements.

Open suitable City maintenance to resident stewardship. As maintenance and service contracts come up for renewal or review, Council should examine and where appropriate renegotiate contract terms so safe, suitable tasks can include City-approved resident participation. Neighbourhood cleanups, gardening and planting, minor public-space care, reporting and inspection support, repair or maintenance events, trail stewardship, park stewardship, and other low-risk work could be approved where appropriate. This would remove unnecessary contractual barriers while preserving work that requires trained City staff or contractors, union labour, professional or trade qualifications, specialized equipment, accessibility standards, or specific safety and liability controls.

Approved activities could include:

• prevention, issue reporting, safety walks, and emergency preparedness;
• City-approved traffic-calming and street-safety measures, including signage, visibility improvements, and local hazard reporting;
• minor maintenance, cleanups, tree watering, gardens, and other public-space care;
• tool libraries, repair events, skill-sharing, and practical workshops;
• community gardens, edible landscapes, and local food projects;
• neighbour support, including voluntary help for seniors and residents with mobility challenges.

Ward Councillors, Local Representatives, public meetings, City staff, labour representatives, and trained responders would help define safe roles and coordinate approved projects. Community organizations and businesses could contribute where their capacity is useful.

Ward Stewardship Credit

After legal review and a limited pilot, Owen Sound could consider a Ward Stewardship Credit for verified contributions to City-approved projects. Early uses might include recreation or municipal-program credits.

Following a useful pilot and legal review, credits might circulate through participating locally owned stores and possibly be accepted for selected municipal fees or capped property-tax-related credits where legally permitted. This remains a longer-term possibility pending pilot results and approved design.

Program safeguards should include:

• inclusion of renters as well as property owners;
• transferability under clear rules, so renters could use credits directly or exchange them with landlords, local businesses, or other participants;
• city-approved projects and verified contributions;
• design with staff, labour representatives, residents, seniors, people with disabilities, renters, landlords, and local businesses;
• protection for paid municipal work while adding supplemental civic capacity.

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Affordable Homes, Land Access, Food, and Local Resilience

Food security, housing affordability, tenant rights, protection from illegal rent increases, firewood, local business, and local resilience are connected. As land, energy, fertilizer, machinery, transportation, and housing costs rise, younger generations need a credible path toward affordable homes, practical skills, family life, land-based businesses, and low-input food and firewood production.

The construction cost of a conventional house alone can exceed what a person or household earning $30,000, $50,000, or even $70,000 annually can responsibly finance. Land, wells, septic systems, roads, permits, development charges, and financing add further costs. Approving more conventional detached houses may increase supply at the expensive end while placing the building beyond the financing reach of many residents.

Housing costs can perpetuate poverty when most household income goes to rent or a mortgage and the household remains fully dependent on cash for food and heat. Affordable housing should include credible paths toward gardens, greenhouses, orchards, perennial crops, firewood, practical skills, rural enterprise, and shared productive infrastructure.

The working affordability standard is total housing cost at 30% or less of relevant income. For a single-person home, relevant income means one living-wage income; for a family home, it means household income. Total housing cost includes the housing payment, property taxes, utilities, insurance, and other applicable shelter costs.

Housing Costs and Food Insecurity

OSHaRE reports that most families using its Family Assistance Meal Program are working families. After paying accommodation, transportation, and other essential costs, many have little money left for food.

The demand has risen rapidly. OSHaRE reported serving approximately 146,000 meals in 2023, more than 212,000 in 2024, and 327,905 in 2025. Its Family Assistance Meal Program grew from 12 families to more than 340 families.

Housing security requires more than four walls. More than 340 families now use OSHaRE’s Family Assistance Meal Program, and most are working families. A secure household also needs the ability to produce food, raise a family, develop skills, and build useful work or a small business close to home.

That is why Affordable Rural Communities (ARC) pair a home with productive land. A household could grow annual food, establish fruit and nut trees, develop practical skills, use workshops or shared equipment, build household businesses and productive assets, and contribute to local production and industry. At community scale, this can support food security, rural enterprise, import replacement, and a stronger Grey-Bruce economy from the household level upward.

Making Existing Homes Available

Owen Sound should make full use of the homes it already has.

When homes sit empty while residents are looking for places to live, the city loses twice: families struggle to find housing, and neighbourhoods lose the life, care, and stability that occupied homes bring.

We can introduce a vacant home tax to bring empty homes back into active use as rentals, owner-occupied homes, or homes for sale. The goal is simple: more homes lived in, more stable neighbourhoods, and more people able to build their lives in Owen Sound.

The process should begin with clear rules and owner declarations. Those declarations would establish the public baseline of qualifying vacant homes before Council sets the rate, exemptions, administration, and use of verified net revenue.

The vacant home tax would help return existing urban homes to use, while Affordable Rural Communities would create a new low-cost pathway combining housing, land access, food security, and rural livelihoods.

Financial role. The vacant-home tax would encourage long-term vacant homes back into use, generate municipal revenue, and help offset applicable City costs associated with long-term vacant properties, including by-law, fire-risk, property-standard, and policing or public-safety demands. A portion of verified net revenue is proposed for Help Now food-security services and the initial civilian crisis-response pilot, subject to budget approval. The pilot would publish measured reductions in police demand and future staffing pressure, with the long-term goal of reducing policing-cost pressure. The allocation and reported results would be connected to the Verified Savings Ledger.

A city should reward homes being used for people, families, and community. Homes are for people.

Vacant Serviced Land

Vacant land deserves attention too. Grey County Council’s 2021 tax policy removed the discount for vacant commercial and industrial properties, as recorded in the County’s April 2021 meeting highlights. The plan would examine further lawful tools for long-term vacant serviced land so land with public infrastructure can be cared for and, where practical, brought into productive use. Any approach would consider the planning, assessment, tax, and municipal authority connected with each property.

Protecting Tenants from Illegal Rent Increases

Ontario’s ordinary rent rules continue to apply when a landlord paints a unit, replaces flooring or appliances, or completes other routine or cosmetic improvements.

Ontario Regulation 516/06, section 18 defines a capital expenditure as an extraordinary or significant renovation, repair, replacement, or addition whose expected benefit lasts at least five years. It specifically excludes:

“routine or ordinary work” and work that is “substantially cosmetic in nature.”

Appliance repairs, general maintenance, cleaning, painting, and cosmetic modernization therefore remain within the ordinary rent-increase framework.

Major and lasting building work may support an above-guideline application in some circumstances. Examples include replacing a failing roof or a worn-out central heating system where the work preserves the building, maintains an essential system, or meets health and safety standards.

An additional increase for qualifying work proceeds through an above-guideline application to the Landlord and Tenant Board. The landlord discloses the work and its cost, affected tenants may respond, and the Board determines the lawful increase.

Early prevention is inexpensive compared with a housing crisis. Tenant information, mediation, service navigation, qualified assistance, and the 211 housing-loss prevention intake can help residents understand lawful rent rules and address manageable problems early. This pathway can reduce shelter use, repeated crisis calls, and other downstream demands when housing remains secure.

The Landlord and Tenant Board provides an official guide explaining how above-guideline rent-increase applications work.

A tenant who has paid an unlawful increase may be able to file a T1 Tenant Application for a Rebate, asking the Board to determine the lawful rent and order repayment. Useful evidence includes the lease, rent-increase notices, payment records, photographs, and messages describing the work or the reason given for the increase. Filing deadlines apply.

Some rental units first occupied for residential purposes after November 15, 2018 fall outside the annual rent-increase guideline. Notice and timing requirements continue to apply, and the Grey Bruce Community Legal Clinic can help residents understand the rules for their particular unit.

We can turn this preliminary information into a clear City tenant-rights resource available online and in print. It would help residents understand lawful increases, follow Landlord and Tenant Board proceedings, preserve useful evidence, and find qualified assistance.

Tenant assistance in Grey and Bruce

Residents who need advice about their particular circumstances can contact the Grey Bruce Community Legal Clinic’s housing-law service. The clinic provides free legal services to eligible low-income residents of Grey and Bruce Counties.

Building a Resilient Local Food System

High-input farming can save labour, but it depends on fuel, fertilizer, machinery, chemicals, debt, and long-distance transport. When those inputs rise, food costs rise with them.

Low-input farming, edible landscapes, gardens, orchards, greenhouses, woodlots, and small farms can reduce dependence on expensive outside inputs while creating more meaningful local livelihoods. Grey County will need thousands more low-input farmers, growers, tree stewards, firewood producers, food processors, preservers, and local distributors.

Making Affordable Rural Communities Legal

Affordable Rural Communities would provide a County planning pathway for intact, productive properties where modest dwellings, food production, shared facilities, and secure long-term tenure can work together. They would serve workers, families, seniors, young adults, growers, and residents seeking access to land.

Because residents own their homes, each dwelling is their own asset, with mortgage, maintenance, insurance and property-care responsibilities attached to their own investment and future.

Conventional construction remains useful, but a modest 150 m² conventional house can cost about $383,000 to construct before land and site costs. At 5.5% over 25 years, the building alone costs about $2,352 per month and requires income above $72,000 before property taxes and heating. Owen Sound’s median household income was $63,200, while the median one-person household had $34,000.

The configured Living Region house-cost scenario places the resident-owned completed dwelling at about $88,000 cash, with an initial contribution of about $17,600 and estimated home-loan payments of about $386/month at the stated financing terms. The current ARC affordability scenario adds about $280/month for the automatic-price community-scale site lease and shared infrastructure, giving a layered planning illustration of about $670/month before household operating expenses. The two calculators use different household inputs, so actual projects require a matched recalculation. These are planning baselines, not quotations or guaranteed rents.

The model would keep each property intact and avoid severances. Its primary tenure model would keep the parent property as one parcel under one title: residents could own compliant permanent homes and lease defined residential and productive sites, while roads and genuinely shared infrastructure remained with the overall property. Productive hectares are leased allocations, not separately titled household lots. Homes would generally remain within the existing one-to-two-hectare farmstead envelope, with approximately 250 m² per household for the dwelling and immediate private outdoor space. Early planning would reserve about one hectare of productive land per adult. Once a property, residential plan, and occupants are known, the Living Region carrying-capacity refinement would test soil, food production, household composition, building heat, woody energy, and resilience needs. One hectare for one adult and two hectares for two adults remain planning benchmarks; shallow, rocky, or otherwise constrained sites can require more. Household land allocations could cover gardens, greenhouses, perennial crops, orchards, and coppice woodlots, while an existing farmhouse could provide shared kitchen, laundry, storage, workshop, or gathering space.

Explore the ARC affordability calculator Explore the dwelling cost calculator

That common policy groundwork was followed by Grey County’s approval of a project-specific County Official Plan amendment for the proposed Thornbury Acres residential farm co-operative. The next County Council could pursue a low-red-tape framework for modest dwellings, permanent affordability, productive land, and multigenerational families while participating municipalities retain local approval authority.

This is also an import-replacement opportunity: local demand could support manufacturing and repair of yurt components, platforms, windows, doors, heaters, greenhouses, water systems, furniture, and food-processing equipment, alongside more local food, wood, and fibre production.

Read the full Affordable Rural Communities proposal, cost model, and implementation plan

Join the Affordable Rural Communities Interest List

Read the detailed background article on affordable rural communities.

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