Check My Homework

At Thursday's Ward 13 debate, my opponent spent surprisingly little time on the Eastern Bridge, the Bathgate basketball court, or his committee attendance record. He spent it on me. I need to know how the city operates. I need to actually like people. I'm anti-democratic. And — my favourite — unlike Peter, he does his homework.

The debate is public. People can watch it and decide for themselves what happened in the room. What I want to do here is put those four lines next to the record, because a thirty-second exchange doesn't leave room for that part.

"You need to know how the city operates"

I've spent this campaign tracking the operational stuff that doesn't make for good soundbites: which committees actually oversee the LRT versus which councillors just issue statements about it, the status of a 271-unit OCH project on Mikinak Rd that's had no public update since the 2020-2030 Housing Plan, the servicing gap on Blair Road that a federal-lands review is letting bypass the city's own site-plan sign-off, a parking pledge from another candidate checked line-by-line against the city's 2025 Parking Services annual report. That's not opposition-research trivia. That's what "how the city operates" actually looks like when you go past the press release.

"You need to actually like people"

This one isn't really a claim about anything I've said or done — it's a claim about my temperament, and there's no record to check it against. I'd just note that I already wrote a post called "This is not a popularity contest," and it's the most-read thing on my blog. I'm not running to be liked. I'm running because I think people deserve a councillor who tells them the truth even when it's not what they want to hear, which is a different thing entirely, and — based on the traffic — one a lot of Ward 13 residents seem to agree with.

"You are anti-democratic"

This one came out of my proposal to shrink council from 25 wards to 12. His response was that fewer wards would be bad for democracy. Here's what's actually true: incumbents in this city win essentially every time they run. Only about 40% of eligible voters turn out. And urban wards like ours get outvoted 16-9 by suburban ones on the issues that matter most to us. A system that reliably returns the same people on a shrinking, structurally skewed slice of the electorate isn't the democratic baseline I'm being accused of threatening — it's the thing worth asking questions about.

"Unlike Peter, I do my homework"

This is the one I'll admit got under my skin, so let's just look at it. Over this campaign I've published sourced, chart-backed pieces cross-referencing city audits, council votes, and public records — on the LRT bearing failure timeline, on the city's own itemized liabilities, on OPS database-misuse auditing, on OCH's delivery record ward by ward. I've been writing about the Eastern Bridge file specifically since 2019. None of that happens without doing the reading first.

And there's a detail from Thursday worth mentioning: partway through, I pointed out that he was reading his answers off prepared notes. It visibly threw him off. Claiming the homework high ground in the same debate where you got caught working from a script is a hard thing to pull off.

Humourous aside

The tiresome and pedantic blow hard criticized me for putting my name forward for North Kanata not realizing I did so to promote the temporary reappointment Marianne Wilkinson the former and beloved councillor.

Obviously King does not do his homework.

The pattern

Four lines, and not one of them engaged with anything I actually raised. That's not a coincidence — it's what happens when the substance doesn't favour you and the character judgments are easier to reach for. You can watch the debate and draw your own conclusions about tone. But tone isn't the record you're voting on. The record is public, it's specific, and it's been public for years. Check it yourself- here is the debate video.