Update · October 27, 2026
What Are We Paying For?
Oct 27, 2026 · @Sean Hunt
The morning after
I ran for mayor, and I lost. Congratulations to Mayor-elect John Brennan, and thank you to the 2,188 residents who voted for a different direction.
Now the harder part. Just 36.1% of us voted, but 100% of us will pay the bill. The 2026 budget raised municipal taxes 5.71%: $159 more on the average home. Before the new council settles in, every resident should be asking one question of the people we just hired: what, exactly, are we paying for?
There are three fact-based answers. None of them is "better service."
1. Policing we fund but cannot direct
Our OPP bill for 2026 is $2,687,360, up 11% over 2025, after a 22.4% jump the year before. Mayor-elect Brennan himself told CBC that the OPP increase alone accounted for two points of that year's tax hike. The province "capped" this year's increase at 11% and called it relief.
Let me be clear: our officers are well-trained, caring people who live here and serve here. This is not about them. It is about what the people paying $2.7 million a year are allowed to ask for, which is almost nothing.
Council cannot point officers at the speeding on our concession roads or the e-bikes and scooters weaving through our sidewalks, and we have no bylaw of our own to discourage the kind of crash that ends with a helicopter. Queen's Park banned municipal speed cameras last year, the one tool a SickKids study found cut speeding by 45%, and told municipalities to buy speed bumps instead. The school board paused police in schools in 2021 and voted 7–6 in January 2024 not to bring them back. And in the neighbourhood Facebook groups where this community now actually gathers, argues, buys, sells and gets scammed, nobody we pay has a mandate to be present, let alone to intervene. Not even during an election.
Then there is the data. The OPP collects calls-for-service data about our community, paid for by us and about us. Try getting it in a form you can map or analyze. It arrives, when it arrives, as a summary to a detachment board. If we are paying $2.7 million for a service we cannot steer and cannot measure, we are not buying public safety. We are buying an invoice.
2. Delay is the most expensive line in the budget
Every project this council "prudently" deferred got more expensive while it waited. Construction prices do not pause for a budget cycle. Push a trail, a sidewalk or a culvert out two years and you are paying two to four times the original estimate, depending on the materials and the trades. The crosswalk Ilderton waited twelve years for will now cost roughly five times what it would have cost to simply move the existing one.
Being conservative with a capital budget is not conservative when inflation is running ahead of your reserves. It is a transfer of cost from this year's taxpayer to next year's, with interest. The Active Transportation Plan adopted in September cut the Ilderton Rail Trail extension and the Mill and Margaret Street sidewalks. Those are not savings. Those are future invoices at a higher price, for the same trail.
3. Same vendors, same technology, higher prices
The third driver is habit. When a municipality renews the same vendors and the same systems for more than two fiscal years without going back to market, it stops buying value and starts buying familiarity: old technology at new prices.
Take the election we just held. We rent an internet-and-telephone voting portal from an outside vendor. If you wanted to vote in person, you drove to the municipal office, a long way from where most residents live, assuming you own a car and could spare the hour and the fuel. In 2026, a municipality of 20,000 can run its own secure resident identity: one login, two-factor, tied to the voter roll, that lets you vote, pay a bill, report a pothole and request a record from the same account, wherever you are, whoever you are, however long you have lived here or in this country. We build software like this in Middlesex County every day. We just do not buy it from ourselves.
The same goes for records we already own. Council agendas, budgets and staff reports sit behind a portal that blocks the very tools residents now use to read them. Open by default is not a luxury. It is the cheapest accountability tool a council has, and we are paying a vendor to keep it closed.
Growth is change, and it is coming either way
Middlesex County is building rockets, AI, clean energy and robotic farm equipment. Our fair gets bigger every year because our community does: families leaving London for a home they can afford, newcomers from across the country and around the world. Growth is change, and change is coming whether this council plans for it or not.
A modern community plans it. The 2026 budget raised taxes $159 on a $400,000 home and $99 on a $1 million farm. That is a statement about who the tax base is built to serve. Agriculture is our heritage and still our largest land use, and it deserves a seat at the table. But a plan that protects the consolidation of quota holdings while choking out newer forms of agriculture and the complementary uses a growing community needs, trails, housing diversity, small industry, is not a growth plan. It is a holding pattern with a tax bill attached.
So ask: are we a future-ready community with a smart-growth plan that residents in Arva, Ilderton, Komoka and Kilworth were actually consulted on? Or are we waiting to be surprised, and then paying the rush price?
Now hold us to it
A small portion of you voted. All of you can hold the result accountable, and not just at the next election: next week, next budget, every season. The questions that actually measure a council are simple.
• Did I get more service for my tax dollar than last year, or just a bigger bill?
• Is my road safer? Is my kid's walk to school safer? Who do I call, and will they come?
• Can I find the budget line, the staff report and the OPP numbers for my own street without filing a request?
• Was the project on the plan built on time, or deferred into a bigger number?
• Was I consulted, or informed?
If the honest answers are yes, if we get the crosswalk, the trail, the sidewalks, the open data and the safer roads, then the investment was worth it and I will say so in these pages. If the answers are no, then ask what you are paying more every year to not receive.
Leading costs money. Trailing costs more.
Sean Hunt lives in Ilderton. He was a candidate for Mayor of Middlesex Centre in the 2026 election and served as the Thames Valley District School Board trustee for Middlesex County from 2018 to 2022.
— Sean