Values… Conflict, Confluence
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in May 2026.
I never made it through Mark Carney’s book, Value(s) – BC Minister Adrian Dix joked on Power & Politics recently that reading it was the best three weeks of his life -- but I resonate with the ambiguity of the title. The subjective sense of what is important to humans dances clumsily with the objective designation of a dollar figure in the market place. Together the two comprise the Economy, making it one of the most slippery words in the English language. The Economy is the tune to which the subjective and the objective blunder around the dance floor.
Most recently I have been thinking about how that ambiguity operates in the field of public service. We are in the early stages of the run-up to municipal elections and giving thought to the kind of leadership we need in a world in rapid transition and fundamental change. The dance floor is heaving beneath our feet, rockin’ and rollin’ as one after another global upheaval – over which we individually, even collectively, have zero influence – upends the usual.
We do not value municipal leadership in the objective sense of the word: we pay little and expect much. When we elect a municipal council, we are hiring a board of directors that will run a multi-million dollar business that delivers most of the services that impact most intimately on our lives. Road and bridge construction and maintenance, transportation (or lack thereof), water quality and waste management, recreational facilities, civic planning and enforcement, appropriate and affordable housing, education (through a glass darkly), health facilities (ditto), public safely (ditto).
The dittos, which are delivered through structures that are more or less accountable to the public through elected or mandated bodies that tend to the distant and mysterious (i.e., the glass darkly), eat the bulk of the multi-million dollar budget that is raised exclusively through land taxes.
When I first came to the County and discovered that the right to vote in municipal elections was determined by ownership of a dwelling in the electoral jurisdiction, I thought that rule was a hangover from medieval times, given that it enfranchises ownership rather than citizenship. I can only vote in provincial or federal elections once, regardless of how much land I own or rent, so I wonder that it is different in the municipal realm. The answer, I’m told, is that because the municipality taxes land, not people, the land must have input into decision making. Hmm, that’s an interesting pic, land a naked suffragette on a horse demanding the vote.
The enfranchisement of the land also means that someone who owns land in all four townships can vote four times. It means that the vote of a seasonal resident, who engages in local life quite differently than year-round residents, and whose values (there’s that word again) vis a vis local reality are legitimately different, has equal say in selecting who runs the County. In fact, given that less than half the homes (46% by 2021 census) in the County are ‘usual’ aka primary residences, seasonal voters may have priority in determining municipal governance.
The enfranchisement of the land, I learned, is not a historic hangover but a gift from the Harris government of the 1990s. I can see it being innocuous then, because a seasonal resident would have to care enough about municipal politics to get in his car and drive to the cottage to cast a vote. A political pandering with small impact – until on-line voting became the thing.
While fact-checking, I came across an excellent 135-page report done by Watson and Associates Economists for Haliburton County, delivered in 2025. It is entitled Growth Analysis Phase 1, the foundation for a subsequent Development Charges Background Study. Together they evaluate (there’s that word again) the factors that must be taken into account to plan for and deliver the County-wide infrastructure necessary for a successful social and economic future.
This is the kind of work that our municipal government is elected to do. Counsellors must determine what is needed to ensure that the physical and social infrastructure within their mandate is what the population needs at present and into the future, and how to pay for it with revenue that is tightly constrained.
If the County were a for-profit corporation, the CEO and the Chair of the Board and the Directors would all be paid handsomely and expected to contribute generously to the success of the company. Because it is a not-for-profit corporation, there is much more attention to Conflict of Interest than there is of Confluence of Interest, which is how corporate directors are chosen. Because its shareholders are the public, and its mandate is their overall well-being, it is heavily regulated from without and vigilantly monitored from within.
It’s a crap job with crap pay, but we need the best and the brightest at the table working together (confluently) for the good of us all.
