On Monday morning I sent a questionnaire to every certified candidate for mayor in Collingwood and in The Blue Mountains. Seven candidates, two towns, one deadline: Friday, 18 September. Below is exactly what was asked of every one of them.

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Why this exists

Turnout in this region runs near 30 per cent. In The Blue Mountains in 2022, roughly 4,000 people voted and the mayor’s race turned on 480 ballots — a handful of votes steering close to $30,000 per household in obligations.

Most residents who do vote cannot name what the candidates on their ballot actually stand for. I hear a version of the same sentence every week: she seems like a nice person. That is not the voters’ failure. It is a failure of transmission. Platforms are written to avoid offence, coverage is thin, and by election day the ballot is a list of names attached to nothing in particular.

This questionnaire exists to correct that. It is not a scorecard and it is not an endorsement. It is a set of questions with dates and dollar figures attached, put to every candidate in identical terms, with the answers printed as written.

The questions did not come out of thin air. They came out of consultations with residents in Collingwood, The Blue Mountains and Clearview about what they wanted to know before they vote, and a draft went to readers in all three towns for comment before it was sent. Every candidate was told the same thing in the covering letter.

Who received it

Collingwood — Yvonne Hamlin, Jon Hillis, Kathy Jeffery, Norm Sandberg.

The Blue Mountains — Peter Bordignon, Marni Moreau, Paul Reale.

Each was sent the questionnaire in Word and in PDF, individually addressed, to the campaign address on the town’s certified candidate list. Nominations closed on 21 August.

Voting is not a single day. In Collingwood, internet voting opens on 8 October and runs to 26 October, with paper ballots at the library on 15, 22 and 25 October and on voting day itself. In The Blue Mountains, voting is by internet and telephone only, from 16 October to 26 October — there are no paper ballots. In both towns everything closes at 8 p.m. on Monday 26 October.

The terms

• Every completed response is published in full and unedited. Nothing is summarised, trimmed or characterised.

• Responses are set side by side against the same criteria, so readers can compare candidates directly — and, because the first fourteen questions are common to both towns, across the two towns.

• Every candidate who responds is offered a recorded follow-up interview. These answers are its starting point.

• If a question rests on a factual premise a candidate disputes, they are asked to say so in the answer and give the source. The correction is published.

• Where a candidate does not respond, that is reported — plainly, without adjective.

• Returns are accepted in any form: the Word file, a PDF, or answers typed into the body of an email in question order.

Disclosure

I have publicly proposed that Collingwood and The Blue Mountains consider amalgamation, and was reported doing so by CollingwoodToday on 11 March 2026. Questions 10 and 12 ask about regional co-operation and the structure of local government. I have also published in favour of moving water and wastewater into a municipal services corporation, which is the subject of Question 3. Those questions go to every candidate in identical terms, and every answer is published in full — including answers that reject my position outright.

That disclosure sits on page one of both documents. It is there so that a candidate who disagrees with me can say so knowing the reader has been told where I stand.

How the two documents fit together

Questions 1 to 14 are parallel, not identical. The same subject is put to candidates in both towns so the answers can be read across the boundary — but where a question carries local figures, they are that town’s own. Eight items differ by design:

• Q2 — the TBM version adds a target for the non-residential share of the assessment base, currently about 8 per cent.

• Q3 — Collingwood candidates are asked about council’s 10 August reversal on the expression of interest; TBM candidates are asked whether they would join a regional corporation anchored in Simcoe County.

• Q5 — both towns’ heads of council have held strong mayor powers since 1 May 2025; the TBM version notes that the current mayor delegated authority over the CAO appointment back to council.

• Q6 — Collingwood carries Simcoe County’s 50 per cent reduction; TBM carries its own March 2026 Ontario Land Tribunal settlement, a 40 per cent cut with more than $1 million refunded.

• Q8 — Collingwood’s $1.1 billion portfolio, $255 million in poor condition and roughly $15 million annual gap; TBM’s reserves falling from $82 million to a projected $6.7 million.

• Q9 — Collingwood’s $837,398 of overtime against a $490,125 budget; TBM’s 191.74 full-time equivalents and 10 per cent rise in loaded compensation.

• Q10 — the TBM version adds Grey County’s proposed transfer of roads to the Town.

• Q11 — the joint services group question is the same in both, with the partner reversed.

After Part A the documents diverge. Collingwood carries seven town-specific questions, The Blue Mountains six. Both close on what a candidate is prepared to be judged on, and on leadership.

What happens next

Around 10 September I will publish an interim note recording who has responded so far. On 18 September the returns close. Responses are then published in full, set against each other, and each candidate who responded is offered a recorded interview.

If you think a question is missing — something you want your mayor asked before you vote — write to me.

Part A — Questions 1 to 14

These fourteen questions are put to candidates in both towns so that answers can be compared across both. The text below is the Collingwood document; where the Blue Mountains version differs, the difference is marked.

1. Priorities

Rank your top three priorities for the 2026–2030 term, 1 to 3.

For each of the three, outline what you would actually do, and by when. If they compete for the same dollar in the 2027 budget, say which one gives way. (150 words)

2. The tax levy

Over the 2026–2030 term, the average annual levy increase I will work toward is:
☐ Below inflation ☐ At inflation ☐ Inflation + up to 3% ☐ More than inflation + 3% ☐ I will not commit to a number

The Blue Mountains version adds: Non-residential property makes up roughly 8 per cent of the Town’s assessment base. Over the term I would work toward: ☐ A stated numeric target (state it) ☐ Growth without a target ☐ No change

Outline your fiscal platform. Name at least one specific service, programme or project you would reduce, defer or eliminate to hold that number — or state plainly that you would raise the levy instead, and by how much. (125 words)

3. A municipal services corporation — and, if not, then what

The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act passed on 24 November 2025 as Schedule 16 of the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act. It allows water and wastewater to be moved into an arm’s-length public corporation. Long-term municipal debt cannot be transferred to such a corporation. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing called for expressions of interest on 15 April 2026, closing 13 August 2026. For context: recent projects in the region have leaned heavily on provincial grants — roughly $150 million toward the Collingwood water treatment plant expansion, and $24.5 million toward the three Blue Mountains sewage projects.

On a municipal services corporation for water and wastewater, my position is:
☐ Actively pursue membership ☐ Complete the analysis, then decide ☐ Oppose ☐ Undecided

Collingwood only. Collingwood council filed an expression of interest on 10 August 2026, reversing its 15 June decision to stay the course. That vote was:
☐ Correct ☐ Incorrect — I would withdraw the expression of interest ☐ Undecided

The Blue Mountains only. If The Blue Mountains were invited to join a regional corporation anchored in Simcoe County, I would:
☐ Join ☐ Negotiate terms first ☐ Decline

If you would NOT join a corporation: do you expect the Province to fund this town’s next major water or wastewater project?
☐ Yes, substantially ☐ Yes, partly ☐ No ☐ I have not formed a view

If you expect provincial funding, complete this line: amount counted on, programme, year expected.

Outline your platform. If you would not join one, state specifically how this town will finance and manage its water and wastewater debt and capital programme alone — the debt figure you are working from, the rate path you would accept, and what you would defer or cut. If your plan depends on a provincial grant, say what happens to it if the grant does not come. (175 words)

4. Capital cost control, and who is accountable when it fails

Across this region, major projects have run far past budget: three bundled sewage projects in The Blue Mountains went from $34.79M to $53.56M, and Collingwood’s water treatment plant went from roughly $60M to $120M to $270M.

The reporting threshold at which a cost variance must come to council should be:
☐ Any variance over $100,000 ☐ Over $500,000 ☐ Over 10% of budget ☐ Set by staff

Outline what you would change in procurement, estimating, contingency and staff-to-council reporting so that a nine-figure programme cannot drift by half before council hears about it. Be specific about mechanisms, not intentions. (125 words)

5. Strong mayor powers

Ontario granted these powers to 216 municipalities. They include appointing and dismissing the CAO, reorganising the municipal structure, vetoing certain by-laws, and passing some by-laws with one-third of council. Collingwood’s head of council has held these powers since 1 May 2025. AMCTO has found no clear evidence strong mayor powers have increased housing starts.

The Blue Mountains version reads the same, and adds that the current mayor used those powers to delegate authority over the appointment of the CAO back to council.

As mayor I would use strong mayor powers:
☐ Yes, where useful ☐ Only in a defined emergency ☐ No, never

I will delegate authority over the CAO back to council: ☐ Yes ☐ No

Outline your position on how this town should be governed, and what you would commit to in writing on day one. (100 words)

6. Development charges — who pays for growth

Development charge revenue is falling across the region while senior-government programmes make funding conditional on cutting those charges further. Simcoe County approved the maximum 50 per cent residential reduction in August 2026, retroactive to 30 March 2026.

The Blue Mountains version instead reads: The Blue Mountains settled an Ontario Land Tribunal appeal in March 2026 with a 40 per cent reduction to all development charges and automatic refunds, paying out more than $1 million. Under the Canada–Ontario programme, participating municipalities must cut residential charges by 30 to 50 per cent for three years.

Residential development charges in this town should be:
☐ Increased ☐ Held ☐ Reduced further to unlock grants ☐ Undecided

Development charges on attainable and affordable housing units specifically should be:
☐ Eliminated ☐ Reduced ☐ Deferred ☐ Unchanged

Outline your platform. Development charges fund growth-related capital. If they fall, name what fills the hole — the levy, the rate base, debt, or projects that do not get built. (125 words)

7. Housing

Polling by Nanos for OnePoint in April 2026 found affordability, homelessness and infrastructure tied as the top regional priority at 17 per cent each, with 84 per cent of residents concerned about whether the next generation can afford to live here.

Would you commit to a numeric target for affordable and attainable housing units, including rental, created during the term? ☐ Yes ☐ No

If yes: the target, in units by 2030, and the definition of affordable or attainable housing being used.

Outline your housing platform: which tools you would actually use — municipal land, development-charge deferrals, zoning, public–private partnerships, incentive programmes, strong mayor powers — and how each is paid for. (125 words)

8. Asset management and the renewal gap

Every Ontario municipality must produce an asset management plan stating what it owns, what condition it is in, and what must be set aside annually to keep it working. The difference between that figure and what is budgeted is the funding gap. Collingwood’s 2025 plan reports a $1.1 billion replacement portfolio with $255 million of it in poor or very poor condition, and an annual funding gap of roughly $15 million. The plan states the increases required to close it — 5.8 per cent on the tax levy, 7.4 per cent on water and 12.1 per cent on wastewater. Council approved 3.18, 5.5 and 3.5 per cent.

The Blue Mountains version instead reads: reserves have fallen from roughly $82 million in 2021 to a projected $6.7 million by the end of 2026, the asset management reserve stands at roughly $1.8 million, and the development charge fund is on track to be exhausted by 2027.

Do you accept your town’s asset management plan’s estimate of the annual funding gap?
☐ Yes ☐ No ☐ I have not reviewed it

Outline how you would close the gap between what this town owns and what it is setting aside to replace it — and if you would not close it, say so and say what fails first. (125 words)

9. Council, staff and professional governance

In 2025 Collingwood spent $837,398 on overtime against a budget of $490,125, and ran roughly $307,000 over budget on legal costs for Ontario Land Tribunal appeals.

The Blue Mountains version instead reads: The Blue Mountains budgeted 191.74 permanent full-time equivalent positions in 2026, up from 185.61, for roughly 9,000 households. Fully-loaded compensation rose about 10 per cent in a year with no new hires, with the cost-of-living adjustment set at 5 per cent.

Over the term, the permanent staff complement should: ☐ Grow ☐ Hold flat ☐ Shrink

Reliance on outside consultants should: ☐ Increase ☐ Stay the same ☐ Decrease

I will support publishing closed-session subject matter and voting records to the fullest extent the Municipal Act permits: ☐ Yes ☐ No

Outline your platform on how this town is run: the mayor–CAO relationship, where council’s role ends and staff’s begins, what you would change in the first hundred days, and how residents will be able to see what the town spends, owes and owns in a form a non-accountant can read. (150 words)

10. The region, and the structure of local government

Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Wasaga Beach, Clearview and Meaford share one economy, one labour market and, increasingly, one set of pipes. Existing arrangements include the South Georgian Bay Mayor and CAO Forum, transit, regional economic development, water servicing and mutual-aid fire agreements. Amalgamation of Collingwood and The Blue Mountains has been publicly proposed — see the disclosure above.

Which would you actively pursue as shared or regional services? Check all that apply.
☐ Water / wastewater ☐ Solid waste ☐ Regional transit ☐ Recreation ☐ Fire ☐ Economic development ☐ Building and planning ☐ None

On amalgamation of Collingwood and The Blue Mountains, my position is:
☐ Support ☐ Study it formally ☐ Oppose ☐ Undecided

The Blue Mountains version adds: Grey County has proposed transferring roads to the Town. On that transfer my position is: ☐ Accept ☐ Accept only with a permanent revenue transfer ☐ Decline ☐ Undecided

Outline how this town should work with its neighbouring municipalities — and name one thing you would give up local control over to get a better result. (150 words)

11. A joint services group with the other town

Question 10 asks about co-operation in principle. This one asks about a specific vehicle: a standing joint services group between this town and its neighbour, with shared staff, shared procurement and a single management structure for the services placed inside it. Collingwood candidates are asked about a group with The Blue Mountains; Blue Mountains candidates about a group with Collingwood.

Would you support creating a joint services group?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, if a business case supports it ☐ No ☐ Undecided

If yes, which services would you support being run jointly? Check all that apply.
☐ Water and wastewater ☐ Solid waste ☐ Fire ☐ Building inspection ☐ Planning ☐ By-law enforcement ☐ Roads and fleet ☐ Recreation facilities ☐ Transit ☐ Economic development and tourism ☐ Information technology ☐ Human resources and payroll ☐ Procurement ☐ Finance and treasury ☐ Other

Outline your platform. Name the savings or service improvement you would expect, how a joint group would be governed so neither town is captured by the other, and what you would not put into it. (150 words)

12. Regional government for South Georgian Bay

Beyond shared services and the amalgamation of two towns, a further proposal has been raised. A single regional government for South Georgian Bay, drawn on its natural geographic boundary, at a population of roughly 100,000. It would be responsible for water and wastewater, transportation, and other services now delivered separately by each municipality.

Which of these benefits do you believe such a regional government would actually deliver? Check all that apply.
☐ Water and wastewater planned and financed as one system rather than five
☐ Borrowing capacity and credit standing no single town here can reach
☐ Transportation and transit planned across the whole travel-to-work area
☐ One planning framework in place of five
☐ Lower administrative cost for each household
☐ A stronger position with the Province and other funders
☐ The ability to attract and keep professional staff
☐ None of these

Weighed against the loss of local control, those benefits are:
☐ Clearly worth it ☐ Worth it only on conditions I will state ☐ Not worth it ☐ Undecided

If you believe this is a good idea, explain the strategic benefits in your own words. If you do not, explain why. (150 words)

13. Contracting out municipal services

Municipalities deliver some services with their own staff and buy others from contractors. This question asks where you would draw that line.

Would you support contracting out services currently delivered in-house?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, where a business case supports it ☐ No ☐ Undecided

Which would you be prepared to contract out? Check all that apply.
☐ Snow ploughing and winter control ☐ Landscaping and parks maintenance ☐ Transit and buses ☐ Tree pruning and forestry ☐ Facility cleaning and custodial ☐ Fleet maintenance ☐ Building inspection ☐ Waste collection ☐ By-law enforcement ☐ Information technology

Candidates are also asked to name any other services they would contract out, and any they would never contract out.

Outline your platform. Say what test you would apply before contracting a service out, what you would do about the staff currently delivering it, and how service quality would be held to account once it sits with a contractor. (150 words)

14. Performance management

Ontario discontinued the Municipal Performance Measurement Program effective the 2014 reporting year. Since then no province-wide requirement has obliged a municipality to publish what it achieves for the money it spends, though some measures survive inside the Financial Information Return. Residents can see what this town spends. They cannot easily see what it delivers.

This town’s present ability to measure and report service performance is:
☐ Adequate ☐ Inadequate ☐ I have not reviewed it

Within the term, the Town should publish a scorecard of service standards against results:
☐ Annually ☐ Quarterly ☐ No

Building a culture of performance measurement in this town would require: check all that apply.
☐ A small set of council-approved corporate measures, published and reported on a fixed cycle
☐ Service standards for each department, reported against publicly
☐ Benchmarking against comparable Ontario municipalities
☐ Every major report to council stating the measure by which it will be judged
☐ An annual public account of what was delivered against what was budgeted
☐ Resident satisfaction surveyed on a fixed cycle
☐ Measurement is not where I would start

Performance measurement should be owned by:
☐ Council, through targets it sets and publishes
☐ The CAO, as an internal management system
☐ An officer reporting to council independently of the CAO
☐ It is not a priority

Building this capability costs money and staff time. You would:
☐ Fund it as new spending ☐ Reallocate from within the existing budget ☐ Require it within current resources ☐ Not proceed

Set out how you would build performance management into this town. Say what you would measure first, who answers for the numbers, and what happens when a measure shows a service is failing. (150 words)

Part B — Collingwood, Questions 15 to 21

15. The wastewater treatment plant

The plant has no Environmental Assessment, no replacement site and no funding, and replacement has been openly discussed at $200–300 million. In April 2026 close to 10,000 cubic metres of sewage entered Georgian Bay, roughly 6,700 of it raw, about a kilometre from the town’s drinking-water intake. The Water and Wastewater Master Servicing Plan EA began on 29 April 2026, with public information centres in September 2026 and February 2027. Every decision in it belongs to the next council.

The Town should commit to a wastewater plant decision — site, scope and financing — by:
☐ 2027 ☐ 2028 ☐ 2029–2030 ☐ Not in this term

Outline your platform for new wastewater infrastructure: the Environmental Assessment, the site, how it is financed — rates, levy, debenture, development charges or a regional partner — and what happens to development approvals until capacity exists. (150 words)

16. The water plant, the development charges, and the debt

The Raymond A. Barker expansion is a $270M project: roughly $150M from the Province, New Tecumseth carrying most of the remaining net cost, and Collingwood’s share approximately $44.4M. Residents were told that share would cost them nothing because development charges would cover it. Development charge collections fell from $12.85M in 2021 to roughly $2M in 2024, and the reserve is forecast to be exhausted around 2028. The plant comes online in 2029.

If development charges do not cover Collingwood’s $44.4M share, it should be funded by:
☐ A debenture on the water and wastewater rate base ☐ The tax levy ☐ Deferring other capital ☐ I dispute the premise

Outline your platform. State the figure you believe represents the town’s real water and wastewater obligation, and what you will tell ratepayers about their bill between now and 2030. (150 words)

17. Stormwater

The final Stormwater Management Master Plan came to committee on 10 August 2026. It identifies 23 urban and 6 riverine flood damage centres, estimates $242 million in flood damage by 2076 if nothing is done, and proposes a phased $35.5 million programme with roughly $1.15 million of high-priority items for the 2027 budget. A dedicated stormwater fee is contemplated. The decision falls to the next council.

A dedicated stormwater charge, separate from the tax levy: ☐ Support ☐ Oppose ☐ Undecided

Outline how much of the stormwater programme you would fund, over what period, and from where. If you oppose a separate charge, say what you would fund it from instead. (125 words)

18. Growth and servicing capacity

Collingwood has imposed and lifted a development moratorium before. The new Official Plan is now in effect.

Over the next term I would:
☐ Accelerate residential growth ☐ Maintain the current pace ☐ Slow it ☐ Pause approvals until infrastructure catches up

Servicing capacity is best understood as:
☐ A hard veto on approvals ☐ A sequencing tool ☐ A cost to be funded

Outline your platform on growth, and be specific about who pays for the capacity that growth requires. (125 words)

19. The waterfront, the Terminals and the Town’s major assets

Terminals Point groundbreaking has moved to 2027. The developer bears roughly $200 million; the Town committed approximately $15 million (a 2022 estimate) for public realm works. The definitive documents signed in 2024 remain unpublished, with negotiations expected to run to mid-2027. Separately, the Poplar Sideroad land has been transferred for a new hospital.

The Terminals Point definitive documents should be made public: ☐ Now ☐ When negotiations conclude ☐ No

Outline your platform for the waterfront and the Town’s major real property, including the municipal role in the hospital project. State your test for whether the Town should own something at all. (125 words)

20. The Arts and Culture Centre

A proposed arts and culture centre has been before council, with land and negotiations dealt with in closed session — including at the council meeting of 22 June 2026. No total public cost has been put to residents.

Do you support the Town of Collingwood providing financial support to the proposed Arts and Culture Centre?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, capped at a stated amount ☐ Only land or in-kind support, no cash ☐ No ☐ Undecided

Candidates supporting a capped contribution are asked to state the maximum they would support, in capital and in annual operating.

Before any municipal commitment, a full public business case — total capital cost, annual operating subsidy and the Town’s share — should be published: ☐ Yes ☐ No

The Town should reach a decision on its role by: ☐ 2027 ☐ 2028 ☐ 2029–2030 ☐ Not in this term

Outline your position: what the Town’s role should be, what conditions you would attach, what share should come from private or senior-government sources, how long you expect the approval process to take and what governs that timeline, and at what point you would walk away. (125 words)

21. The Multi-Use Recreation Centre

A multi-use recreation facility has likewise been before council, with land acquisition handled in closed session — including at the meeting of 22 June 2026 — and council has continued to consider purchasing land while keeping options open. No total public cost has been put to residents.

Do you support building the Multi-Use Recreation Centre?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, at a reduced scope ☐ No ☐ Undecided

Do you support delivering it in partnership with the Town of The Blue Mountains?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, if they contribute proportionally ☐ No ☐ Undecided

If both the Arts and Culture Centre and the Multi-Use Recreation Centre cannot be afforded in this term, my priority is:
☐ The recreation centre ☐ The arts centre ☐ Neither ☐ Both, and I will say how they are paid for

Candidates are asked to state the maximum total capital cost they would support, and whether a full public business case should be published before any municipal commitment.

Outline your platform: scope, site, cost, how it is financed, what a partnership with The Blue Mountains would have to look like for you to sign it, and what else in the capital plan gives way to make room for it. (150 words)

Part B — The Blue Mountains, Questions 15 to 20

15. New water and wastewater infrastructure

The Town carries roughly $57 million in water and wastewater debt. The Thornbury plant is approaching fifty years old. A $66 million new water-treatment programme has been carried to the Ministry of Infrastructure. The Town’s own servicing allocation policy concedes that growth has been outpacing completion of the projects meant to serve it.

On the proposed new water-treatment programme:
☐ Proceed as planned ☐ Proceed only with senior-government funding ☐ Pause and pursue regional supply ☐ Cancel

Outline your platform for new water and wastewater infrastructure: what gets built, what gets deferred, the fixed water charge trajectory you will accept, and where the money comes from. (150 words)

16. The overrun, and whether anyone is ever held to account

Three bundled projects — the Craigleith lift station, the Mill Street pumping station and the Bay–Grey Street linear works — went from $34.79M to $53.56M. Council learned of the full variance in November 2025. Staff report ADM-26-015 found the bundling obscured individual cost pressure and that escalation should have been triggered at the Craigleith tender. Council spent $150,000 on value engineering, declined to spend more, and on 2 April 2026 asked for a performance audit from a body that does not review municipal matters. Thornbury came in 92 per cent over budget; Craigleith 54 per cent.

An independent third-party performance audit of these projects should be commissioned:
☐ Yes, in the first 90 days ☐ Yes, later in the term ☐ No

Its findings should be: ☐ Published in full ☐ Received in closed session

Outline what you would do. Name who would conduct it, by when, and what consequence would follow from an adverse finding. (125 words)

17. The two bills every household pays

Reserves fell from roughly $82 million in 2021 to a projected $6.7 million by the end of 2026. Audited long-term debt at the end of 2024 was only $5.24 million, because the capital programme was paid by draining reserves rather than borrowing. Roughly $99 million of projects is committed and under way with more than $150 million further planned, about 90 per cent of it water and wastewater — which lands on the water bill, not the tax bill. On a no-intervention path the municipal tax on a $1 million home rises about 69 per cent by 2030 and the fixed water charge more than doubles. Separately, section 290 of the Municipal Act forbids an operating deficit, and closing the projected $10.3 million operating gap by 2028 implies a further 42 per cent.

Do you accept these projections?
☐ Yes ☐ No — I will supply my own figures ☐ Undecided

Which of the $150 million in planned projects would you defer or cancel?
☐ None ☐ Some ☐ Most

Outline your platform. Will you commit to a cap on the combined increase a household faces, and name specifically what you would cut to stay under it? (150 words)

18. Thornbury, Craigleith and the Campus of Care

The Town bought 32 acres at 125 Peel Street, Thornbury in February 2021 and selected peopleCare with Skyline/SkyDev to build 160 long-term care beds, seniors’ retirement living and attainable staff housing, to be delivered by CIHA order approved in April 2023. Negotiations were terminated in November 2024; servicing and the Peel Street reconstruction were cancelled; the Town kept the land and the beds moved to Craigleith. Meanwhile Thornbury West Phase 2 is suspended and the Thornbury plant nears fifty.

The 32 acres at 125 Peel Street should, in the next term, be:
☐ Brought back to market for seniors’ and attainable housing ☐ Used for another municipal purpose ☐ Sold ☐ Held undeveloped ☐ Undecided

Long-term care, attainable housing and higher-density rental should be built in Thornbury as well as in the Craigleith corridor: ☐ Agree ☐ Disagree

State plainly what position you took on the Campus of Care at the time, and what you would do differently now. Then set out how a permanent base of roughly 9,000 households pays for a service load sized for visitors. (200 words)

19. Grey Road 19, and long-term care capacity

Two separate projects sit on Grey Road 19. The first is a 192-bed peopleCare long-term care home on roughly 3.2 acres of municipal land the Town is selling, beside the new Craigleith fire hall. The second is a private proposal of approximately 612 rental units on a 9.95-hectare site at 796060 Grey Road 19, up to six storeys, being sought by Minister’s Zoning Order rather than by Official Plan and Zoning amendment. Separately, Errinrung is currently the only licensed long-term care home in Thornbury, with 60 beds. Please answer on each project separately.

On the 192-bed long-term care home: ☐ Support ☐ Oppose ☐ Undecided

On the 612-unit rental proposal:
☐ Support the units and the MZO route ☐ Support the units but oppose the MZO route ☐ Oppose the proposal ☐ Undecided

If Errinrung closes or enters redevelopment before replacement capacity opens, the Town should:
☐ Secure interim local capacity at municipal cost ☐ Accelerate the Craigleith home and accept a gap ☐ Reopen a Thornbury site ☐ Treat it as a provincial responsibility

Outline your platform on long-term care and seniors’ housing, and explain your view of using a Minister’s Zoning Order to deliver housing in this town. (150 words)

20. Shared recreation and cultural facilities

Collingwood is weighing a multi-use recreation centre and an arts and culture centre, both of which have been dealt with in closed session. Residents of The Blue Mountains would use either facility, and Collingwood candidates are being asked in the parallel questionnaire whether they would build them in partnership with this town.

Would you support The Blue Mountains partnering with Collingwood on a multi-use recreation centre?
☐ Yes ☐ Yes, if the cost share matches the usage share ☐ No ☐ Undecided

Would you support The Blue Mountains contributing to a regional arts and culture facility?
☐ Yes ☐ Only in-kind or land ☐ No ☐ Undecided

Alternatively, The Blue Mountains should build its own recreation facility: ☐ Agree ☐ Disagree ☐ Undecided

Candidates are asked to state the maximum capital contribution they would support toward a shared facility, and whether a full public business case should be published before any contribution.

Outline your platform on recreation and cultural facilities: build alone, build jointly, or buy access. State the test you would apply, and what this town would want in return for its money. (150 words)

Part C — Both towns

These close both documents: Questions 22 and 23 in Collingwood, 21 and 22 in The Blue Mountains.

What you should be judged on

Name up to three commitments you are prepared to be held to at the end of the term. Each must carry a number and a date.

Outline how you believe a mayor’s performance should be measured, and what you would consider a failed term. (100 words)

Leadership and accountability

A mayor has one vote. What distinguishes mayors is not their platform but how they work — with council, with staff, and with residents who disagree with them. Council’s only employee is the Chief Administrative Officer. The CAO is responsible for all other staff. Any accountability a mayor wants in the professional ranks has to be built through that relationship.

Five situations. Choose one answer in each.

A major decision has the support of a bare majority of council. You would:
☐ Proceed on the majority you have ☐ Delay it to build a wider majority ☐ Withdraw it

A staff recommendation is competent but less ambitious than what you campaigned on. You would:
☐ Accept it ☐ Adopt it and pursue the rest separately ☐ Send it back with your own direction

Council votes against your position on a significant matter. You would:
☐ Implement it and defend it publicly ☐ Implement it and say publicly that you disagreed ☐ Use the powers available to you to bring it back

By the end of your first year, the organisation should feel:
☐ Largely as it does now ☐ Noticeably different in how it works ☐ Substantially restructured

The larger share of your time in the first year belongs:
☐ Running the town’s own business ☐ Representing the town to the Province, the county and its neighbours

Accountability for professional staff work should be strengthened by: check all that apply.
☐ A written annual performance agreement for the CAO, with published objectives
☐ Named professional sign-off on cost estimates and major reports to council
☐ A fixed period within which staff must report a variance to council
☐ Independent third-party review of major projects, commissioned by council
☐ Public reporting of every major project against its original budget and schedule
☐ Senior staff compensation tied to delivery on budget and on time
☐ Present arrangements are adequate

When a major project fails on cost or on schedule, the person publicly accountable should be:
☐ The mayor ☐ Council as a whole ☐ The CAO ☐ The responsible department head ☐ No individual — it is a process failure

In your own words, what is the job of a mayor? Say what you would do to build accountability into the professional staff role. Then name a decision in your working life where you took a position that was unpopular with the people around you, and say what it cost you. (200 words)

Follow-up interview and consent

Both documents close with the same four items: availability for a recorded follow-up interview and preferred times; consent to publication of the responses in full; willingness to have factual claims verified against public records; and a signature and date.

A closing note

Every candidate on this list was told the same thing, in the same words: this is not a gotcha exercise and there are no trick questions. Every question asks what you would do and why. It is an opportunity to put a platform in front of about 6,000 readers who vote here, unedited, with no reporter’s framing in between.

The instructions carry one more line worth repeating here, because it is the standard the answers will be read against: “It depends on the staff report” is an acceptable answer only if you also say what would make you decide one way or the other.

Returns close on 18 September. What comes back — and what does not — will be published.

Ron Shulman · The Shulman Report

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For the past year I’ve been looking at the four municipalities that share this bay. Now I want to take one of them apart properly — not in a single article, but chapter by chapter, so that by October you have the whole picture and can decide for yourself what to do with it.

Each chapter takes one subject and follows it to the end. This one is about money: what the town says about its financial position, and what its own documents say. The chapters that follow will deal with the wastewater plant and Georgian Bay, what four years of consulting studies actually delivered, and how this town is organized and what that costs.

Everything in them comes from records that are already public — the town’s staff reports, its asset management plan, its budgets, its own consultants’ findings. There’s no name-calling in any of it. There doesn’t need to be.

Each chapter ends with a scorecard, and I set out the criteria before the evidence, so you can disagree with me on the record rather than take my word for it.

Here’s the first.

INTRODUCTION

I am not a politician and I am not running for anything.

For the past year I have been writing to the residents of South Georgian Bay about the four municipalities that share this bay — Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Clearview and Wasaga Beach. I have looked at their finances, their infrastructure and the way they are run. Nobody asked me to. Think of it as an unelected editorial board of one.

I did not take this on because I enjoy it. I spent thirty-five years as a strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies across four continents, and I know what a competently run organization looks like. What I have found in this region does not look like one.

This report is about Collingwood.

Let me be clear about what it is and what it is not. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I do not know your priorities and it is not my place. But I will say this plainly: if I have done my job, this report will shape who you decide not to vote for. That is a different thing, and I think it is a legitimate thing for a resident with a keyboard and a public record to attempt.

THE STANDARD

We elect people to represent us. Not to be brilliant, not to be experts — but to run this town with integrity, honesty, and the competence we would expect from anyone managing an organization of this size. Call it professional governance.

The Town of Collingwood is a $198-million-a-year organization. It treats our drinking water. It processes our sewage. It maintains our roads and decides where people live. Those are not small responsibilities and nobody should pretend they are easy.

But difficult is not the same as impossible, and well-intentioned is not the same as competent.

I want to say something about intent, because it matters and because I do not want to be misread. I do not believe the members of this council are bad people. I do not believe they set out to mislead anyone. In most cases I think they are doing what they believe is right.

And I have come to the view that it does not matter.

When a town tells residents its infrastructure is robust while raw sewage enters the harbour, the difference between not knowing and not saying is invisible from the outside — and it makes no difference to the water.

Whether a failure comes from ignorance or from something less innocent, it is still a failure, and it still has to be answered for. That is the whole of my argument about motive, and I will not return to it.

HOW THIS REPORT WORKS

Everything here comes from documents that are already public: the town’s own staff reports, its asset management plan, its budgets, its consultants’ findings, its public notices, and contemporaneous local reporting. Where a figure is disputed or uncertain, I say so. Where I could not establish something, I say that too.

There will be no name-calling in these pages. The facts are more damaging than any adjective I could attach to them.

Each analysis ends with a scorecard. The criteria are set out before the evidence, and every score carries its reasoning — so you can disagree with me on the record rather than take my word for it. Where this council has got something right, it is marked as right.

This section asks one question. When Collingwood’s council and staff describe the town’s financial position to residents, is the description true?

Part 1. FISCAL ACCOUNTABILITY

On 15 June 2026, after a staff presentation on whether to pursue a municipal services corporation for water and wastewater, council voted unanimously to stay the course. The presentation included this:

“Collingwood enters this discussion from a position of strength. We have declining debt, substantial borrowing capacity, long-standing regional partnerships, sophisticated water location systems and significant expertise within our water and wastewater sectors.” — Amanda Pegg, executive director of corporate and customer service, to Collingwood council, 15 June 2026

Parts of that statement are true and should be acknowledged. The regional partnerships are real: Collingwood sells treated water to New Tecumseth through a pipeline that has operated since 2000. The town issued no new debenture debt in 2024 or 2025, and its existing long-term debt is scheduled to retire by 2034. On the narrow measure the sentence uses, debt is declining.

The question is what the measure leaves out.

Let’s Review the Numbers

The Raymond A. Barker water treatment plant expansion is a $270-million project. It was first put at roughly $60 million, then $120 million, before reaching $270 million.

The financing is as follows.

• The Province is covering approximately $150 million through the Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund — $70 million announced in September 2024, and a further $80 million in the spring of 2026.

• New Tecumseth, which buys Collingwood’s water, carries roughly 63 per cent of the remaining net cost.

• Collingwood’s share is approximately $44.4 million.

Residents were told that this $44.4 million would cost them nothing, because it would be paid entirely out of development charges — the fees builders pay on new construction. Growth pays for growth. No debenture. No tax levy. A modest increase to the water bill.

Four of the town’s own figures test that promise.

TEST ONE — THE DEVELOPMENT CHARGES ARE NOT ARRIVING

The promise rests entirely on development charge revenue arriving fast enough to cover $44.4 million.

Collections fell from $12.85 million in 2021 to $6.10 million in 2022, $3.73 million in 2023, and roughly $2 million in 2024. The 2024 figure strips out one-time rental prepayments to show real fees on real new construction. That is a decline of roughly 84 per cent in three years, settling toward a floor in the region of $1.5 million a year.

The reserve is also draining faster than it fills. In 2024, $11.9 million flowed out of the development charge reserve against $4.7 million flowing in — two and a half times as much out as in. On current trends the reserve is forecast to be exhausted around 2028.

There is a final turn, and it is the one that matters most for the next council.

• Under the Canada–Ontario Development Charge Reduction Program, municipalities that participate must cut residential development charges by between 30 and 50 per cent for three years, in exchange for infrastructure funding. In August 2026, Simcoe County council approved the maximum 50 per cent reduction, retroactive to 30 March 2026.

• Whether the Town of Collingwood has applied to the same programme for its own development charges is a separate question, and one worth putting to any candidate.

TEST TWO: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE DEVELOPMENT CHARGES DO NOT ARRIVE?

The town’s position is not that development charges might cover the $44.4 million. It is that they will. That is the basis on which residents were told the plant would cost them nothing.

So it is worth setting out precisely what follows if they do not — because the consequences are sequential, and each step is already visible in the town’s own numbers.

• The obligation does not lapse. Collingwood’s share of a finished plant is owed whether or not builders pay it. The money is committed and construction began in July 2024.

• It becomes a debenture on the rate base. Water plant debt is repaid from water and wastewater user fees, not from the tax levy. It arrives as a utility bill rather than a tax increase — less visible, and not subject to the same annual public scrutiny as the levy.

• The timing is the worst available. The development charge reserve is forecast to be exhausted around 2028. The plant comes online in 2029. The debenture therefore begins at precisely the moment the reserve that was meant to prevent it has run dry.

• And the wastewater plant is still waiting. Replacement is estimated at $200 to $300 million, with no Environmental Assessment, no site and no funding. If $44.4 million produces a 43 per cent increase in the household bill, the wastewater plant is not a rate problem. It is a structural one.

TEST THREE— THE BILL THAT LANDS ON HOUSEHOLDS

• If the development charges do not arrive, the $44.4 million is financed as a debenture on the rate base. Ratepayers pay it through their water and wastewater bills.

• The approved rate plan will bring the typical household bill to about $1,400 by 2030. If the $44.4 million is debentured instead, the same bill will reach approximately $1,685 by 2030 — roughly $503 more per household, every year, on the rate study’s own basis.

Residents have been shown the first line. The second line follows from the town’s own development charge figures.

TEST FOUR— THE DEBT THE TOWN DOES NOT CALL DEBT

When development charges do not cover a bill, the bill does not disappear. It changes category. It stops being a development charge and becomes debt.

The town acknowledges approximately $12.1 million of water-related debt. The $44.4 million water plant share sits outside that column, carried by the assumption that development charges will cover it. Add the two together and the real obligation is approximately $56.5 million.

Roughly 21 per cent of Collingwood’s real water obligation appears in the column the town labels “debt.” The reported figure is about one-fifth of the actual one.

Declining debt is a true statement about the $12.1 million. It is not a true statement about the $56.5 million.

“Substantial borrowing capacity” was one of the four claims made to council on 15 June. A $44.4 million debenture that turns to about $56 million changes that perspective and the town has not even begun to address $300 million it will need for the wastewater plant.

AN ASSET MANAGEMENT PLAN… WHAT, WHY, AND THE IMPLICATIONS

An asset management plan is not a discretionary exercise. Ontario requires every municipality to produce one, and it answers three questions: what do we own, what condition is it in, and can we afford to keep it working.

From that inventory, engineers calculate the amount that must be set aside every year simply to stop what the town already owns from deteriorating — and the difference between that figure and what the town actually budgets is the funding gap.

It is, in effect, a home inspection for a town. The same exercise you would pay for before buying a house: someone walks the property, grades every component, and tells you the roof has five years left and what it will cost to replace.

WHAT THE PLAN INCLUDES…

The 2025 plan covers twelve asset classes: transportation, wastewater, stormwater, water, buildings and facilities, parks and recreation, fleet and equipment, cultural and community assets, land holdings, natural assets, library assets and information technology. Together they are valued at approximately $1.1B in replacement cost.

Every asset in those classes is assigned a condition grade. The plan then reports the portfolio against five grades — very good, good, fair, poor and very poor — and this is the result:

The green is what the town does not need to worry about yet: $566 million of assets in good or very good condition, 52 per cent of the portfolio.

WHAT IS IN THE RED AND THE ORANGE

The red and orange together — poor and very poor — total $255 million. The plan rounds it to $254 million. That is the figure it describes as requiring targeted investment, and it is worth knowing what it consists of, because the plan does not break it out and the town has not.

It can be calculated from the town’s own scorecard, by subtracting the replacement value in fair or better condition from the total replacement value of each class:

The 2025 Asset Management Plan, approved unanimously in August 2025, identifies a funding gap of approximately $15 million a year and states what closing it requires through 2034:

THE SCORECARD

Four criteria. Each is scored from 1 to 5, where 5 is strong, 4 adequate, 3 mixed, 2 weak and 1 failing. The reasoning is given so the score can be argued with.

THE FINDING

Collingwood’s public account of its finances is not false in its particulars. It is true about a narrow set of numbers and silent about the larger set surrounding them. Debt is declining — on one measure. Growth pays for growth — if growth arrives. Bills rise 18 per cent — if the development charges appear.

Each individual statement can be defended. Together they describe a town that does not exist.

The question for October is not whether anyone lied. It is whether a council that has been given these figures — by its own treasurer, its own consultants and its own asset plan — can reasonably continue to describe the town’s position as one of strength.

Thanks for reading,
Ron

WHY I PUT THIS TOGETHER

I put this together because I kept hearing strong opinions about The Blue Mountains’ finances and very few facts to anchor them. So I went to the source — the Town’s own audited financial statements and its council-approved budget — and simply followed the money.

Not to score points, and not to tell anyone how to vote, but because I believe residents deserve to see the whole picture, in plain language, before they mark a ballot this October. Every number in these pages is the Town’s own; all I’ve done is connect them and ask what they add up to.

What they add up to is what worried me enough to write it down. Day-to-day operating costs are outrunning the revenue that pays for them; the savings that quietly funded a decade of roads, pipes and buildings are nearly gone; and the bills now coming due land on the same roughly 9,000 households — a property tax on track to rise about 69% by 2030, a fixed water charge set to more than double, and, because Ontario law forbids an operating deficit, a further 42% simply to balance the books.

Meanwhile only about 4,000 of us voted last time, and the mayor’s race turned on 480 votes — a handful of ballots steering close to $30,000 per household in obligations.

That is why I did this: so that when you meet the candidates, you can ask the hard questions with the facts already in hand, and insist on specifics, not slogans.

— Ron Shulman

Every figure in this briefing comes from the Town’s own audited financial statements and its council-approved budget — not from opinion.

We begin with who pays for the Town and who actually votes, because the gap between them is why this matters. Then the money, in two parts.

Part 1, the operating picture, follows the day-to-day cost of running the Town — the staff, the compensation, and the structural deficit those costs are opening up, which by law must be closed with higher taxes.

Part 2, the capital picture, turns to the roads, pipes, plants and buildings: how the Town paid for them by draining its savings, and the debt and household bills now coming due.

Under each figure is a plain-language explanation and a set of questions for the candidates. They build as the picture comes into focus. Bring them to the meeting, and ask every candidate to answer with specifics, not slogans.

A briefing for candidates and residents

START HERE

Who Pays — and Who Votes

What this shows. Before the dollars, get the denominator right.

Cost and tax should be measured per taxable household — an estimated ~9,000 (the 2021 census counted 7,396 dwellings; we assume ~20% growth to 2026, to be confirmed against the tax roll) — not per the 9,390 census residents, and not per voter.

Property tax is one bill per home (the owner); water is billed to the occupant; and a single home can list several voters (every resident adult 18+, plus non-resident owners) yet still pays once.

That fixed base of payers sits under a far larger, uncapped pool of voters — of whom only a sliver actually turned out.

What this shows. It is easy to look at a 25.6% turnout and a 480-vote margin and conclude your vote doesn’t matter.

The opposite is true.

Precisely because so few people vote, each vote decides more — and what it decides is roughly $30,000 per household in obligations, a collapsed savings cushion, and a widening annual shortfall.

A few hundred votes are steering tens of thousands of dollars behind every home in town. The pages that follow show exactly what is at stake.

PART 1

The Operating Picture

Start with what it costs to run the Town every year. The day-to-day budget — staff and their compensation — is growing faster than the revenue that pays for it, and Ontario law (Municipal Act, s.290) forbids an operating deficit, so the gap must be closed by the tax levy. The test: can a town of about 9,000 households afford it?

Questions for the candidates

• Staffing rose about 63% while the permanent population barely moved. Which positions are essential, and would you freeze or reduce the complement?

• Fully-loaded compensation rose 10% in one year with no new hires, and the COLA is set at 5%. Do you support a 5% annual increase when residents’ incomes are not rising that fast — and if not, what would you set it at?

What this shows. When costs outrun revenue and the savings that used to cover the difference are gone, the result is an operating deficit that deepens every year.

This chart is the Town’s full funding-gap picture: it takes the operating squeeze from the previous page and also subtracts the investment income the Town is losing as its reserves disappear, and adds the new debt service coming due — so it turns negative sooner, and falls further.

From a reserve-propped surplus in 2025, the annual gap widens to about $10.3 million by 2028, and the accumulated hole reaches roughly $16.8 million.

Every dollar must be covered by borrowing or by higher taxes.

Questions for the candidates

• Your Town’s own model shows the operating gap reaching about $10 million a year by 2028 and $17 million accumulated. Do you accept these figures — and if not, what are yours?

• The 2025 surplus was propped up by one-time reserve draws that are now gone. What replaces them?

PART 2

The Capital Picture

Part 1 was the yearly squeeze; it lands on a Town that has already spent its cushion. For a decade the Town paid for its roads, pipes and plants by draining its savings, not by borrowing — and those reserves are now nearly gone.

Questions for the candidates

• In 2021 the Town held roughly $82 million in reserves; its own budget projects $6.7 million by end-2026. Where did about $75 million go — a deliberate plan, or a failure of oversight?

• The development-charge fund is on track to be exhausted by 2027, yet it is committed against tens of millions in contracts. What happens to those projects when it runs dry?

• The asset-management reserve is about $1.8 million against a $5.6-billion infrastructure base. How will you fund renewal of existing roads, water mains and facilities?

• What specific reserve targets will you commit to rebuilding, and what will you cut or raise to do it?

What this shows. Here is the part that has not hit the books yet. At the end of 2024 the Town’s audited long-term debt was just $5.24 million — remarkably low — because the capital program was paid by draining the reserves on the previous pages, not by borrowing. Now that the reserves are gone, the borrowing begins. Roughly $99 million in projects is already committed and under way; more than $150 million more is planned. About 90 cents of every dollar of it is water and wastewater — charged to your water bill, not your property tax. And two committed projects already ran far over budget: Thornbury by 92%, Craigleith by 54%.

Questions for the candidates

• The Town’s debt was only $5.24 million because it spent savings instead of borrowing. Now the savings are gone — how much will the Town have to borrow to finish the $99 million already committed?

• More than $150 million of further projects is planned. Which will you proceed with, defer, or cancel — and on what basis?

• Thornbury came in 92% over budget and Craigleith 54% over. What, specifically, will you change so the next project does not?

• Will you commit to publishing a costed 10-year capital plan that shows the cumulative debt, tax, and water-bill impact before any new project is approved?

• Given the Town’s financial situation — collapsing reserves and a looming operating deficit — how was it possible to authorize a new fire hall approaching $16 million ($15.8M), and would you have voted for it?

What this shows. When the savings run out, the bills come due — and they come together. The municipal property tax on a $1-million home rises about 69% by 2030, and the fixed water charge — paid by every property before a drop is used, and where roughly 90% of the coming debt lands — more than doubles. Property tax and water, climbing at the same time, on every household.

Questions for the candidates

• On a no-intervention path the municipal tax rises about 69% and the fixed water charge roughly doubles by 2030. Do you accept these projections? If not, show us your numbers.

• About 90% of the coming debt is water and wastewater. What is your plan to control that cost — and do you support moving it to a regional service board?

What this shows. And then the blow the law makes unavoidable. On top of both bills, a municipality cannot budget an operating deficit (Municipal Act, s.290), so the operating gap from Part 1 must be closed by the tax levy. Closing the projected $10.3 million gap by 2028 forces the municipal tax on a $1-million home from about $4,426 to $6,274 — a 42% rise, $1,848 more a year — for day-to-day operations alone, before any of the capital debt above. Property tax, water, and this: a household faces all three at once.

Questions for the candidates

• Balancing operations alone requires roughly a 42% municipal tax increase by 2028 — on top of the property-tax and water increases you have just seen. Will you commit to a cap, and name specifically what you would cut to stay under it?

• A typical household faces a rising property tax, a doubling water bill, and new operating taxes all at once. What is your concrete plan to keep this town affordable for the people who live here year-round?

FURTHER QUESTIONS

Issues We Haven’t Touched — Yet

Each question below could fill a briefing of its own — and may. But every candidate should be able to speak to them now, because together they decide whether The Blue Mountains can grow its way out of this rather than simply tax its way through it.

• Open for business. The commercial and industrial share of the tax base is small — roughly 8% — which leaves residential owners carrying the load. How will you attract investment and employers to grow the commercial base toward, say, 16% over your term, and what concretely would make the Town “open for business”?

• Housing people can actually afford. Beyond the single project at 171 King Street, what will it truly take to attract private investment in rental and attainable housing — and which barriers (servicing, approvals, fees, zoning) will you remove to get it built?

• The money we send to the county. A large share of the property tax collected here is passed through to Grey County rather than kept for local services. Why, and what will you do to keep more of residents’ tax dollars working here?

• The grants meant to backfill development charges. When development charges were cut and refunds were ordered, senior governments were meant to offset municipalities. How do those grants actually work, how much has the Town received, and does it come anywhere close to replacing the lost revenue?

• A Municipal Services Corporation (MSC). What role do you think a Municipal Services Corporation could play in reducing the Town’s debt — and would you actively pursue one?

• Swapping roads with the county. Grey County wants to transfer some of its roads to the Town. What are the costs and benefits of taking them on, and is it a good idea?

A home for the Report

This week the work moves to a permanent home: shulman.report.

It started as a Substack — somewhere to think out loud with my neighbours.

It has grown into something with a name and a mandate: The Shulman Report, independent accountability journalism for South Georgian Bay.

Not a newsletter, and not a campaign. A standing record of the decisions, the dollars, and the growth reshaping Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Clearview, Wasaga Beach, and the county around them — and a place where every paper in this series lives, alongside the arithmetic behind it: the model, the sources, the numbers, open for anyone who wants to check my math.

That is the whole point.

For thirty years I was paid to read past what large organizations say about themselves and watch how the money actually moves.

The Report brings that same lens to the town hall. When a council says the plant is “handled,” or that a bill “won’t land on taxpayers,” the Report does the one thing no press release ever does: it checks.

Follow the dollars. Check the arithmetic.

The plant is in the wrong place

As part of this process, I am meeting with a wide range of very smart, connected people who advise and criticize, and I learn.

Here is something I did not expect to hear, and then heard again and again, the Raymond A. Barker plant is in the wrong place.

Their argument is simple… On the merits of water alone, you would not have put this plant in the Collingwood harbour — you would have gone deep, maybe somewhere close to Thornbury, and drawn the region’s supply from the best source on the shoreline.

Set aside whether they are right. The location is not the point; the thinking is. Ask why the plant sits where it sits and you find the flaw under every water decision this region has ever made: a boundary.

Every choice here has been made because municipal lines have governed them, town by town, because that is the only frame the region has ever had. No one has stood above those lines to ask the one question that matters — where, along this whole shoreline, should the region draw it and treat it?

The boundary decided by default: not the geography, not the depth or cleanliness of the water, not the way it moves along this coast.

Those lines feel like they were drawn in a horse-and-buggy century to divide survey lots and administer local roads — an administrative convenience, never an environmental judgment.

You cannot un-build the Barker plant, and you should not try. But you can stop letting the next hundred years of decisions be made by lines a surveyor drew for reasons that have nothing to do with our water environment. That is what a regional utility is for. Ours is called an MSC, a Municipal Service Corporation.

A Bit of Background

Why does an MSC make sense — it is a utility

An MSC is a public utility, structured within a natural geographic boundary like South Georgian Bay and owned directly by its member municipalities. In this case — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, The Blue Mountains and Clearview — the towns whose residents it serves.

• It consolidates fractured systems where four partner towns plus one customer each keep their own plan, their own priorities and their own budget. The utility creates a single regional plan — mapping every asset, finding every failure point, and sequencing the investments to fix what is broken and build what the region needs.

• It is run by experienced professionals who deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget — and who hold the region’s water to the highest environmental standard, drawing on the best treatment technology in the world and holding every town to the same mark.

• As a public utility, it finances capital at lower interest and over longer terms than any single municipality — and carries that debt on its own balance sheet, not the town’s, freeing each town’s borrowing room for roads, parks, growth, and everything else.

• For you, the taxpayer, the result is one regional structure delivering higher quality and better management. The most important point is that this will be delivered to you at lower cost.

An MSC changes the game, and it does so with three Driving Forces.

Force 1. Scalability and Regional Infrastructure

Today, the region runs three water plants, two of them on life support. In Stayner, a well field cost $70 million — because hooking the town up to a pipe of fresh water running right through it was judged too expensive. Next door, Nottawa is running out of water and, for the very same reason, cannot tap that same pipe. And a builder with 500 homes to construct is being forced to spend an estimated $25 million drilling its own wells and building a treatment plant to supply them.

Our vision: one plant that serves all of these needs.

The beneficiaries:

● You, the taxpayer — because your water bill goes down.

● The Province — no more handouts.

Force 2. Long-Term Capital Financing

The second fundamental benefit of a major utility like the MSC is its capacity to finance infrastructure over the long term — to spread the cost of assets built to last fifty years across the decades that actually use them.

Ontario law limits municipal debentures to a maximum term of 15 to 20 years. An MSC, structured as a utility corporation, can issue infrastructure debentures over 40 years. That difference is decisive.

And this is what changes everything about who pays. Under the go-it-alone approach, each town waits, hat in hand, for a provincial cheque — and that cheque will never come. So nothing happens: not a new water plant, not a new wastewater plant. Stop and think about what that means — new building stops, and pollution rises.

Under an MSC, the region does not wait. It finances each project itself, at utility scale and over the long term, and pays for it directly through water and wastewater rates.

So what about losing control of your own water system? In fact, it is exactly the opposite.

How do I convince you that we don’t have control of our water system? Look at the facts.

Ask yourself, how can the Town of Collingwood build a fancy new water treatment plant that ended up costing $250 million. The answer is they went to the provincial government, hat in hand and pleaded for the money. Simple, no money no plant.

By removing the Ontario government from the equation, integrating across a regional population, and creating a corporation with utility-grade financing, the region controls its own destiny for the first time — instead of pleading for a rescue that will not come.

Force 3. Professional Talent, Quality, and Focus

Finally and critically, what sets an MSC apart from the small, stretched teams in each town is what it brings to the table.

None of these municipalities — not one of the four — can attract, afford, or retain the calibre of engineering and project-management talent that water and wastewater infrastructure demands.

What each gets instead is a young engineer learning on the job — practising, on a $50 million capital project, skills they have never applied before. And the results show it: not one project in any of the towns has ever come in on budget. Not one!

The Blue Mountains could build only two pumping stations for the $35 million that was supposed to cover three; Collingwood’s water plant started at $65 million, doubled to $121 million, and is now targeted at $270 million; Stayner tried to drill wells for $35 million and the cost doubled.

An MSC changes that equation entirely. A regional utility serving all four communities recruits differently. It attracts the fifty-year-old project manager who has built treatment plants, managed contractors, and delivered complex infrastructure a dozen times over.

It creates the conditions for mentorship — where junior engineers learn from seasoned professionals rather than from their own expensive mistakes. Talent follows the mandate, and the mandate of an MSC is singular: run the infrastructure competently, and nothing else.

There is one more thing that sets an MSC apart, and it may matter most of all: who runs it. An organization of this size and complexity is led by people who have run a major utility before — people with the education, the skill, and the experience to oversee an operation on this scale.

That is leadership a single small town cannot attract, cannot afford, and could not keep busy enough to justify.

And above the management sits a board built for the task: professional experts in engineering, finance, and investment, working alongside representatives of the owners — the member towns and townships.

The expertise to run the system and the accountability to the communities that own it, in the same room. That is not how any of the four municipalities is governed today. It is how infrastructure of this magnitude must be.

Is this a new concept?

There is nothing new here. Strip away the acronym and the legislation, and what I am describing is a utility — the most familiar structure in modern life.

You already live with them. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant; you buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires — in Collingwood, that utility is EPCOR — and pay by the kilowatt-hour. Gas is the same. So is water — everywhere but here.

Ontario already has water utilities doing exactly this:

• The Union Water Supply System Inc., owned jointly by Leamington, Kingsville, Essex, and Lakeshore, runs one plant and one trunk system and sells bulk water by volume to its four members.

• The Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation builds and operates communal water and wastewater across the county’s rural townships, full-cost-recovery.

• Edmonton has delivered its own municipal water for more than a century, today through EPCOR, a city-owned utility.

• Peel — Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon — is moving its water and wastewater into a single publicly owned corporation right now.

This is not an experiment. It is how the developed world handles exactly the problem this region has. What follows is simply the case for doing it here.

Why is the Province driving this forward

Every conversation about water in this region ends the same way: not to worry — we can ask the Province for a grant. Look, we did it last time and they were wonderful.

Time to give our collective heads a shake

Ontario is running a $13.8-billion deficit for 2026–27, on debt near $485 billion, and the interest alone now runs about $17.2 billion a year — its fourth-largest expense. The budget projects a small surplus by 2028–29; the Financial Accountability Office doubts it.

The point is simple: a region should not stake nine-figure infrastructure on the most optimistic line in someone else’s budget. Betting the next plant on the next rescue is not planning. It is gambling.

What the rescues have already cost

Look at what this region has drawn from that shrinking well in just three years. The Raymond A. Barker plant expansion: $150 million. Stayner’s well field: $35 million. That is $185 million across two files — drawn down grant by grant, with no mechanism of control and no plan behind it. And the next ask is already on the table: The Blue Mountains has taken a $66-million water treatment plan to the Ministry of Infrastructure.

And the asks have not stopped. Stayner still needs to replace the aging pipes its $70-million wells did not buy.

Every one of those files assumes the same thing — that the cheque will come. It will not. The honest response is not to complain; it is to stop needing it. This region must learn to stand on its own.

This group of documents proposes the mechanism for half of that need — the water-treatment side — without going to the Province and without raising your bill. Wastewater, the harder half, gets its own paper.

The plan: the South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation

The plan is a regional water utility — the South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation, a public utility. The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, passed in November 2025 and being refined at Queen’s Park through Bill 98, is built to move water out of town halls and into arm’s-length public utilities — with the power to make a regional system exclusive, borrowing that lives off the towns’ balance sheets, and a first pilot underway in Peel.

One entity owns the regional plant and trunk system, sells water at a wholesale rate to every member town, and finances the region’s water infrastructure on its own balance sheet — over the life of the assets, without a provincial cheque.

I know the first response, because I have heard it in every coffee shop in three towns: this will cost me more money, or we will lose control of our water systems. These things will not happen — and we answer that with arithmetic, not assurances.

The Practical Application

The division of labour is simple, and it answers everyone who fears a takeover.

The Players

The utility will have 4 regional partners, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview and one customer, New Tecumseth.

The Payout and Transfer of ownership

The MSC once incorporated will repay each town’s outstanding project debt and then will finance the acquisition over the asset’s 40-year life.

The utility will take over the ownership and management of the plant, the trunk mains, and the booster stations — everything from the intake to each town’s gate.

Under the Legislation, the operators, maintenance crews, and compliance staff transfer to the corporation by transfer by-law, with employment, seniority, and successor-employer protections intact, on day one.

The Price of Water

It sells to every member, that is every town and township, at one published wholesale tariff, the same terms for everyone, set by a cost-of-service study and published for all to see. This is important… this rate will be lower than what any town could charge on its own and we will explain why.

What Stays with Your Town

Your town keeps everything from the gate to your tap: the local pipes, the meters, the billing, the retail rate your council sets. Your bill still comes from your town, and the money for your local pipes comes back every year through the Fund.

So — will you pay more?

No. Here is the arithmetic, in three parts.

Priced on today’s water — and today is the low-water mark

A water utility’s costs are almost entirely fixed: debt service, operators, lab, and head office cost the same whether the plant treats 7 million cubic metres or 12. Only chemicals and electricity rise with volume — pennies per cubic metre.

So every new customer lands on costs already paid. Spread $15 million of fixed cost across 7.2 million cubic metres of water and it is about $2.08 for each; grow to 10 million and that cost drops $1.5 per cubic metre. This really isn’t rocket science. Growth does not strain the system; it makes the water cheaper for everyone already on it. That is the opposite of the town-by-town model, where every new subdivision triggers the next $60-million plant.

And the ‘profit’?

There isn’t one — by charter. The MSC recovers operations, maintenance, debt service, and a capital renewal reserve, and nothing leaves the system. It pays no dividend. Every dollar above cost is locked to one purpose: to upgrade the region’s water infrastructure — the regional system the utility owns, and the local systems the towns keep.

That is the quiet revolution: a region that stops begging for its infrastructure and starts funding it. Here is how.

The Infrastructure Development Fund

Each year, once debt service and reserves are funded, the utility will distribute its surplus to the member towns through what will be called the Infrastructure Development Fund. Distributing its surplus in proportion to each of the partners’ water purchases, ring-fenced to water infrastructure, and conditional on one thing: a current, honest asset-management plan. No plan, no cheque. It is paid from surplus, never promised as an entitlement — the lenders always stand ahead of it — and that is what makes it durable. By the mid-2030s the surplus runs on the order of $7 to $8 million a year — real renewal money, in every town, every year. Watermains, not wishes.

The Reserve Fund

A fixed share — say 20 per cent — is set aside first, into a Reserve Fund for the day something breaks. Not maintenance — catastrophe. The kind of day Collingwood lived this past December, when a cast-iron main laid in 1968 blew out at Hume Street: the tower drained, the town went under a boil-water advisory, and crews worked to 2:45 in the morning. Today a town’s only options are to drain its reserves, issue an emergency debenture, or phone the Province. The Reserve Fund replaces all three — the money is already there, the repair mobilizes in hours, and no council meets in emergency session to decide which service to cut. Rescue money ends, because the region finally carries its own rescue fund.

Your Town, Your Implications

This section takes each town in turn and puts the numbers where they belong — on your household. We begin with Collingwood.

Collingwood

Collingwood has been told, twice, that its water problems are handled. Both times the real bill was hidden. Here is what the current path actually costs a Collingwood household, and what the MSC changes.

The water plant you were told was free

Collingwood’s own share of the Raymond A. Barker plant expansion is $44.4 million.

Residents were assured that $44.4 million would cost them nothing — development charges would pay for it. In Collingwood Today, the Town’s message was exactly that: the fees developers pay would carry it, and “current taxpayers won’t be the ones faced with the bill” (Jessica Owen, CollingwoodToday.ca).

Let me state something very clearly. This isn’t true and Council’s presentation of this is simply unacceptable. Here is why? And you check it out yourself.

Development charges have collapsed 84 per cent in three years, from $12.85 million in 2021 to roughly $2 million by 2024, and the reserve is now draining about two-and-a-half times faster than it fills. Look around the town and find this massive development that is going to generate the millions.

When the charges fail — and the Town’s own numbers say they will — the $44.4 million lands on the rate base as a debenture. What does that mean for you?

On the water bill — where a treatment plant’s debt is recovered — the $44.4 million works out to roughly $230 more per household every year once it lands in 2029, on top of what you pay today. (That is the water share alone; the fuller picture, with the wastewater side added, comes in a later chapter.)

Counted honestly, Collingwood’s real water obligation is about $56.5 million — the $44.4 million plant share plus the $12.1 million the Town already owes and in fact acknowledges — yet only about a fifth of it appears in the column the Town calls “debt.”

The chart shows it plainly: going it alone, the water bill climbs; under the MSC, it holds.

Under the MSC, the plant will be purchased and that debt will be retired, at closing.

The Blue Mountains

TBM is in trouble financially… In this section we will only talk about the Water Treatment needs and they are significant, but more importantly, there is no way the town can pay for this infrastructure without the province, and the province isn’t going to cooperate.

The water plant it cannot build

The Town’s Thornbury water treatment plant is roughly fifty years old and has to be replaced. The replacement program carries a $66-million target — and on this region’s record of overruns, it points toward $100 million. On a base of roughly 9,000 water-billed homes, a town this size cannot finance a plant of that scale on its own.

And the money that was supposed to pay for it is gone. The development-charge reserve — the fund that was to make growth pay for growth — built to a $33-million peak in 2022 and is now collapsing toward zero.

On appeal, the Town was forced to cut its development-charge rates by 40 per cent and to refund more than $1 million (CollingwoodToday.ca), while the reserve that remains is already committed against more contracts than the money it holds. The growth was never coming, and the bill was always going to land on the ratepayer.

What the MSC changes for The Blue Mountains

Under the MSC, The Blue Mountains never builds the plant. It buys its water from the region at the published tariff, from capacity the region already owns, and the $66-to-$100-million program — and the debt behind it — simply disappears.

Clearview

Stayner: too late to help

Stayner ran out of water in 2023 and froze building. Its $70-million well fix leaned on a $35-million provincial rescue and a fragile, first-mortgage County loan backed by forced developer pre-payments. That money is committed and cannot be un-spent — for Stayner the MSC arrives too late. It stands here as the warning, not the saving.

Nottawa: give the village water

Nottawa is where the MSC arrives in time. The village sits beside the Collingwood pipeline yet was quoted $159,000 a home to connect while the subdivision developer, Georgian Communities, was pushed to drill its own wells. The MSC ends the toll: it runs the trunk main to the village for about $10 million — roughly a dollar a month spread across the regional system — and connects homes at the normal $12,000 to $15,000. We give Nottawa its water, and it barely moves the regional bill.

And the developer wins too. With pipe access at no cost, Georgian Communities drops the roughly $25 million it would spend on its own wells and treatment plant — about $50,000 off the price of every one of its ~500 homes.

New Tecumseth

New Tecumseth is the easiest yes in the room. It has bought treated water at wholesale, by the cubic metre, under committed minimums since 2000 — the MSC asks it to keep doing exactly that, on better terms, with its capital returned.

Currently, New Tecumseth buys its water wholesale from Collingwood at a cost of $0.62 a cubic metre, and by contract that rate rises 2% every year, with a $0.04 fee added on top once the expanded plant is running, targeted for 2029.

But that rate leaves out that New Tecumseth is also paying, separately, its $75.6-million share of the new water plant expansion — and once that is counted, its real cost of water is about $1.94 a cubic metre.

Servicing that $75.6 million costs the town roughly $5.7 million a year, for twenty years.

Under the MSC, that debt is repaid at closing— so the $5.7 million a year comes off New Tecumseth’s books and back into the community, freeing it to reinvest in the roads, services, and growth the Province has ordered it to deliver by 2051.

For New Tecumseth, signing on to the regional rate turns out to be a savings.

Wasaga Beach

Wasaga Beach is a full partner in the corporation — an owner with a seat on the board — but on the water side it is an observer. It sits on a deep, confined aquifer — seven wells running at about 60 per cent of capacity, its fresh-water supply, in the Town’s own words, simply not in question — so it draws nothing from the regional plant and buys none of its water. Wasaga’s stake is wastewater, and that is where its seat will matter most: in the next paper, not this one.

The bottom line

Here is the whole chapter on one page. Down one column, five towns each building or borrowing alone — a separate plant, a separate debenture, a separate rescue. Down the other, one plant, one published price, and open access to a pipe that has been in the ground for twenty-five years.

Your water bill does not go up when this happens. It goes up if it doesn’t.

First, Educate. Then, Vote.

None of this happens on its own. A plan is only as good as the council that takes it up — and that council is the one you are about to elect this October. Two things stand between reading about this and shaping it: getting informed and getting to the ballot box.

Educate — Meet the Candidates

There is a Meet the Candidates session on Monday, August 10th at the Windfall Shed, 140 Crosswinds Blvd. in Windfall. It runs from 5:00 p.m. to about 7:00 p.m. — a welcoming chance to listen, connect, and share ideas and opinions in a positive community conversation with the people running for Council.

For The Blue Mountains, you can learn about all of the candidates running for Town Council at commonsensecollective.ca.

Vote — Are You on the Voters List?

This is the key question, and it is an easy one to get wrong: are you on the Voters List? Even if you were registered for the last election, there is a new list — so check.

You can register until August 12, 2026 at RegisterToVoteON.ca. After that date, changes can be made starting September 1st at Town Hall.

And one question that trips up a lot of people here: can I vote in the municipality of my primary residence and my vacation property? You sure can. If you are a qualified voter and own property in another municipality — or are the spouse of someone who does — you can vote in both.

The provincial rules for registering a second property are here: registertovoteon.ca — additional property registration.

A word on who pays for this

Nobody does — except you. The Shulman Report takes no advertising, no corporate sponsorship, and not a dollar from any town, party, developer, or campaign.

It is written for the people who live here, and supported in the only currency that matters: your attention — by reading it, checking it, arguing with it, and passing it to a neighbour.

That independence is the whole point. It is why the Report can say plainly what a press release never will, and why, when it tells you to check the arithmetic, you can trust that no one was paid to write the answer.

If the work has been useful, become a paid subscriber and share this paper with someone who votes here.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Questions and answers to a sustainable future for Southern Georgian Bay

Water — A Case of Mismanagement

The region already has one water system. Nobody governs it.

This is the second of three papers I’m publishing this week.

If you missed the first, start there — Paper 1: The Vision, on why this was never really a fight about water: https://shulmanr.substack.com/p/the-south-georgian-bay-municipal-f44

A quick recap: our water and wastewater are failing, and our bills keep climbing, because four towns each run the same regional system alone. A new Ontario law now lets them run it together, as one publicly owned utility — a Municipal Services Corporation.

Paper 1 made the case for why. This paper turns to the water itself: the system we already own, and how four town halls have run it into the ground.

• Paper 1 — The Vision (published): why this region, why now.

• Paper 2 — Water: A Case of Mismanagement (today): the system we already own, and how four town halls have run it into the ground.

• Paper 3 — The Cost of Water (this week): what the water really costs, and how one utility lowers your bill.

If you haven’t yet, subscribe — it’s free — so Paper 3 lands in your inbox this week.

So why begin with the pipes?

Because water is not like the other things a town does. A municipality can run its own arena, its own library, its own main street, and scale barely matters. A water system is a different animal — the most expensive, most technically demanding, most heavily regulated thing a small town will ever own, and its costs are almost entirely fixed.

A treatment plant costs almost the same to run whether it’s half full or nearly full; the cost is in the capacity, not the water flowing through it. A trunk main costs what it costs whether one town pays for it or four.

That single fact is the whole argument. Fixed costs divided among more customers get cheaper per household. Fixed costs carried by one small town alone stay expensive — and, as the pages ahead will show, get more expensive every year the town insists on going it alone.

And here is the part that surprises people: this region already has one water system. A plant on Collingwood’s shore, now undergoing a major upgrade, feeds two trunk mains — one running south through Stayner, the other running west — that already deliver treated water to New Tecumseth, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview.

The pipes already cross every municipal boundary that supposedly divides us. The system is regional in every respect but one — nobody governs it as a region. Four councils, four rate bases, four sets of managers, and a price for the same water from the same plant set not by any published rate, but by whoever negotiates hardest.

Regional management of the pipes changes only that. It does not touch your parks, your council, your identity, or your main street. It puts the plant and the trunk — the expensive, invisible spine of the whole thing — under one professional operator, at one open price. Everything that makes your town yours stays exactly where it is.

One system at a time. This one is the water.

Your Water, One System, Four Owners

Four municipalities draw from one system. Each pretends it runs its own.

The drinking-water story in this region runs from Collingwood council’s fantasy that it owns the new $270-million treatment plant — when it paid less than 20 per cent of it — to outright mismanagement of your money elsewhere in the region.

Across all of it, four municipalities draw from one connected system while each pretends it runs its own.

· One town froze all building for lack of water while a full pipe ran through its main street.

· Another is fighting its own residents over a well nobody should have to drill.

· A third is a customer of a neighbour’s plant with a fifty-year-old facility of its own quietly aging toward a rebuild it cannot afford.

Every one of these towns pretends to be making ‘rational’ decisions inside its own borders — and together they are producing tripled projects, frozen permits, provincial rescues, and a bay that gets the consequences.

The problem is that nobody planned this, which is precisely the cause of this mess: nobody plans any of it.

You cannot fix what you refuse to look at, and this region has spent twenty years refusing to look.

But here is where it turns.

Today we talk about the solution to the water mess.

The wastewater mess — Collingwood’s plant with nowhere to go alongside the region’s other aging treatment plant — gets its own solution, in a later chapter. One system at a time.

The solution to our water management is not radical and it is not new. It brings a rational, thoughtful, planned approach to a region that has never had one.

And here is the part nobody expects: it will save you money — not vaguely, and not someday. Done properly, a regional utility lowers the unit cost of your water, holds your bill steady instead of letting it compound, and throws off a surplus that flows back into the region’s own pipes — all without a provincial cheque and without a rate hike.

We will put the arithmetic to you in the next chapter, in a clear and discernible way — no games. You get to check our math.

There is nothing new in this.

You already live with utilities. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant. You buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires, and you pay by the kilowatt-hour. Gas works the same way. So does water.

Ontario already has them.

• Union Water Supply System Inc., owned by Leamington, Kingsville, Essex, and Lakeshore — runs one treatment plant and one trunk system and sells bulk water by volume to its four member municipalities.

• The Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation builds and operates communal water and wastewater across four rural townships on a full-cost-recovery model.

• Edmonton has delivered its own municipal water for over a century — today through EPCOR, a city-owned utility.

• And right now, Peel — Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon — is moving its water and wastewater into a single publicly owned corporation.

This is not an experiment. It is how the rest of the world handles exactly the problem this region has, and I intend to show you how this solution works, providing higher quality and more environmentally friendly decisions while steadily lowering what the whole region pays to run it.

The place to start is with two pipes most people have never heard of.

The Pipes that Bind

Look at the map below. We already have the infrastructure that carries treated water from the Raymond A. Barker plant connecting this region’s water. This is half the system, the Collingwood–Alliston trunk main (route approximate)

The Collingwood–Alliston trunk main (Line 1), from the Raymond A. Barker plant south through Stayner to Alliston

• A 600-millimetre trunk built in 2000,

• Laid in the former rail corridor

• Approximate length… 57 kilometres

• Passes through Batteaux, the middle of Stayner, past New Lowell

• Connection tees installed for each community’s future needs.

  • New Lowell’s is the only one ever opened.

  • Stayner’s and Batteaux’s never opened

• Built to carry 13,440 cubic metres a day and designed to expand to 60,000 with added pumping.

New Tecumseth: The Town That Owns the Pipe

New Tecumseth is usually described as the region’s water customer — the town at the far end of the line, buying Collingwood’s water by the cubic metre. That description hides the single most important fact about how water moves through this region.

New Tecumseth doesn’t merely buy from the pipeline. It owns it.

In the 2008 Environmental Assessment’s own words: “The pipeline is owned and operated by the Town of New Tecumseth though the water is supplied from Collingwood Utility Services.”

Collingwood makes the water; New Tecumseth owns and runs the 57-kilometre pipe that carries it — and the town that owns the artery sits at the very end of it, in Alliston, an hour from the plant that fills it.

That one fact explains everything that follows. Because the pipe belongs to New Tecumseth, no other community can touch it without New Tecumseth’s consent.

And it prices the gate accordingly.

The EA notes that…

Where the Water Doesn’t Run

A Look at the Status Quo

Clearview Township

Clearview Township is the poster child for why water and wastewater cannot be run town by town.

Clearview is in a state of suboptimization: every component, every town or community is driving to optimize its needs at the expense of the total community. Sum the parts and it is easy to see the whole township is disturbingly dysfunctional.

Stayner

Stayner is Clearview’s largest community. Since inception it drew its water from its own municipal wells. For years, the known local groundwater was considered insufficient.

The following describes a situation that is almost impossible to believe.

As you can see from the map the pipeline — New Tecumseth’s pipe, carrying Collingwood’s water — runs straight through the centre of Stayner.

When it was built in 2000, connection tees were set into it at Batteaux, Stayner, and New Lowell, ready for exactly the day the Township would need them.

In 2008 the town commissioned a long-term water supply study. It found no viable new groundwater source and priced the cost of connecting to the Collingwood—New Tecumseth pipeline.

The terms that came back were extraordinary — and they had almost nothing to do with what it would actually cost to serve Stayner.

Just so you don’t miss the point: the line runs straight through Stayner. There is a tee, already built, sitting in the ground. All that was ever required was a pipe to reach it.

And here is the context that makes it worse: the entire 57-kilometre trunk main, Collingwood to Alliston, was built in 1999–2000 for $28.3 million — the whole line.

The charge came in layers — and not one of them was priced on the water Stayner would actually use.

· $29.33 million — a capacity buy-in, paid up front to New Tecumseth, for a share of the pipeline’s ultimate allocation. That alone is more than the entire 57-kilometre line had cost to build.

• It bought the full ultimate allocation for a town of 28,000 — in full, on day one — not the water a town of 5,000 actually uses: roughly five times the capacity Stayner would need.

  • New Tecumseth’s share to build the line was roughly only $7 million

• $5 million was earmarked for an emergency reservoir about two and a half times the storage the town would need.

• And then, entirely separately, a take-or-pay charge — $2.35 million a year for twenty years, about $29.7 million in all — payable whether the town ever drew the water or not.

  • Like the buy-in, it was computed on the full ultimate allocation for a town of 28,000, not on real demand — and it was paid mostly to Collingwood.

Before we go on, this needs an editorial note. This was not an amateurish proposal, this was something much more insidious, a capricious money grab. And no one was there to protect, to oversee, to ensure that your money and mine didn’t get pushed down a pipe like sewage.

So what was the decision? Stayner chose to build a well.

In 2021, the Township committed to building its own supply — and to everything that came with it:

• four new municipal wells at Klondike Park Road, northeast of town, drawing on a deep aquifer discovered during a provincial seismic survey;

• a treatment, storage and pumping facility to serve them;

• roughly eight kilometres of watermain to carry the water into Stayner’s system —

• the whole of it sized for a town projected to grow from 5,000 people to 28,000 by 2034.

On March 10, 2023, the current wells reached their capacity and the Township froze building permits. Approximately 3,150 approved housing units could not proceed.

The well digging proceeded.

How was it paid for?

• Half by the Province — a $35-million grant from the Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund.

• Half by three developers, roughly $10 million each in prepaid development charges,

• The Township chipped in approximately $5 million

• A $30-million County contingency credit line standing by to bridge any cash-flow gaps.

Not to be excessively redundant, but $70 million spent, when there was a pipe and a spigot right there.

All that has to be said here is that in a professionally run organization, with a Board responsible to the taxpayer for fiduciary oversight, it would never occur.

Nottawa

Nottawa is one of the loveliest corners of this region.

A quaint crossroads village on County Road 124, minutes south of Collingwood, with the Pretty River valley at its back and the escarpment on the horizon.

A general store, a school, a few hundred homes under mature trees. It is the kind of place people move to precisely because it isn’t anywhere else — and the kind of place growth was always going to find.

And now growth has found it. Georgian Communities has proposed a subdivision of roughly five hundred homes on the village’s edge — a project nearly the size of Nottawa itself, arriving all at once at a crossroads that has never had a municipal water main.

A development that size cannot run on private wells and septic beds the way the village always has. It forces the question Nottawa had managed to avoid for two centuries: where will the water come from, and who pays to bring it?

Nottawa is a community that has happily lived off well water and septic systems since it was settled. Every home in the village gets its water from a well — the private wells of the older properties, and the small municipal well system, the McKean, that serves the newer subdivision. For generations, that was enough.

The last few years have proved a problem. Residents report that water levels have been declining — not because of any single event, but under the steady pressure of development on the aquifer everyone draws from.

A village that never had to think about its water started to.

There was supposed to be an answer. The plan of record — the servicing framework the township had carried for roughly fifteen years — was to connect Nottawa to municipal water via the pipeline. That was the promise local developers and landowners planned against, and the security residents assumed was coming.

Then, in April 2024, council reversed it because the price of the connection was out of reach.

And understand what that reversal did to the price of a connection. Everywhere municipal water is introduced, the municipality builds the trunk — the main that brings water reasonably close to a community — and recovers that cost across the whole system over time.

The homeowner pays for the last leg, from the main to the house: typically twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. That is the norm.

When Clearview walked away from the trunk, they told the homeowners that the entire cost of reaching Nottawa fell onto their individual homes — and the price of connecting jumped up to $159,000 a house.

So why would a council walk away from a fifteen-year promise to its own people? The answer lay in the same layered charges that Stayner was forced to pay. Charges that are beyond what any small community can withstand.

Five hundred homes is serious money for the township. Nottawa sits outside the three urban service areas, so each home pays the township-wide development charge — currently $12,724 for a single detached house, rising to $17,138 under the Township’s new 2024 DC study — before the County and the school boards take their own charges on top.

Across 500 units, that is somewhere between $6 and $9 million in township development charges alone, plus permit fees, plus a permanent addition to the property tax base.

The Township’s own DC study counts on it: its growth forecast books 500 units for Nottawa, six per cent of all the housing growth in Clearview to buildout. This development is not an application sitting on a counter. It is a line item in the township’s financial future.

Council had no choice but to move forward. But make no mistake this is a bad deal for everyone.

So when the water connection died, nobody blinked. No water? No problem. The developer proposed expanding the McKean system — two new municipal wells, a new treatment plant, a new reservoir, built into the development itself. The township’s engineers tested it and called it feasible.

What does building all of this actually cost — and who pays for it? There is no published figure; because the works are developer-funded, the Township’s own reports record “no financial implications for the municipality.”

But a system of this kind — two municipal wells, a treatment plant, and a reservoir — is reasonably estimated at around $25 million. Spread across the roughly 500 homes the development will build, that works out to about $50,000 per house — $50,000 added to the price of every home, to duplicate a water supply that already runs in a pipe a few kilometres away.

There is a better way to bring Nottawa its water — one that leaves the aquifer where it is, serves the village and the five hundred new homes together, and costs the developer next to nothing. The connection it needs is already in the ground. We put a number on it in the next chapter

A System That Cannot Sell Its Own Water

Step back from the individual stories — Stayner’s well, Nottawa’s abandoned connection — and look at what Line 1 has actually become: not infrastructure so much as a broken market wearing infrastructure’s clothes.

New Tecumseth owns the pipeline. Betting on the water demand of a massive Honda electric-vehicle plant in Alliston, it committed heavily to a share of new, expanded treatment capacity. Then the plant evaporated: after being announced as one of the largest auto investments in Canadian history, the Honda EV project was suspended indefinitely in 2026. New Tecumseth is left holding a share of an abundance of treated water — capacity built for a future that is not coming.

And it cannot sell it. Not for lack of trying. New Tecumseth has been to the table three times — with Stayner, with Nottawa, and, more briefly, with the Airport lands — and walked away from all three without a deal. Each time the outcome was identical: the price of joining the line, built on take-or-pay and full-allocation capital tolls, sat so far above what the water was worth to a small buyer that the buyer walked.

Stayner drilled its own $70-million well. Nottawa was pushed onto its aquifer. The Airport connection was priced at $109 million and dismissed as “cost prohibitive.”

Sit with the absurdity. One town owns the region’s water main, holds more water than it can possibly use, and wants to sell it — and it cannot close a single sale, because the only terms it can offer would ruin the buyer.

Meanwhile the very neighbours it is trying to sell to spend tens of millions building duplicate supply a few kilometres from a pipe running half empty. Water going begging on one side of the meter; towns going without on the other.

Leg 2 of the Pipeline System — The Blue Mountains

Currently, the town draws its water from two sources. The Thornbury Water Treatment Plant, built in 1977, takes water from an intake half a kilometre out in Georgian Bay. The town is running out of water.

In March 2024, the town’s East Side Water Storage and Supply study came before the public. Its job was to solve the water supply deficiencies in the town’s eastern pressure zones — Craigleith, the mountain, where the growth is — and it evaluated several alternatives.

This is the council endorsement…

The estimate for this plan was $66 million. This is an interesting number. When Collingwood started its plan for a new treatment plant it also started at about $60 million and you know where that went. Without question this would cost the town more than $100 million.

It is worth noting that in A Fiscal Autopsy, I documented the town’s projected water and wastewater debt to 2028 at approximately $57 million — with no legitimate way to pay it down.

So what’s another $100 million?

No problem — the Province will give us the money.

“Hello Brian, are you there?”

That would be Brian Saunderson: our MPP, former Collingwood mayor, and now Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing — the man sitting inside the very ministry every one of these funding requests lands on.

Leg 2 of the pipeline, running west along the Highway 26 corridor

toward The Blue Mountains.

· The route is approximate

• Runs west along the Highway 26 corridor,

• Boosted en route,

• Interconnected at Grand Cypress on Highway 26.

• Runs up Grey Road 21 to the Mountain Road Booster Station at the municipal boundary.

• Current capacity 4,000 cubic metres a day

So here we are. The Blue Mountains — a town already carrying $57 million in water and wastewater debt it cannot pay down — is about to commit to a two-plant program that starts at $66 million and, on this region’s record, will land well past $100 million, to build from scratch the capacity that already exists a few kilometres away, at the end of a pipe running to its own boundary. And the plan to pay for it is the one every town in this chapter has leaned on: send the bill to Queen’s Park.

It is the same blindness, one more time. Stayner, Nottawa, New Tecumseth, now The Blue Mountains — four towns, four boundaries, four sets of blinders, not one of them able to act on the single system they are all standing inside.

And here is the part that matters most: none of it is a story about foolish people. Every council believed it was making the responsible local choice. That is precisely the trap. In a region with one water system and no one to govern it, the responsible local choice and the sensible regional one are almost never the same — and there is no structure in which anyone is even asked to make the second.

This chapter set out to show that the current system does not work — that the mismanagement is built into the very shape of things, not the failing of any one council.

But mismanagement is only half the story, and the less important half. The question that actually decides this — the one every ratepayer should be asking — is what it costs: what you pay now, buried and unlabelled, for four towns doing everything four times over, and what you would pay instead under one utility that owns the plant and the pipe. That is the arithmetic. It is where we go next.

That’s Paper 2. Paper 3 — The Cost of Water — comes next: what the water really costs today, buried and unlabelled across four towns doing everything four times over, and what you’d pay instead under one utility that owns the plant and the pipe. You get to check the math.

This work is supported by my paid subscribers — thank you. Every paper is free to read; if you’re able, a paid subscription is what keeps the research and writing going. And if you can’t, a free subscription still delivers Paper 3 to your inbox this week.

If this made the case to you, share it with a neighbour.

Ron Shulman

The Shulman Report

Questions and answers to a sustainable future for Southern Georgian Bay

Our wastewater is failing, our water bills and taxes keep climbing, and going it alone, town by town, is why. There is a cleaner, cheaper way — and a new Ontario law that finally makes it possible.

Here is what’s coming this week:

• Paper 1 — The Vision (today): why this region, why now, and why this was never really a fight about water.

• Paper 2 — Water: A Case of Mismanagement (this week): the water system we already own, and how four town halls have run it into the ground.

• Paper 3 — The Cost of Water (this week): what the water really costs, and how one utility lowers your bill.

The wastewater papers follow in the weeks after. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe — it’s free — so Papers 2 and 3 land in your inbox as they publish.

Introduction

On November 24, 2025, Queen’s Park passed a law that will change how every community in Ontario manages water and wastewater — and almost no one here noticed. Tucked inside the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, as Schedule 16, was the Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act. Its spearhead was our own MPP, Brian Saunderson, who oversaw its creation. In plain language, the Act hands municipalities across the province a tool they have never had before: the power to lift water and wastewater out of the town hall and run it the way the rest of the developed world does — as a regional public utility. The concept has a name — a Municipal Services Corporation, an MSC.

What is an MSC?

• It is a public utility, regionally structured within a natural geographic area — for us, South Georgian Bay — and owned directly by the taxpayers who live within it.

• It develops a single regional plan: mapping every asset, assessing every failure point, and sequencing the investment needed to fix what is broken and build what the region needs.

• It is run by experienced professionals — people who manage contractors and deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget.

• As a public utility, it can finance capital projects at lower interest, and over longer terms, than any single small municipality. For you, the taxpayer, the result is one regional structure delivering higher quality, better management, and lower cost.

It is a brilliant idea. But a statute is a permission, not a plan — and for this region the idea arrived without bones, without structure, without direction.

As a result, a group of us went to work. We set out to turn it into something a council could vote on and a lender could finance: to draw the boundaries, fix the accountabilities, model the money, and lay out, step by step, how a Municipal Services Corporation for South Georgian Bay would actually be built. What follows is that plan, in six chapters.

• The Vision — why this region, and why now.

• Water: A Case of Mismanagement — the system we already own, and how four town halls have run it into the ground.

• The Cost of Water — what the water really costs, and how one utility lowers your bill.

• Wastewater: A Case of Municipal Myopia — the duplication and pollution that follow when no town can see past its own line.

• Wastewater: One Plant, One Plan — the integrated regional plant that fixes what no single town can.

• A Financial Analysis: Managing Without Handouts — how the whole of it is owned, priced, and paid for, without a provincial cheque and without raising your bill. One system at a time.

A word before we begin. What you are reading is the first of the six chapters above, and it is more than a series of essays. Together they are a single report, written to do two things at once. For this community, it is the plan that shows a region can take the Province’s new tool and actually use it. For the Province, it is proposed as an implementation playbook — a worked, adoptable template the Minister can put in front of any region facing the same water and wastewater crisis. We intend to place it directly in the hands of the MPP who made that tool possible, Brian Saunderson, in late August. Read it, check our arithmetic, and hold us to it.

Chapter 1 — The Vision

For twenty years, when the need to fix, update, or even manage water and wastewater infrastructure came due, communities in Ontario sent it to Queen’s Park — and Queen’s Park paid. That era is ending.

Consider the Province’s own books, because that is where the era ends.

Ontario is running a deficit of $13.8 billion this year. Its debt has climbed to roughly $485 billion — up from about $314 billion a decade ago — and is forecast to reach $529 billion by 2028–29. The interest alone, the cost of simply carrying that debt, now runs about $17.2 billion a year: the Province’s fourth-largest expense, after only health, education, and social services.

The budget pencils in a small surplus by 2028–29, but the Financial Accountability Office doubts it will land without deeper cuts, and projects a $6.6-billion deficit that year instead.

Let me be clear: this region — and every other region in Ontario — cannot stake nine-figure infrastructure decisions on the most optimistic line in somebody else’s budget. Betting the next plant on the next rescue is not planning. It is gambling — and the house is closing the table.

There is a name for this process: collective delusion. The towns pretend they can build alone, because the Province will pay. The Province pretends each rescue is the last, even as it signs the next cheque. Both sides know better; both keep playing their parts — $70 million delivered at a podium here, a quiet $80 million in a staff report there — because the pretence is easier than the reform. Nobody is lying, exactly. Everyone has simply agreed not to look.

But here is the problem…

Across this region, every council that ‘owns its own water and wastewater’ is preparing a fight.

Not because these councils built their infrastructure — they didn’t. Not because they run it well — they don’t. They will fight because control is the one thing they are not prepared to surrender, and no argument, however sound, will change that on its own.

The resistance is sharpest in Collingwood, but it is not Collingwood’s alone — and even where a council has agreed to explore the idea, agreeing to look is a long way from agreeing to let go.

Watch how the fight actually unfolds.

On June 15, 2026, less than a week after MPP Brian Saunderson formally proposed the concept of a Municipal Services Corporation in Collingwood Today, Collingwood council voted — unanimously — to stay the course.

Within a day the message was set to music: a polished video, drone footage of the town on a flawless summer day, a banner reading “Robust Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Ready for Growth,” a council “entering this discussion from a position of strength.”

The town went to war — and it believes the enemy is the MPP who raised the idea.

It is not. Its war is with its own residents.

Now weigh that “position of strength” against the record — and watch how little the record matters to the people defending it.

It doesn’t matter that Collingwood calls the new $270-million plant its own when it had to run to the Province for support and ended up paying less than a fifth of the cost — the Province and New Tecumseth paid the rest.

It doesn’t matter that the wastewater plant sent close to ten thousand cubic metres of sewage into Georgian Bay in April 2026 — roughly 6,700 of it raw — human waste carrying pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, microplastics and PFAS, a kilometre from the town’s own drinking-water intake.

It doesn’t matter that there is no real plan behind any of it — that a 2019 engineering report warned the plant was out of margin, and council after council chose to “monitor the situation” instead of fixing it.

It doesn’t matter that joining the corporation would lower taxes and retire debt these towns cannot pay down alone.

And it doesn’t matter — this is the part that should stop you cold — that joining would hand these same councillors something they do not have today: a real, direct say in how this entire region is shaped, environmentally and otherwise, from a seat at a regional board.

None of it matters — because this was never a fight about water. It is a fight about control.

That is the fight this paper is written to win: not with slogans, but with the facts on every page that follows.

Sometimes people who run organizations believe they can make whatever choices they deem fit.

Sometimes they cannot.

This is one of those times: the Province can no longer afford to rescue, and the Towns can no longer afford to go it alone — which means the only choice left to either is the same one. To make this process work.

We need to think differently — and to start where change is actually within reach.

Of all the pressures a municipality cannot control — the highways, the hospitals, the costs handed down from above — water and wastewater is the exception. It is the one major system a community already owns, already operates, and under the proper circumstances can finance itself.

This paper presents MPP Saunderson’s model in detail: a plan for the self-management of regional water and wastewater, through a vehicle now written into Ontario law and, since 2026, opened to municipalities like ours — a publicly owned water and wastewater corporation, called the Municipal Services Corporation.

Let’s start with what a Municipal Services Corporation is not.

Ontario is drawn in counties — lines a surveyor could walk, laid down for a century of warden’s councils and registry offices. They are real, and they are old, and they have almost nothing to do with where the water goes. In the legislation built for it — Ontario’s Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, 2025 — there is not one county named, not one boundary fixed, not one line on a map. The statute does not care about counties. It cares about systems and the service areas they define.

What Is a Municipal Services Corporation?

A Municipal Services Corporation (MSC) is the regional integration of water and wastewater systems into a single, publicly owned operating unit — ideally one plant, one network, one balance sheet — built to deliver a service the way a utility delivers it, not the way four town halls take turns delivering it.

It is not a merger of towns. The towns keep their councils, their names, their main streets; nobody is coming for any of that. It is a merger of plant and pipes — of the professional capability to run them that no single small town can afford: the licensed engineers, the project managers who hold a contractor to budget, the financial officers who can model debt across a hundred-million-dollar program, the regulatory staff who understand an Environmental Compliance Approval.

The legal machinery already exists. Ontario’s Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, 2025 — the framework now being piloted in Peel and, since April 2026, opened by the Province to any municipality ready to adopt it — was built for exactly this: to lift water and wastewater out of town halls and into an arm’s-length, publicly owned utility with two powers no municipal department has.

• First, exclusivity — within its service area the region’s water and wastewater run through the corporation alone, which is what lets it borrow against a whole region’s revenue.

• Second, its own balance sheet — the corporation finances the infrastructure over the life of the assets, on its own account, instead of on any one town’s books. The result is a jointly owned corporation: its shares held by the member municipalities; its board built on professional expertise, perhaps ten around the table (engineering, finance, environmental, investment), with a seat for a representative of each owner town; its operations run by career utility staff; the whole disciplined by a published tariff and full-cost recovery.

This is not an experiment. It is how Ontario already runs its electricity and its gas, and how Union Water, the Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation, Edmonton’s EPCOR, and now Peel already run their water.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

A Boundary Drawn By Water

The Players. Five communities run through this story. Four are partners in the Municipal Services Corporation, its owners: Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Wasaga Beach, and Clearview. The fifth, New Tecumseth, is not a partner in the corporation — but it is no bystander: it owns the region’s pipeline.

Three of them already share one water system. Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview draw from one plant and one trunk main, with New Tecumseth at the far end of the line.

The pipeline is the heart of it. New Tecumseth has owned that 57-kilometre trunk main — the one carrying this region’s water south from the Collingwood plant — since 2000, and has bought the water it carries by the cubic metre ever since.

That single fact — one town holding the artery the whole region depends on — sits at the centre of what has gone wrong with distribution here. It lets New Tecumseth control the gate and price access to it, which is why neighbours with the pipe running through their own streets — Stayner and Nottawa among them — could never afford to connect.

Chapter 2 tells that story in full. Under the corporation the gate comes down: the trunk becomes a regional asset, and New Tecumseth keeps buying its water on better terms, with the standing of a preferred customer, as Chapter 3 sets out.

Wasaga Beach belongs for the opposite reason — not water but wastewater. Its plant, discharging onto the longest freshwater beach in the world, will reach capacity in the early 2030s, and the opportunity the MSC offers is to connect to a modern regional plant rather than spend a hundred million dollars that its own taxpayers will have to fund. For Wasaga, it will be a cleaner solution at lower cost.

What binds the four is not a county — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, and Clearview sit in Simcoe, The Blue Mountains in Grey — but the systems themselves. The unit is drawn by the water, not by the warden.

The Price to Pay for Individualism

In just the last three years the Province has committed roughly $260 million in water and wastewater grants across the County of Simcoe — grant by grant, emergency by emergency, with no plan behind any of it.

Narrow the lens to these four communities and their immediate neighbours, and about $210 million of that lands on their files alone: $150 million toward the Collingwood plant expansion, $35 million for a well field in Stayner, and $25.4 million for wastewater in The Blue Mountains.

And the asks are still out there. The Blue Mountains has carried a $66-million water-treatment program to Queen’s Park; Collingwood’s wastewater plant has been discussed as a $300-million rebuild; Stayner still needs money for the aging pipes its new well never touched.

Every one of those files assumes the same thing — that the cheque will come. It will not. And the honest response is not to keep asking. It is to stop needing to ask.

A Template, Not A One-Off

What follows in this paper is a worked example, but it is meant as a template. The arithmetic that makes one corporation cheaper, safer, and better governed than four fragments does not belong to South Georgian Bay; it belongs to every region in Ontario where a few small municipalities pay several times over to run one connected system badly. Change the names and the map, and the same structure builds the same corporation anywhere.

What follows builds it — beginning with the water this region already owns.

That’s the first of the three. Paper 2 — Water: A Case of Mismanagement — goes up later this week: the water system we already own, and how four separate town halls have run it into the ground.

This work is supported by my paid subscribers — thank you. Every paper is free to read; if you’re able, a paid subscription is what keeps the research and writing going. And if you can’t, a free subscription still delivers all three papers to your inbox this week.

If this made the case to you, share it with a neighbour.

— Ron Shulman, The South Georgian Bay Project

We have just crossed 400 subscribers — and I could not be prouder to be a voice for what I believe is the beginning of a movement.

Let me be clear about what kind. Not a protest movement. I have no patience for the reflexive “no” — for the crowd that loves every idea right up until it lands near their own backyard. We are the opposite: a movement for change, and for the right kind of development. We care about real environmental problems — the ones we can actually fix.

We live here because we love it — the lifestyle, the air, the water, the people. And yet, for reasons I still can’t explain, the people we elected to lead us have turned out to be the least creative, the least visionary, and the most dogmatic about refusing to change.

We already know what happens when that flips. Remember the patios. I never met a single person who didn’t shake their head — what? Then the community rose up with one voice, and in two weeks we had our patios back.

We need that voice again — this time for something bigger: clean water, and lower taxes to go with it. And when I say clean, I mean clean. Not “within the limits we happen to measure today” — that bar is not good enough. I mean water you could drink. Wastewater plants that meet that standard already exist and are already running. There is no reason ours can’t be one of them.

So, two things.

First, we need 1,000 subscribers by the end of September. That is what turns a newsletter into a voice — a serious one, the kind the people in the council chambers cannot wave away.

And second — the part that moves me most — some of you have already taken up this fight directly. You know who you are. Bless you.

Let’s get to work.

— Ron —

Introduction

On November 24, 2025, Queen’s Park passed a law that will change how every community in Ontario manages water and wastewater — and almost no one here noticed. Tucked inside the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act, as Schedule 16, was the Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act. Its spearhead was our own MPP, Brian Saunderson, who oversaw its creation. In plain language, the Act hands municipalities across the province a tool they have never had before: the power to lift water and wastewater out of the town hall and run it the way the rest of the developed world does — as a regional public utility. The concept has a name — a Municipal Services Corporation, an MSC.

What is an MSC?

• It is a public utility, regionally structured within a natural geographic area — for us, South Georgian Bay — and owned directly by the taxpayers who live within it.

• It develops a single regional plan: mapping every asset, assessing every failure point, and sequencing the investment needed to fix what is broken and build what the region needs.

• It is run by experienced professionals — people who manage contractors and deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget.

• As a public utility, it can finance capital projects at lower interest, and over longer terms, than any single small municipality.

For you, the taxpayer, the result is one regional structure delivering higher quality, better management, and lower cost.

It is a brilliant idea. But a statute is a permission, not a plan — and for this region the idea arrived without bones, without structure, without direction.

As a result, a group of us went to work. We set out to turn it into something a council could vote on and a lender could finance: to draw the boundaries, fix the accountabilities, model the money, and lay out, step by step, how a Municipal Services Corporation for South Georgian Bay would actually be built. What follows is that plan, in four chapters.

• The Vision — why this region, and why now.

• Managing Our Water — the system we already own, and the plan to run it as one.

• Our Wastewater — the harder, more expensive half, and how a regional plant fixes what no single town can.

• The Financial Requirements — the mechanism under which the whole of it is owned, priced, and paid for, without a provincial cheque and without raising your bill.

One system at a time.

Chapter 1 — The Vision

For twenty years, when the need to fix, update, or even manage water and wastewater infrastructure came due, communities in Ontario sent it to Queen’s Park — and Queen’s Park paid. That era is ending.

Consider the Province’s own books, because that is where the era ends.

Ontario is running a deficit of $13.8 billion this year. Its debt has climbed to roughly $485 billion — up from about $314 billion a decade ago — and is forecast to reach $529 billion by 2028–29. The interest alone, the cost of simply carrying that debt, now runs about $17.2 billion a year: the Province’s fourth-largest expense, after only health, education, and social services.

The budget pencils in a small surplus by 2028–29, but the Financial Accountability Office doubts it will land without deeper cuts, and projects a $6.6-billion deficit that year instead.

Let me be clear: this region — and every other region in Ontario — cannot stake nine-figure infrastructure decisions on the most optimistic line in somebody else’s budget. Betting the next plant on the next rescue is not planning. It is gambling — and the house is closing the table.

There is a name for this process: collective delusion. The towns pretend they can build alone, because the Province will pay. The Province pretends each rescue is the last, even as it signs the next cheque. Both sides know better; both keep playing their parts — $70 million delivered at a podium here, a quiet $80 million in a staff report there — because the pretence is easier than the reform. Nobody is lying, exactly. Everyone has simply agreed not to look.

But here is the problem…

Not because these councils built their infrastructure — they didn’t. Not because they run it well — they don’t. They will fight because control is the one thing they are not prepared to surrender, and no argument, however sound, will change that on its own.

The resistance is sharpest in Collingwood, but it is not Collingwood’s alone — and even where a council has agreed to explore the idea, agreeing to look is a long way from agreeing to let go.

Watch how the fight actually unfolds.

On June 15, 2026, less than a week after MPP Brian Saunderson formally proposed the concept of a Municipal Services Corporation in Collingwood Today, Collingwood council voted — unanimously — to stay the course.

Within a day the message was set to music: a polished video, drone footage of the town on a flawless summer day, a banner reading “Robust Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Ready for Growth,” a council “entering this discussion from a position of strength.”

Now weigh that “position of strength” against the record — and watch how little the record matters to the people defending it.

It doesn’t matter that Collingwood calls the new $270-million plant its own when it had to run to the Province for support and ended up paying less than a fifth of the cost — the Province and New Tecumseth paid the rest.

It doesn’t matter that the wastewater plant sent close to ten thousand cubic metres of sewage into Georgian Bay in April 2026 — roughly 6,700 of it raw — human waste carrying pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, microplastics and PFAS, a kilometre from the town’s own drinking-water intake.

It doesn’t matter that there is no real plan behind any of it — that a 2019 engineering report warned the plant was out of margin, and council after council chose to “monitor the situation” instead of fixing it.

It doesn’t matter that joining the corporation would lower taxes and retire debt these towns cannot pay down alone.

And it doesn’t matter — this is the part that should stop you cold — that joining would hand these same councillors something they do not have today: a real, direct say in how this entire region is shaped, environmentally and otherwise, from a seat at a regional board.

None of it matters — because this was never a fight about water. It is a fight about control.

That is the fight this paper is written to win: not with slogans, but with the facts on every page that follows.

Sometimes people who run organizations believe they can make whatever choices they deem fit.

Sometimes they cannot.

This is one of those times: the Province can no longer afford to rescue, and the Towns can no longer afford to go it alone — which means the only choice left to either is the same one. To make this process work.

We need to think differently — and to start where change is actually within reach.

Of all the pressures a municipality cannot control — the highways, the hospitals, the costs handed down from above — water and wastewater is the exception. It is the one major system a community already owns, already operates, and under the proper circumstances can finance itself.

This paper presents MPP Saunderson’s model in detail: a plan for the self-management of regional water and wastewater, through a vehicle now written into Ontario law and, since 2026, opened to municipalities like ours — a publicly owned water and wastewater corporation, called the Municipal Services Corporation.

Let’s start with what a Municipal Services Corporation is not.

Ontario is drawn in counties — lines a surveyor could walk, laid down for a century of warden’s councils and registry offices. They are real, and they are old, and they have almost nothing to do with where the water goes. In the legislation built for it — Ontario’s Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, 2025 — there is not one county named, not one boundary fixed, not one line on a map. The statute does not care about counties. It cares about systems and the service areas they define.

What Is a Municipal Services Corporation?

A Municipal Services Corporation (MSC) is the regional integration of water and wastewater systems into a single, publicly owned operating unit — ideally one plant, one network, one balance sheet — built to deliver a service the way a utility delivers it, not the way four town halls take turns delivering it.

It is not a merger of towns. The towns keep their councils, their names, their main streets; nobody is coming for any of that. It is a merger of plant and pipes — of the professional capability to run them that no single small town can afford: the licensed engineers, the project managers who hold a contractor to budget, the financial officers who can model debt across a hundred-million-dollar program, the regulatory staff who understand an Environmental Compliance Approval.

The legal machinery already exists. Ontario’s Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, 2025 — the framework now being piloted in Peel and, since April 2026, opened by the Province to any municipality ready to adopt it — was built for exactly this: to lift water and wastewater out of town halls and into an arm’s-length, publicly owned utility with two powers no municipal department has.

• First, exclusivity — within its service area the region’s water and wastewater run through the corporation alone, which is what lets it borrow against a whole region’s revenue.

• Second, its own balance sheet — the corporation finances the infrastructure over the life of the assets, on its own account, instead of on any one town’s books.

The result is a jointly owned corporation: its shares held by the member municipalities; its board built on professional expertise, perhaps ten around the table (engineering, finance, environmental, investment), with a seat for a representative of each owner town; its operations run by career utility staff; the whole disciplined by a published tariff and full-cost recovery.

This is not an experiment. It is how Ontario already runs its electricity and its gas, and how Union Water, the Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation, Edmonton’s EPCOR, and now Peel already run their water.

A boundary drawn by water

The system this paper describes — the South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation — proves the point on its own map. Its owners are four towns: Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Wasaga Beach, and Clearview.

Three of them already share one water system. Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview draw from one plant and one trunk main, with New Tecumseth a customer for water at the far end of a 57-kilometre pipeline.

New Tecumseth is not an owner and does not need to be: it has bought this region’s water by the cubic metre since 2000, and under the corporation it keeps doing so — on better terms, and with the standing of a preferred customer, as Chapter 4 sets out.

Wasaga Beach belongs for the opposite reason — not water but wastewater. Its plant, discharging onto the longest freshwater beach in the world, will reach capacity in the early 2030s, and the opportunity the MSC offers is to connect to a modern regional plant rather than spend a hundred million dollars that its own taxpayers will have to fund. For Wasaga, it will be a cleaner solution at lower cost.

What binds the four is not a county — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, and Clearview sit in Simcoe, The Blue Mountains in Grey — but the systems themselves. The unit is drawn by the water, not by the warden.

The Price to Pay for Individualism

In just the last three years the Province has committed roughly $260 million in water and wastewater grants across the County of Simcoe — grant by grant, emergency by emergency, with no plan behind any of it.

Narrow the lens to these four communities and their immediate neighbours, and about $210 million of that lands on their files alone: $150 million toward the Collingwood plant expansion, $35 million for a well field in Stayner, and $25.4 million for wastewater in The Blue Mountains.

And the asks are still out there. The Blue Mountains has carried a $66-million water-treatment program to Queen’s Park; Collingwood’s wastewater plant has been discussed as a $300-million rebuild; Stayner still needs money for the aging pipes its new well never touched.

Every one of those files assumes the same thing — that the cheque will come. It will not. And the honest response is not to keep asking. It is to stop needing to ask.

A template, not a one-off

What follows in this paper is a worked example, but it is meant as a template. The arithmetic that makes one corporation cheaper, safer, and better governed than four fragments does not belong to South Georgian Bay; it belongs to every region in Ontario where a few small municipalities pay several times over to run one connected system badly. Change the names and the map, and the same structure builds the same corporation anywhere.

What follows builds it — beginning with the water this region already owns.

The South Georgian Bay Project is reader-funded — no advertising, no developer money, no grants, no editorial strings. If this work matters to you, subscribe — and if you’re able, a paid subscription is what keeps it independent and gets us to 1,000 voices by September.

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Each of you thinks of your town as its own place — separate, a little different, with its own character and its own rules. And you’re right. Wasaga has fourteen kilometres of the longest freshwater beach in the world. Collingwood has its harbour and its history. The Blue Mountains has the escarpment and the shoreline villages. Those identities are real, and they’re worth protecting. That’s what makes this stretch of Georgian Bay one of the best places in the country to live.

But water doesn’t recognize a town line — and here is where thinking of your town as an island stops working in your favour. You share one shoreline, one bay, and one wastewater problem, whether you’ve been told that or not.

In Collingwood sits a conventional wastewater treatment plant that discharges its effluent straight into Collingwood Harbour — into Georgian Bay, the same water that laps The Blue Mountains to the west and Wasaga to the east. That plant now processes landfill leachate trucked in from all six of Simcoe County’s landfills. Five have been coming for years; the sixth was just added this year after Barrie, a bigger and better-resourced city, decided it would no longer accept the county’s leachate.

Leachate is not ordinary sewage. It carries chlorides, heavy metals, and PFAS — the “forever chemicals” showing up across the Great Lakes. A conventional plant like Collingwood’s is not built to remove any of them, and in Ontario it is not even required to test for them. On top of that, the plant already spills: a single bypass on April 3, 2025 sent roughly 21,000 cubic metres of untreated wastewater into the bay in about twelve hours — one of several such events that year.

Now here is the part that should get everyone’s attention. Which way does that water go?

Georgian Bay’s summer circulation runs counterclockwise, which along this southern shore means the water moves from west to east. The prevailing winds are from the northwest, and they push surface water the same way — down onto the shore and eastward along it. It’s the very pattern that built Wasaga’s dunes and grows its spit. What leaves Collingwood Harbour does not drift out into the open bay, away from people. In the dominant pattern, it travels along the shore — toward Wasaga’s beaches. And nothing about that current respects a municipal boundary; on a different wind, on a different day, it moves against The Blue Mountains just the same.

So none of you is an island on this one. You are all on the same shoreline, sharing the same water and, right now, the same risk.

That is why, on wastewater, all three towns have to stop thinking only locally and start thinking regionally. Waste decisions made in Collingwood and at the county are decisions about your beaches, your swimming, your drinking water, your brand. And right now those decisions are being made without your voice in the room.

You need a seat at that table. Not to be polite, not to ask good questions after the fact — but to set a line and hold it. And the line is simple:

Nothing should go into the water that is going to pollute our beaches.

Not treated, not diluted, not “within limits.” Say it plainly, say it together, and say it before the next tanker rolls in — because the current is already carrying the answer in your direction.

Now here is the part nobody running for office wants to say out loud. Small towns cannot afford to upgrade their own water and wastewater plants. These are hundred-million-dollar projects, and for years the Province has been the primary funder that made them possible at all. That is changing. The signals are clear: the Province is moving onto a different trajectory, and the money that carried these projects is not going to keep flowing the way it has. Which means the leaders now selling you tidy “local solutions” are, whether they say so or not, handing you the bill. Go it alone and your water and wastewater rates don’t creep up a little — they could climb by as much as 60%.

And there is already a way to build that table.

Our MPP, Brian Saunderson, has proposed and is promoting exactly the right idea: a Regional Utility that would plan and run this infrastructure across South Georgian Bay as one system instead of a patchwork of towns each guarding its own pipes. Done right, it spreads the enormous cost of these plants over a fair timeframe, gives the region real borrowing power for projects no single town can carry alone, makes housing more affordable, and — most important for everything above — it puts every community’s voice at the same table where the water decisions are actually made.

That is the whole point. A Regional Utility done right would manage our most important resource as if it were our most important resource — not an afterthought, not a line item, not somebody else’s problem downstream, but the single asset this entire region is built on.

The idea is on the table right now, while these decisions are still being made. So here is the ask, and it’s a simple one: do your own research, get on the team, and tell your council to support this. A region that manages its water together is a region that gets to keep its beaches.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally

Ron Shulman

Read more at Two Towns, One Failure — shulmanr.substack.com

I had coffee recently with an interesting and very smart woman, and — to be honest — she admonished me. Not for the analysis. For the framing. You keep writing about pipes and plants, she said, and you are not pushing the thing that actually matters: leadership.

My answer was that with this infrastructure, I hope, will come the leadership we need. But she stayed with me, and I have been musing ever since about why we don’t have the leadership we need — in any of the four municipalities.

Let me offer three thoughts for your consideration.

The first is regionalization. We need the equivalent of a GTA for South Georgian Bay. We need to think regionally, plan regionally, and govern regionally. And to those who fear losing their local identity, my response is: nonsense. The things that make your town yours — recreation, arts and culture, community life — can and will remain driven by local needs and local management. Nobody is coming for your main street.

The second remuneration . One regional government would pay its leadership at a level that recognizes the importance of the job — and the sequitur is that we would finally attract people with the capability, the energy, and the vision to run a complex, growing, changing community. Right now, four small towns compete for talent none of them can afford, and the results are on every page that follows.

And the third…collaboration. The four communities would finally share the resources — the people — required to run a complex system, instead of quadruplicating every department behind four town halls.

Consider the arithmetic. These four municipalities already spend on the order of $230 million a year running four complete organizations for a combined population of roughly 100,000.

Administrative overhead alone — four sets of senior management, finance, HR, IT, and clerks doing the same jobs four times — runs into the tens of millions a year in pure duplication.

Now add the cost of fragmented capital decisions, the kind this series documents in detail: a $70-million well drilled beside a working pipeline in Stayner, a $100-million treatment program contemplated in The Blue Mountains for capacity the region already owns.

Averaged across the region, year after year, the waste of doing everything four times over easily reaches $100 million a year. The quality of the work would bear no comparison to what exists today.

So there you have it. It is time for change. What follows is one piece of that change — the water — and six words you will see repeated throughout, because they are the whole answer in miniature:

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Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Last week I showed you Collingwood’s side of this: a sewage plant that is at capacity and cannot be fixed where it stands, a $270-million drinking-water plant the town calls its own but holds only a minority share in, and a council that — when given the opportunity to address the environmental, financial, and infrastructure crises facing its community by participating in a regional water utility — voted, unanimously, to go it alone anyway.

And step back for a moment, because Collingwood is only one corner of the mess. Across this region, four municipalities drink from one connected system while each pretends it runs its own.

• One town froze all building for lack of water while a full pipe ran through its main street.

• Another is fighting its own residents over a well nobody should have to drill.

• A third is a customer of a neighbour’s plant with a fifty-year-old facility of its own quietly aging toward a rebuild it cannot afford.

Every one of these towns is making ‘ rational’ decisions inside its own borders — and together they are producing tripled projects, frozen permits, provincial rescues, and a bay that gets the consequences.

The problem is that nobody planned this, which is precisely the cause of this mess: nobody plans any of it.

I know what the last two weeks have felt like. A depressing read — and that was deliberate. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at, and this region has spent twenty years refusing to look.

But here is where it turns.

Today we talk about the solution to the water mess. The wastewater mess — Collingwood’s plant with nowhere to go, the region’s aging treatment — gets its own solution, in a future piece. One system at a time.

The solution is not radical and it is not new. It brings a rational, thoughtful, planned approach to water management to a region that has never had one. And here is the part nobody expects: it will save you money.

The alternative to this mayhem is to create a regional water utility — the Simcoe County Municipal Water Corporation, the MWC. There is nothing new in this.

You already live with utilities. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant. You buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires, and you pay by the kilowatt-hour. Gas works the same way. So does water.

Ontario already has them.

• Union Water Supply System Inc. — owned by Leamington, Kingsville, Essex, and Lakeshore — runs one treatment plant and one trunk system and sells bulk water by volume to its four member municipalities.

• The Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation builds and operates communal water and wastewater across four rural townships on a full-cost-recovery model.

• Edmonton has delivered its own municipal water for over a century — today through EPCOR, a city-owned utility.

• And right now, Peel — Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon — is moving its water and wastewater into a single publicly owned corporation.

This is not an experiment. It is how the rest of the world handles exactly the problem this region has and I intend to show you how this solution works, providing higher quality and more environmentally friendly decisions while saving us vast amounts of money.

The place to start is with two pipes most people have never heard of.

The Pipes that Bind

Look at the two maps below. We already have the infrastructure that connects this region’s water. Most people have never heard of either.

The first runs south. Built in 2000, it is a 600-millimetre trunk main carrying treated water from the Raymond A. Barker plant in Collingwood, some 57 kilometres to Alliston — built to supply Honda, laid along the old rail corridor.

The Collingwood–Alliston trunk main (route approximate), laid in the former rail corridor.

The line passes through Batteaux, through the middle of Stayner, and past New Lowell, where connection tees were installed in 2000 for each community’s future needs.

Connection tees were installed for all three in 2000

New Lowell’s is the only one ever opened.

Stayner’s and Batteaux’s have sat unused for twenty-five years.

It was built to carry 13,440 cubic metres a day and designed to expand to 60,000 with added pumping.

Today it moves roughly 9,500.

The west leg (route approximate): Collingwood to The Blue Mountains along the Mountain Road corridor, through the Mountain Road Booster Station. The flow is reversible.

Currently 1,250 cubic metres a day, rising to 4,000 under the plant expansion.

Step back and look at what already exists.

• One regional plant.

• A trunk main running south through three communities with taps built and waiting.

• A west leg to a second municipality that can push water in either direction.

• Four municipalities already drink from one system — Collingwood, New Tecumseth, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview at New Lowell.

The backbone of a regional water utility is not a proposal. It is in the ground, and it has been for twenty-five years. The pipes already bind the region together.

Where the Water Doesn’t Run

A look at the Status Quo

Clearview Township

Clearview Township is the poster child for why water and wastewater cannot be run town by town. For the purposes of this article we are only going to deal with the freshwater issue. It is both large enough to consume our analytic capabilities for now and surprisingly very solvable.

Clearview is in a state of what is called suboptimization: every component, every town or community is driving to optimize its needs at the expense of the total community. Sum the parts and it is easy to see the whole township is disturbingly dysfunctional.

Stayner

Stayner is Clearview’s largest community. Since inception it drew its water from its own municipal wells. For years, the known local groundwater was considered insufficient.

The following describes a situation that is almost impossible to believe.

The Collingwood–New Tecumseth pipeline was built in 2000 and runs through the centre of Stayner. When it was built connection tees were installed at Batteaux, Stayner, and New Lowell in anticipation of future water needs in the Township.

In 2008 the town commissioned a long-term water supply study. The study found no viable new groundwater sources and then it priced that solution at $50.7 million.

Just so that you don’t miss this point, the line runs through Stayner, there is a tee to hook up, all that is required is a pipe. $50.7 million.

Nothing was done. No negotiation, no second opinion, no challenge to the number — the report went on a shelf, the tee stayed closed, and fifteen years passed.

On March 10, 2023, those wells reached available capacity. The Township froze building permits. Approximately 3,150 approved housing units could not proceed.

The study was eventually taken off the shelf and dusted off — and the connection, at that price, was judged unaffordable.

So what was the decision? Stayner chose to build a well.

In 2021, the Township committed to building its own supply — and to everything that came with it:

● four new municipal wells at Klondike Park Road, northeast of town, drawing on a deep aquifer discovered during a provincial seismic survey;

• treatment, storage and pumping facility to serve them;

• roughly eight kilometres of watermain to carry the water into Stayner’s system —

• the whole of it sized for a town projected to grow from 5,000 people to 28,000 by 2034.

A project was initially estimated at $25 to $28 million in 2022, $42 million by 2023, and $70 million by 2024 — with substantial completion not expected until 2027.

How was it paid for?

• Half by the Province — a $35-million grant from the Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund.

• Half by three developers, roughly $10 million each in prepaid development charges,

• The Township’s own share under $5 million

• A $30-million County contingency credit line standing by to bridge any cash-flow gaps.

Not to be excessively redundant, but $70 million spent, when there was a pipe and a spigot right there. How is that possible?

The next part of this should really aggravate you. (which is what I am trying to do, because this is what happens when small towns are given the leash to spend someone else’s money).

The $50.7M was three things, almost none of it pipe:

1. Debt buy-in — purchasing a share of the pipeline’s outstanding construction debt.

2. The water — the capitalized cost of buying it, at a rate the study itself called relatively high.

3. Storage — large reservoirs Stayner would need because the pipeline couldn’t be trusted to keep flowing. It had shut down for maintenance for as long as 32 days at a stretch, and between 2009 and 2018 there were 89 days when Stayner could not have drawn from it. From their perspective, relying on that supply would need enough stored water to ride out a month-long outage — reservoirs sized for weeks of autonomy. But that case rested entirely on the pipeline’s old record. Those chronic maintenance shutdowns were subsequently engineered out — relining, new valves and fittings along the corridor — and since 2021 the trunk main has run without a comparable outage. By the time Stayner committed to its well, between 2021 and 2024, the unreliability that had justified weeks of stored water was already gone. The storage case had quietly evaporated.

We did our research (double-checked) the data and this is what we found…

• The entire 57-kilometre trunk main from Collingwood to Alliston was constructed in 1999–2000 for $28.3 million. Five partners funded it: a $5-million provincial grant,

  • $7 million from New Tecumseth,

  • $1.3 million from Collingwood’s utility,

  • $11.1-million loan from the Ontario Clean Water Agency,

  • the balance from the builder.

Now let’s look at how ridiculous the decision process was…

• New Tecumseth had been buying water off the pipe since the day it opened: metered, by the cubic metre, pay for what you use.

• The Town of the Blue Mountains was buying Collingwood’s water the same way, through the connection at Mountain Road.

• New Lowell — a community in Stayner’s own township — was drawing treated water from the very same main under the very same principle.

The precedent was set — three times over. The model existed. It was flowing through Clearview’s own borders.

What happened instead was an absurd waste of money.

• The Province threw in $35 million with no mechanism of control — a pattern we have seen over and over.

• The town committed more than $30 million of its development charges, collected in advance from three developers and spent on a well beside a full pipe.

  • Money that is not free: every dollar of it is now unavailable for the town’s water infrastructure — not just what 3,150 new homes will need, but the old, slowly failing systems already due for replacement.

I am going to repeat this over and over, we need to…

Nottawa

Nottawa is one of the loveliest corners of this region — a quaint crossroads village on County Road 124, minutes south of Collingwood, with the Pretty River valley at its back and the escarpment on the horizon. A general store, a school, a few hundred homes under mature trees. It is the kind of place people move to precisely because it isn’t anywhere else — and the kind of place growth was always going to find.

Nottawa is a community that has happily lived off well water and septic systems since it was settled. Every home in the village gets its water from a well — the private wells of the older properties, and the small municipal well system, the McKean, that serves the newer subdivision. For generations, that was enough.

The last few years have proved a problem. Residents report that water levels have been declining — not because of any single event, but under the steady pressure of development on the aquifer everyone draws from.

A village that never had to think about its water has started to.

There was supposed to be an answer. The plan of record — the servicing framework the township had carried for roughly fifteen years — was to connect Nottawa to municipal water: Collingwood’s supply, extended to the village. That was the promise local developers and landowners planned against, and the security residents assumed was coming.

Then, in April 2024, council reversed it.

And understand what that reversal did to the price of a connection. Everywhere municipal water works, the municipality builds the trunk — the main that brings water reasonably close to a community — and recovers that cost across the whole system over time. The homeowner pays for the last leg, from the main to the house: typically twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. That is the norm.

When Clearview walked away from the trunk, they told the homeowners that the entire cost of reaching Nottawa fell onto their individual homes — and the price of connecting jumped up to $159,000 a house.

So why would a council walk away from a fifteen-year promise to its own people? I won’t pretend to know what was in anyone’s mind. I’ll show you what was on the township’s balance sheet, and let you draw your own conclusion.

A new subdivision of 500 homes is coming to Nottawa — a village-sized addition to a village of only a few hundred. Homes on that scale need water and sewers, and it was the question of how to service them that put Nottawa on the council table in the first place. Now weigh what those 500 homes are worth to the Township.

Five hundred homes is serious money for the township. Nottawa sits outside the three urban service areas, so each home pays the township-wide development charge — currently $12,724 for a single detached house, rising to $17,138 under the Township’s new 2024 DC study — before the County and the school boards take their own charges on top.

Across 500 units, that is somewhere between $6 and $9 million in township development charges alone, plus permit fees, plus a permanent addition to the property tax base.

The Township’s own DC study counts on it: its growth forecast books 500 units for Nottawa, six per cent of all the housing growth in Clearview to buildout. This development is not an application sitting on a counter. It is a line item in the township’s financial future.

A township standing to book millions from this development chose the one servicing path that kept the developer building — and set the cost down on the village’s own aquifer. Make of that what you will.

So when the water connection died, nobody blinked. No water? No problem. We’ll just drill our own well. The developer proposed expanding the McKean system — two new municipal wells, a new treatment plant, a new reservoir, built into the development itself. The township’s engineers tested it and called it feasible. Staff recommended it. The revenue stayed on the rails — with the village’s aquifer as the collateral.

And let me be clear about something before going further: this is not NIMBY, none of this is a criticism of the developer. I live in a Georgian Communities development myself, in Windfall. It is beautiful. The homes are well designed and well built. The developer in Nottawa is doing exactly what the process demands of it — solving, at its own cost, a servicing problem the municipality created.

No, this is about two things. First, a process run by small-town, short-sighted politicians and their henchmen in the bureaucracy “…greedily clasping their hands like Oliver at the table — please, sir, one more cup — except Oliver was starving, and these people are simply hungry for the fees.”

Now let’s talk about how half this problem can be solved — with huge savings to the developer, and the residents getting the water they need. The other half, unfortunately — not so much.

Have a look at the map.

The tee at Batteaux has been sitting on the regional pipeline since 2000, less than three kilometres from Nottawa, up a road that already exists.

If a connection was made at the Batteaux junction, what would it actually cost?

Watermain construction on an existing rural road allowance runs, at standard Ontario rates, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 per metre installed. Add engineering, contingency, a valve chamber at the tee and pressure works at the village end, and the trunk is a project of roughly $4 million, pending detailed design. Be generous — build out the village distribution, connect everything, gold-plate it — and call it $20 million, serving the existing village and the 500 new homes together.

Under a regional utility, that is exactly the kind of build the utility exists to finance — and everything changes.

The developer does not build a well field, a treatment plant, and a reservoir, and does not bury their cost in the price of 500 homes. The 500 homes connect.

The existing residents connect too, if they choose, at the normative cost of a connection — twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, not $159,000 — because the trunk is the utility’s to build, not each household’s to carry.

The aquifer stays where it is, untouched, under the village. And the fight between neighbours, builder, and township — the one manufactured entirely by a servicing decision — has nothing left to feed on.

One more time, so nobody can twist it: this is not about stopping development. Nottawa’s homes should be built. The region needs the housing.

But the sewage connection to Birch Street in Collingwood will not go ahead, and as a result the development will not go ahead until a regional sewage plant and infrastructure is built.

Collingwood staff project nearly 4,000 cubic metres a day of spare capacity. This is a paper reserve.

Experts have already determined the plant has passed its 80-per-cent trigger, a plant that has already failed into the bay. You don’t add capacity to this kind of plant. That is simply irresponsible, but not unexpected from this bunch.

What the region needs is a regional utility that will make a regional plan — rational, timely, and responsible for the whole. That is the priority, and it is where this series goes next.

Leg 2 of the Pipeline System — The Blue Mountains

Currently, the town draws its water primarily from the Thornbury Water Treatment Plant. The plant was built in 1977, takes water from an intake half a kilometre out in Georgian Bay. With the vast growth of the community, the town is running out of water.

In March 2024, the town’s East Side Water Storage and Supply study came before the public. Its job was to solve the water supply deficiencies in the town’s eastern pressure zones — Craigleith, the mountain, where the growth is — and it evaluated several alternatives.

This is the council endorsement…

The estimate for this plan was $66 million. This is an interesting number. When Collingwood started its plan for a new treatment plant it also started at about $60 million and you know where that went. Without question this would cost the town more than $100 million.

It is worth noting that in A Fiscal Autopsy, I documented the town’s projected water and wastewater debt to 2028 at approximately $57 million — with no legitimate way to pay it down.

So what’s another $100 million?

No problem — the Province will give us the money.

That would be Brian Saunderson: our MPP, former Collingwood mayor, and now Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing — the man sitting inside the very ministry every one of these funding requests lands on.

Now let’s look at a rational alternative: the west leg of the regional pipeline.

The connection already exists. The Mountain Road Booster Station sits at the municipal boundary, delivering water from the regional plant into The Blue Mountains

How much does the water cost… Interesting question. Three customers buy water from the regional plant today: New Tecumseth, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview at New Lowell.

Each customer buys on its own separately negotiated terms — there is no single price for the same water from the same plant. New Tecumseth’s rate lives in one agreement, The Blue Mountains’ in another, New Lowell’s in a third.

Nobody can tell you whether they pay the same, because there is nothing to compare against: no tariff, no system rate, no published price. Under fragmentation, the price of water is not a rate. It is a negotiation — and the leverage always sits with the seller.

Then remember the part everyone forgets: Once the new plant comes on line, Collingwood paid roughly $44 million of a $270-million expansion — about 16 per cent. The Province paid $150 million. New Tecumseth paid the rest.

Collingwood holds a minority share in a regional asset — and yet it sits on one side of every table, negotiating the price of the region’s water as if it owns the plant with every town that needs it. Does this seem crazy?

The alternative is sitting right in the TBM council’s face and it will happen, because the Province is no longer going to throw money at each town.

So let’s start with the obvious question. Will the new regional plant have the capacity to supply The Blue Mountains. ?

To answer….This is a regional plant. It is being expanded to 59,000 cubic metres a day precisely to serve the region.

Today the region’s four municipalities hold roughly 100,000 people; at standard Ontario planning rates of about 400 litres per person per day, that is a total demand in the range of 40,000 cubic metres a day — comfortably inside the expanded plant’s 59,000.

By 2050, a regional population approaching 150,000 would need roughly 60,000 — which is exactly why the plant, like the pipeline before it, was designed to expand.

So what are the implications for The Blue Mountains?

Simple: everything the town is about to build, the region has already built.

The regional plant has the capacity to serve TBM’s entire future. The pipe to deliver it exists: the west leg at Mountain Road, flowing today.

What TBM’s $100-million program buys is capacity the region already owns, delivered through infrastructure the town would have to duplicate.

Under a utility, TBM builds none of it. It upsizes one connection and fixes its local pinch points — real work, a fraction of the cost, and the regional infrastructure will be carried by the utility.

The town will buy its water at the same rate as every other participating member in the community, the price will be set by a tariff instead of a negotiation.

The Thornbury plant retires at the end of its life instead of being rebuilt. The Craigleith plant will never be built. The $100 million will never get spent.

To Summarize

One plant. Two pipes. Four municipalities. That is the region’s water system — in the ground, working, for twenty-five years. What it has never had is an organization that is responsible for the whole. That is about to change.

Fragmentation of decision making has been expensive.

• Stayner spent $70 million drilling a well beside a pipeline that runs through the middle of town, with a connection built for it in 2000 that has never been opened. And now it is not in a position to participate in a structure that will probably lower the cost of water.

• Nottawa is being pushed onto its own aquifer, its residents at war with their own township, while a tee sits three kilometres away and its sewage is pointed at a plant that has already failed into the bay.

  • A regional utility, moving quickly, could have the Batteaux spur to Nottawa in the ground by the fall of 2027.

• The Blue Mountains, carrying $57 million in water debt it cannot pay down, has just endorsed a two-plant construction program estimated at $66 million — a number that, on this region’s record, is only the opening bid — rather than buy water from a regional plant with six times its entire future demand.

• The Province must historically shoulder some of the blame. It has paid for all of it: $35 million here, $150 million there, rescue after rescue, with no mechanism of control and no reason to believe the next rescue won’t be needed.

  • This is going to end. The Province needs to formally send a letter to each Mayor letting them know that there will be no more local funding for water and wastewater treatment infrastructure.

• The people making the extremely expensive and long term decisions were not up to the capabilities required.

In fact, let’s be brutal. The history, the decision making, the lack of vision, the pretense of control are in my view without precedent as far as a lack of competence and fiscal accountability.

The Simcoe County Municipal Water Corporation ends it.

One utility that owns the plant and the pipes. The MWC will…

• acquire the new plant by paying Collingwood and New Tecumseth out at their invested cost,

• take over a pipeline that has long since been paid down and depreciated.

• plan the region’s water as the single system,

• sell the water on a bulk basis to every town at one wholesale rate,

• finance growth the way every utility on earth does — over the life of the assets, out of the water bill you already pay.

• Your town keeps your bill, your rates, your local pipes. The competence moves to where the decisions are.

The water is already regional. The pipes already bind. The only thing missing is the decision to implement.

Part One made the case that Collingwood cannot fix its water and wastewater alone. This piece has made the case that nobody in this region can — and that the solution has been sitting in the ground, waiting, for twenty-five years.

Next: the wastewater. The plant that cannot be fixed where it stands, and the regional plan that fixes it somewhere else. That is a bigger story, and it gets its own piece.

Posted on the shore of Georgian Bay: avoid swimming for at least 24 hours after heavy rainfall, when bacterial levels rise. It is the plainest true thing said about our water all year. (Grey Bruce Public Health)

There is a sign on the beach that tells you not to swim after it rains. Hold that thought.

— Amanda Pegg, executive director of corporate and customer service, to Collingwood council, June 15.

The message is….All is well in Collingwood.

That is the message, and the town has been disciplined about it. They presented a polished video on Facebood under the banner “Collingwood Community News.” With drone footage on a perfect summer day. A line stretched across the bottom of the screen:

After a staff presentation, council voted unanimously to stay the course. Position of strength. Existing systems can support hundreds of new homes immediately. I am going to repeat myself….UNANIMOUSLY….not one vote to say…’Houston, we have a problem’. And more importantly, this includes both candidates who are running for Mayor.

Its time for a wake up call people.

Last week I laid out why that story does not survive contact with the record. The 2019 Cole Engineering report delivered a stark warning: the wastewater plant had reached 80 per cent of its capacity — the threshold at which engineering standards say a plant has no meaningful reserve left for wet weather, nothing in the tank when a storm hits. The town had six bypass events over the following five years, each one worse than the last. And then, on the morning of April 15, 2026, the plant went to full bypass and sent raw sewage straight into Georgian Bay — roughly 6,683 cubic metres of untreated waste across that day and the one before, close to 10,000 once the partially treated flow is counted — while the town asked residents to flush less.

And “raw sewage” is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. This is untreated human waste — the bacteria and viruses that treatment exists to kill, E. coli and the rest. But modern sewage carries far more than that: pharmaceuticals and hormones flushed from every household, microplastics, heavy metals, and the industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS — none of which conventional treatment fully removes even on a good day, and all of which went into the bay untouched on a bad one. It entered the water about a kilometre from the town’s own drinking-water intake off Sunset Point.

This week I want to take the town at its word. It says it has a plan. Let us look at the plan.

The Plan

It is called the 2026 Water and Wastewater Master Servicing Plan, and on paper it is exactly what a responsible town would produce. It promises a long-term roadmap to 2051. It promises to “safeguard drinking water, reduce wastewater impacts, and protect Georgian Bay.” It promises data-driven, defensible decisions and a clear implementation roadmap.

It is the answer to everything I wrote last week. And I want to be fair to it, because the language is good.

The trouble is not the language. The trouble is physics.

What the bypasses actually are

Start with the thing the town is most careful never to say plainly: the bypasses are not a problem of daily capacity. The plant is not too small for the sewage the town produces — it is too full to have anything left when the weather turns.

On an ordinary dry day, the Birch Street wastewater plant runs at about 70 per cent of the flow it was designed to treat. It is not overwhelmed by sewage. It has room.

What overwhelms it is rain. When a spring storm hits, the plant receives a sudden surge of water it was never built to handle — and that water is not sewage. It is stormwater, getting into the sanitary system through cracked and leaking pipes, through groundwater seeping into fifty- and sixty-year-old mains, and through sump pumps and downspouts wrongly connected to the sewer. The town’s own manager has described this precisely: inflow and infiltration, extra water that enters the system and overwhelms the pipes, the pumping stations and the plant.

So the problem is a peak. A few hours of surge, a few times a year, that exceed what the plant can push through. The other 361 days, there is capacity to spare.

This matters enormously, because it tells you exactly what the fix has to be.

The fix

You do not solve a peak by building a bigger plant. You could double the plant tomorrow and still bypass in the next storm, because the surge is not steady demand you can size for — it is a spike.

You solve a peak by storing it.

The standard engineering answer to wet-weather surge is flow equalization storage: holding capacity — ponds, or large tanks — that captures the flood of water during the storm, holds it while the plant works at its normal rate, and then releases it back through treatment over the hours and days after the rain stops. The plant never sees the spike. Nothing bypasses. The stored surge is treated late instead of dumped raw.

This is not exotic. It is how plants across Ontario keep from discharging when it rains. Equalization storage is the single thing that would actually stop Collingwood’s bypasses. Not monitoring. Not “operational adjustments at the margins.” Storage.

Which raises the only question that matters.

The trap

Storage needs land. Not a tank in a corner — the volume required to swallow a storm surge is a serious physical footprint. Ponds. Acres.

So look at where the plant sits.

The Collingwood sewage treatment plant, dead centre. West: Sunset Point waterfront park — the Historic Swim shore and the splash pad. East: the “Waterfront Berm.” North: the harbour. South: parking. Source: Google Earth.

Walk the ring around it.

To the west, the only open ground in the frame — except it is not vacant. It is Sunset Point waterfront park: the playing field, the splash pad in the bottom corner where children play all summer, the trails, and — you cannot invent this — the interpretive panels marked Historic Swim and Water/Fish right at the shoreline. It is the town’s beloved harbourfront park, and the surges drain straight into the bay you are trying to protect.

To the north, the harbour.

To the south, parking lots and commercial buildings, then the road.

To the east, a green mound the map labels the “Waterfront Berm.” That one is the punchline.

The Waterfront Berm is not landscaping. When the old shipyard was cleaned up for redevelopment, the contaminated soil was not hauled away — it was too expensive. Instead, 130,000 tonnes of it were groomed into a seven-acre berm, twelve metres high, and capped with more than a metre of clean fill. It sits behind the amphitheatre under the province’s brownfield rules, monitored for contamination, and it cannot be disturbed. The one patch of “open space” beside the sewage plant is where the town buried its last environmental problem.

So here is the site, in full. A sewage plant that dumps raw waste into Georgian Bay when it rains. On one side, a public swim beach. On the other, a sealed mound of toxic soil. The harbour to the north, the town to the south. And nowhere — nowhere — to build the storage that would stop the dumping.

And storage is the smaller problem.

The plant is approaching seventy years old — a conventional activated-sludge plant from another era. It cannot be patched into a modern facility. At some point, and that point is close, it has to be rebuilt. But you do not rebuild a sewage plant the way you renovate a house. The sewage does not stop arriving while you work. The only way to replace a treatment plant that is still running is to build the new one on land beside the old one, keep the old plant operating right through construction, and switch over when the new one is ready.

That takes a second plant’s worth of land, immediately next door.

Look at the picture again. There is none. So the plant cannot be storage-equipped where it stands. It cannot be modernized where it stands. And it cannot be rebuilt where it stands. Three different fixes, one site, and no room for any of them.

That is what “reduce wastewater impacts” and “protect Georgian Bay through 2051” means at 3 Birch Street: a roadmap to a place you cannot get to. And this is the moment to say it plainly, because the town will not.

Look at the picture.

YOU ARE BULLSHITTING US.

The other pipe

And even the storage, if you could site it, would not be the end of the bill.

The plant’s outfall — the pipe that carries treated effluent away — empties into Collingwood harbour, an enclosed basin with sluggish flushing, about a kilometre from the town’s own drinking-water intake off Sunset Point. That is close to the worst place you could put it. A real fix moves the discharge out to deep water in the open bay, where distance and dilution keep it away from the intake.

That pipe is not cheap. A deepwater outfall of the size Collingwood needs — a kilometre and a half to three kilometres of pipe laid across a shallow bay, with a diffuser, a marine construction spread, and the full environmental-permitting gauntlet — runs, in round numbers, somewhere between $15 and $40 million. Given this town’s record with estimates, budget could be $100

Here is the part that matters. The outfall does not stop the bypasses. It moves treated effluent further out; it does nothing about the raw sewage dumped during a storm. To fix Birch Street you need both — the storage that stops the dumping, and the outfall that gets the discharge away from the water we drink. One has nowhere to go. The other is tens of millions no one has budgeted. The plan funds neither.

Follow the money

Here is the part that should make every ratepayer sit up.

Let’s examine the $270-million Raymond A. Barker project — the one with the drone footage, the “Celebration of Water,” is the drinking-water plant, at 2 Raglan Street on the east end of Sunset Point.

The plant is deliberately oversized for Collingwood, engineered to push treated water 60 kilometres down a pipeline to another town entirely. This is not a municipal water plant that happens to sell a little surplus. It is a regional plant that happens to sit in Collingwood.

That distinction is the thing council will not say out loud. When the Province funds the majority of an asset built to serve a region, it acquires an interest in how that asset is used. The water is not Collingwood’s to hoard, or to hold up as proof of “local control.”

Collingwood is the host. It is not the sole owner, and it never was.

More on exactly what that means next week.

To Summarize

So let us summarize where a decade of “position of strength” has actually left us.

We have polluted our own bay to the point where we are told not to swim in it when it rains — or even when the wind blows hard.

We have a wastewater plant on life support, one storm away from failure, all but guaranteed to spew sewage into Georgian Bay every spring — a plant that cannot be replaced on its own site, and for which there is no other logical site anywhere in the Collingwood region.

And we are building a water treatment plant our politicians love to call The Collinwood Plant — while the truth is that it is a regional plant in which the Town of Collingwood holds only a minority share. A plant that feeds a 60-kilometre pipeline running right through the County all the way to Alliston, and a second pipeline running to The Town of The Blue Mountains.

The way out is the door they voted to close

There is a fix. It is just not one Collingwood can build alone, on that site, on any timeline that stops the dumping soon.

A regional wastewater plant can be built where there is land — sized once, for the whole bay, with the storage and capacity to ride out a storm instead of dumping through it. Financed at utility scale over 40 years instead of the 15-to-20 a single town is capped at. Paid for by revenue from across the region, not loaded onto Collingwood’s ratepayers alone. The site trap is a town-scale trap. Regionalism is the way through the wall — the same wall the harbour and the shipyard put around Birch Street.

That is what a municipal services corporation is for. Not two towns sharing debt. A regional utility that can put the plant where the plant can actually be fixed.

On June 15, council looked at that door and voted, unanimously, to keep it shut. Nobody stood up and said, time out — this doesn’t make sense. Not one.

October is coming

I have said before that I do not think these are bad people. I still don’t. I think they are trying to do what they believe is right, and getting it exactly wrong — the way they got the patios exactly wrong, until the community rose up and a unanimous council reversed itself in a matter of weeks.

This is another patio decision. The stakes are just measured in cubic metres of raw sewage and dollars on your water bill instead of parking spaces.

The town has had its say. It has a video, a slogan, and a plan that cannot be built where it is needed. What it does not yet have is you, on the record, saying you can read a map and you know a dead end when you see one.

October is coming. The more voices now, the harder this is to wave away.

Help me reach my subscriber level. Forward this to a neighbour. And the next time you see the sign at the beach — the one that tells you not to swim for 24 hours after heavy rain — understand what it is really telling you.

Next week, Part Two: the water system this region already has — the two pipes that bind it together, and the township where the water doesn’t run.

Before anything else this week, a word to the 376 of you who subscribe to this project.

You are not an audience to me. You are the core of a community that has decided this town’s water, its debt, and its future are worth paying attention to — and that makes you exactly the people whose judgment I most want on the record.

So I’m going to ask you for something your honest opinion.

This work goes out two ways. On Facebook it reaches a wide, general audience. Here, with you, it reaches the most informed and invested readers I have — fewer people, but the ones who actually read the long version, follow the figures, and understand what’s at stake. And to be honest, I’ve been hearing plenty from the wider world and not nearly enough from you.

I’d like to close that gap, because your voice is the one I’d weigh most heavily. If this project has been worth your time, please take a few minutes and answer the survey right here on the page.

Add a comment if you have one — I read every single one, and as you’ve seen, I answer them.

The town has had its say. October is coming. I’d like the people who’ve been paying closest attention to have theirs.

—

Let’s Puncture the Spin

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Monday update.

On Monday, June 15, after a staff presentation on the option of a municipal services corporation to run its water, Collingwood council voted unanimously to stay the course.

“Collingwood enters this discussion from a position of strength. We have declining debt, substantial borrowing capacity, long-standing regional partnerships, sophisticated water location systems and significant expertise within our water and wastewater sectors.”

— Amanda Pegg, executive director of corporate and customer service, to Collingwood council, June 15 (reported by CollingwoodToday)

The message had already been set to music. Within a day of MPP Saunderson floating a regional water utility, a polished video appeared on YouTube under the banner “Collingwood Community News” — drone footage of the town on a perfect summer day, and stretched across the bottom of the screen, this:

Robust Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Ready for Growth — with the reassurance beneath it that “existing systems can support hundreds of new homes immediately.”

— “Collingwood Community News,” Rogers TV

That is the official story. The town is in full attack mode.

I have been documenting this for months. Nearly 1,100 of you read my last piece. ‘What is Brian Saunderson Up To?’

To be honest, I find Collingwood Council’s approach to this problem as nothing less than shocking.

Forget the politics; here is the real story.

The Documentary

In December 2019, Cole Engineering Group delivered to Collingwood council a formal Master Servicing Plan for the town’s water and sanitary sewer systems. Reference number 2017-1013. Prepared by licensed professional engineers. Based on historical flow data extending back to at least 2017 and 2018. This was not a study commissioned to generate options. It was a technical accounting of physical reality — the same exercise the Asset Management Plan is supposed to perform, applied specifically to the collection and treatment system.

The findings on the wastewater treatment plant were unambiguous. Annual average daily flow from 2018 through 2020 was nearing the 80 per cent threshold that engineering standards define as requiring expansion planning. That threshold is not arbitrary. When average flow exceeds 80 per cent of permitted hydraulic capacity, professional and regulatory standards require the operator to begin planning for expansion or flow reduction. Not consider it. Not study it further. Begin planning.

The threshold exists for one reason: because what happens beyond it is predictable. A plant operating at 80 per cent capacity under normal dry-weather flow has no meaningful reserve for wet-weather surge. When it rains hard — as it does every spring — the system receives a sudden hydraulic load it cannot process. The excess goes somewhere. In Collingwood, it goes into Georgian Bay.

Council received the report in December 2019. A series of councils chose not to act on it.

The Patch Strategy

What followed was not a plan. Staff were directed to monitor flows carefully. Operational adjustments were made at the margins of the plant. The language of prudence appeared at council meetings — we are watching the situation, capacity is being managed, further review is underway.

Each individual response was defensible in isolation. Collectively, they constitute a governing philosophy: defer the hard decision, manage the optics, and hope the problem stays quiet long enough to become someone else’s inheritance. The plant was not expanded. The aging collection system — clay and concrete mains dating to the 1950s and 1960s, cracked, root-infiltrated, and leaking — was not rehabilitated. The pumping stations feeding the plant were not upgraded to handle surge flows.

The infrastructure aged. The town grew. And spring kept coming.

Then It Started to Rain

Between 2021 and 2025, Collingwood’s wastewater treatment plant recorded at least six documented bypass events. Each time, partially treated wastewater entered Georgian Bay. Each time, the town filed the required reports with the Ministry of the Environment.

Each time, the public notice carried the same message: monitoring is being completed, there are no health and safety concerns, the situation is under control.

The situation was not under control. It was being managed downward — one deferral at a time, one bypass event at a time — until the system ran out of margin.

On April 15, 2026, the wheels came off entirely.

That morning, Bayshore Broadcasting reported what the town’s own notice confirmed:

“The Sewage Treatment Plant in Collingwood had to go on a full treatment bypass just before 8 this morning, releasing untreated waste water into Georgian Bay.”

Not partially treated. Not UV-skipped with chlorine substituted. Untreated. Raw municipal sewage, directly into Georgian Bay.

The town’s own water and wastewater manager later confirmed the toll: roughly 6,683 cubic metres of untreated wastewater overflowed into the bay across April 14 and 15 — close to 10,000 cubic metres once the partially treated flow is counted.

The Town’s response….Residents were asked to stop doing laundry. To limit showers. To reduce toilet flushing. Read that again: the town asked residents to flush less because the system built to handle what they flush had failed completely.

The day before, April 14, there had been a partial bypass. The escalation from partial to full took less than 24 hours.

This is what the 80 per cent capacity warning in the Cole Engineering report was describing. Not a theoretical risk. A trajectory. The report was on the table in December 2019. The expansion planning that professional standards required did not begin. And on April 15, 2026, Georgian Bay received the consequence.

And what enters the bay is not just bacteria. Raw sewage carries pharmaceuticals, hormones, heavy metals, microplastics and PFAS — the “forever chemicals” that conventional treatment does not remove and the province does not even require anyone to test for. The plant’s outfall sits about a kilometre from the town’s own drinking-water intake off Sunset Point — a stretch provincial source-water modelling already flags as a contamination threat, where currents can carry the discharge toward the intake within hours.

The other part of the argument that makes council’s unanimous vote spurious is the financial implications for this town if we continue on our current path of ‘excellence’.

The new Raymond A. Barker plant is a $270-million project, and the only reason Collingwood can build it at all is that the Province is covering about $150 million, with New Tecumseth — which buys our water — carrying most of the rest. Collingwood’s own share comes to roughly $44 million.

The evolution of the new Raymond A. Barker plant is a microcosm of why the town should not be in charge of development and implementation of major infrastructure projects. The project was initially billed to cost $60 million, it then went to $120 million and finally to $270. This huge increase was supposed to pay for providing water to the new electric vehicle $15 Billion plant in Aliston. Honda canceled the plant but the project proceeds.

We were told that $44 million would cost us nothing. It would be paid entirely by development charges — the fees builders pay on new construction. Growth pays for growth: no debenture, no tax hike. But that promise only holds if the growth actually shows up, and it hasn’t.

Development-charge collections have fallen off a cliff — $12.85 million in 2021, $6.1 million in 2022, $3.7 million in 2023, and barely $2 million of real organic revenue by 2024. That is an 84% collapse in three years. Building permits are down, and in 2025 the town actually cut its water-treatment-plant DC rate — lowering the very revenue it claims will pay for the plant.

When those development charges don’t arrive, the $44 million doesn’t disappear — it lands on the rate base as debt. Under the town’s approved rate plan, the typical household water-and-wastewater bill rises about 18% by 2030, from roughly $1,182 to $1,400 — and that’s the number residents have been given.

But that plan assumes the development charges materialize. Once they don’t, and the $44 million is financed as a debenture on ratepayers, the same bill reaches about $1,685 by 2030 — a 43% increase, roughly $500 more per household every year, landing in 2029 just as the plant comes online and the development-charge reserve has already run dry.

So — Where Do We Stand?

When I first read that council had voted — unanimously — to stay the course, I felt a few things, and I’ll be honest about all of them. Anger: how could they land on a decision so removed from what is actually happening in our bay? Frustration: why do we keep electing people who seem so far from reality? And, if I’m being truthful, a few less charitable thoughts.

But then I caught myself. I don’t believe these are bad people, and I don’t believe they are acting in bad faith. I believe they are trying, genuinely, to do what they think is best for this community.

I have seen it before. Think back to the patios — when the town pulled them to gain fourteen parking spaces, and the community was outraged. That moment stayed with me, because it was not a council trying to do harm. It was a council trying to do something it believed would help us — and getting it exactly wrong, completely out of touch with how we see our town and what we want this town to be.

And here is the part that matters most — the reason I write any of this at all. What happened next. People rose up. They spoke — loudly, clearly, with one focused voice. And a council that had voted unanimously turned around and reversed itself.

That is the whole point. That is what a community can do when it speaks together. This is another patio decision but with much graver implications.

Not one council member stood up and said, ‘Time out, this doesn’t make sense’. Not one.

And so Collingwood is going to war and they think the target is Brian Saunderson. I am going to prove them wrong. Their war will be with the people of Collingwood because this is a bad decision, a decision that is going to cost us money and prevent us from addressing some critical environmental needs.

My hope is that this writing gives you that voice — not by telling you what to think, but by putting clear, sourced, non-political information in front of you, so that we, as a community, can rise up and make our opinion impossible to ignore.

That is why, on the survey, I asked for your comments. Below, you will find where we stand so far — and then, in your own words, what you told me, with my answer to each. Read them. Then add your own.

Where the survey stands

You’ve heard me say residents are worried. Here’s the fuller breakdown behind it — with one important caveat.

This survey is still open and still filling up, so these are not final numbers. They are where people stand so far — a snapshot in progress. I’m sharing them now for one reason: so you can see the early picture and add your own voice before it closes.

In their own words — and my answers

When we asked readers what else was on their minds, this is what came back — and it’s worth a few minutes, because these are the questions people are actually asking. Encouragement, hard questions, a few sharp challenges. Here they are, in your words, with my answer to each.

And if you haven’t yet told us where you stand — please fill in the survey and add a comment of your own. We need to hear what you’re thinking.

“Why trust this just because Saunderson is behind it?”

My response. Let me be honest: this is the real objection, and it’s bigger than Saunderson. We’ve come to distrust our politicians — all of them — and in fairness, why wouldn’t we? You don’t have to look far to find decisions of a rather spurious nature. I don’t have a clean answer to that, and I won’t pretend a corporation makes it disappear.

But here’s what I’d ask you to weigh. The whole point of an arm’s-length utility is to take a decision this big out of the hands of any one council or any one politician — Saunderson included — and place it with a professional board, accountable to all the member municipalities and governed by engineering and financial facts already in the public record.

You don’t have to trust the messenger; the case stands or falls on those facts. Distrust isn’t a reason to walk away from this. It’s the reason to take the decision out of the hands of the very people you’ve stopped trusting.

Now, that raises a fair worry of its own: if we hand this to a board, are we trading away our democratic say? There are two parts to this question. Firstly, lets be honest. How much say do we currently have. Council voted unanimously, didn’t debate the issue, didn’t ask for an independent opinion. Nope… unanimous. And Secondly the MSC will provide a regional management perspective, not a local political perspective, for water and wastewater, through a board that includes representatives of the owner municipalities sitting alongside professional experts.

What actually changes is that complex engineering and financing decisions move out of the hands of part-time councils and inexperienced bureaucrats and into a utility built to handle them — one still answerable to the member towns. And given the record of overruns and bypasses, that isn’t a loss of accountability. It’s more of it: a check on exactly the kind of decisions that haven’t been going well.

“Isn’t this just two towns sharing debt over a longer term?”

“From what I understand, all that’s proposed is a joint entity between Collingwood and Blue Mountains and a longer repayment period for new infrastructure to get around municipal laws.”

My response. First, a correction worth making: this isn’t a two-town deal. It’s a Simcoe County initiative — a county of more than 530,000 people across sixteen municipalities, the same county where Innisfil already runs a water utility of exactly this kind.

I focus on our four towns — Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Clearview and Wasaga Beach — not because they’re the whole story, but because they’re a system within that larger system: four communities on one shared bay, facing the same plants, the same pipes and the same deadline. (The Blue Mountains is actually in Grey County, not Simcoe — which is the point: the bay doesn’t care about the county line, and neither should the way we service it. The Blue Mountains council has already voted to explore joining a regional corporation with its Simcoe neighbours.)

As for the rest: the longer financing term is one benefit, not the whole idea. An MSC does three things no single town can. It builds one regional plan with regional financing — exactly how that works is still to be determined — mapping every plant, pipe and well and sequencing the fixes. It brings professional engineering and project management that small towns can’t attract or afford. And it finances at utility scale, with debentures over 40 years rather than the 15-to-20 municipalities are capped at. The refinancing is real — but it’s the smallest part of the case.

“Fine — but how would the money actually work, and has anyone really done it?”

My response. This isn’t a theory — the Province is building exactly this right now. Peel, Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon are moving their water and wastewater into a single, publicly owned corporation.

The fine print is still being written, but the structure rests on three simple ideas.

1. Pooled borrowing.

Today each town finances its water and wastewater debt alone, on its own modest tax base, under provincial rules that cap municipal borrowing at roughly 15 to 20 years.

A regional corporation borrows differently — at utility scale, and over a far longer term, debentures of about 40 years rather than 20. The interest rate barely moves: on today’s long-term yields a public borrower would pay somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% either way.

What changes is the term — and the term is everything. Take a single $300-million plant. Financed over 20 years it costs about $24 million a year; stretched over 40 years at the same rate, about $17.5 million. Same plant, same rate — roughly a third less every single year, simply for spreading the cost over the life of the asset instead of cramming it into half that time.

2. Cost stays home.

Pooling the borrowing does not mean pooling the cost. The fairest reading of the model — and the way Peel itself is built — is that each town’s debt stays attributed to the town that incurred it; the corporation simply carries and refinances it on better terms. Collingwood, The Town of The Blue Mountains, and Clearview would continue to own their own debt — just carried at the lower financing rate. What’s shared is the cheaper financing, not the bill.

3. Shared assets.

Refinancing is the smaller half of the story. The real prize of going regional is shared infrastructure: build it once, serve everyone. Collingwood’s expanded water plant already sells water beyond its borders, to New Tecumseth, and in principle could anchor the water supply for the whole region rather than four towns each chasing their own — reaching the very communities, like Clearview’s, that have struggled with their water for years and can’t solve it alone.

As a result, revenue from across the entire region would flow in to pay for the plant, instead of Collingwood’s ratepayers carrying it on their own. This could dramatically reduce your water bills.

On the wastewater side, the prize is larger still. A single regional treatment plant could serve the whole region — which means neither Wasaga nor Collingwood ever has to build a $300-million-plus plant of its own, and Clearview, whose Stayner flows have nowhere of their own to go, gets the regional capacity it could never build alone.

Six plants built separately put the region on the hook for something approaching $2 billion, that each municipality would have to pay for or beg the government for support. Built regionally, the saving runs to hundreds of millions. The other very important aspect of this financial conundrum is that the Province of Ontario is running a huge deficit and there will be no more free lunches.

That is what regionality does. Not a transfer of one town’s debt onto another, but a pooling of the region’s future needs — so the things every one of these towns will need next get built once, shared by all, and paid for at a fraction of the going-it-alone price. And the point I want to stress is ‘gets built’ without begging for government assistance.

“We’re on a well and septic — why should we care?”

“Being in the country, we’re on well and septic — but one way or another this is going to impact our taxes big time, in perhaps a roundabout way. I’d suggest people on well and septic, such as ourselves, consider this too.”

My response. You’ve put your finger on it — and you’re more exposed than “roundabout” suggests.

Being on septic is not an exemption. To protect the region’s drinking water, provincial law — the South Georgian Bay–Lake Simcoe Source Water Protection Plan — already requires Clearview to re-inspect every septic system within 100 metres of a municipal well: the highest-risk systems within five years, then on a recurring cycle. Rural households are already being pulled into the cost of protecting this shared water, one inspection and one repair order at a time.

And the water itself is shared. Georgian Bay and the aquifers beneath us are the region’s drinking-water source; a sewage bypass or a failing septic field doesn’t stop at a property line — and the public money spent cleaning up these failures comes out of taxes all of us pay, on municipal pipes or not.

So your instinct is right, and it cuts in your favour: a properly run regional system isn’t a threat to people on wells and septic. Done right, it is very likely the cheaper, saner path than every household facing this alone, lot by lot.

“Why not just stop building — a moratorium?”

“If the situation is so dire, why don’t the municipalities just stop building and expanding so rapidly? The size of the developments — especially in TBM — is ridiculous. Wouldn’t a moratorium on mega-neighbourhoods help lessen the stress until infrastructure catches up?”

My response. Even with zero new homes, the core problem remains: a 68-year-old Collingwood plant already discharging raw sewage into Georgian Bay, plants running at capacity, and aging pipes. Growth makes it worse, but the existing systems are failing now. A regional plan can also right-size and properly sequence future growth — exactly what four towns planning in isolation cannot do.

“Why let people answer the survey more than once?”

“Why are you allowing multiple responses to the survey? It makes the results meaningless.”

My response. A fair challenge. The follow-up survey is an open, anonymous temperature check designed to maximize participation — we deliberately chose not to require a Google sign-in, which would shut out many readers. Results are directional and read alongside the earlier survey, not presented as a scientific poll. We watch for irregularities and report results by community.

And many of you simply urged us on

“Keep the pressure on candidates.”

“Thanks for your thought leadership.

“I’m glad someone is on it. Please copy all the local politicians on your memos.”

“Collingwood politicians’ response is irresponsibly ostrich-like. Keep up the great work.”

“Time to address our water and wastewater on a regional basis. An MSC makes perfect sense. Keep this campaign going.”

The survey is still open — add your voice

This is a temperature check, not a scientific poll — and the more of us who answer, the harder it is to wave away. If you’ve already responded, thank you. If you haven’t, it takes about a minute:

The survey is right here on this page — please take a moment and add your voice.

And please forward this to a neighbour. The town has had its say. October is coming. The more voices on the record now, the louder the call for a plan that actually adds up.

The full analysis is here: ”What is Brian Saunderson Up To?

The South Georgian Bay Project is reader-funded — no advertising, no developer money, no grants, no editorial strings. If this work is useful to you, a paid subscription is how it stays independent.

shulmanr.substack.com

The poll above gives me the number. But numbers don't capture what you actually think — so this is the real ask: tell me in the comments. What worries you? What would you need to see before you'd back a regional utility? What did I get wrong? I read every comment, and as you've seen in this very piece, I answer them.

“if you’ve been reading along without subscribing, you are genuinely welcome here — no pressure, no guilt. But if this is the kind of work you’d like to see continue, a paid subscription is what makes it possible… If you’re able to, I’d be grateful if you’d consider it.”

It’s fixed. The survey is live, takes about three minutes, and is completely anonymous — and because we report results by community, where you live matters to the picture.

👉 Take the survey: https://forms.gle/nsYUzcMMdTJQJ1QA7

If you tried yesterday and gave up — my apologies, and please give it another go. Your voice is exactly what carries this forward.

A short while ago we put a simple question to the community: knowing what you know today, where do you stand on The Blue Mountains joining a Simcoe County Municipal Services Corporation? One hundred and eighty-three of you answered.

The result was clear, and on its face it was encouraging. Barely nine per cent were opposed. The other ninety per cent were either in favour or open to the idea. But look closer at where that openness sits. Almost a third — thirty-two per cent — told us plainly that they are undecided and need more information. Another quarter said they lean toward joining but want more clarity on the terms. Add those two groups together and well over half the community is saying the same thing: we are not against this; we simply do not yet understand it well enough to commit.

That is the most important lesson of the survey, and it confirms what an earlier survey already suggested: a large share of people do not yet know what a Municipal Services Corporation actually is, what it would do, or what it would mean for their water, their wastewater, and their tax bill. The opposition is small. The information gap is large. And an information gap is a problem with a solution.

This document is that solution. It sets out, in plain language and backed by the public record, what is happening to water and wastewater across our four municipalities — Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Clearview, and Wasaga Beach — and exactly how a Municipal Services Corporation would address it. No jargon. No spin. The facts as they stand, and the case as it is.

And then one request. When you have read it, please take a few minutes to complete the short follow-up survey linked below. The first survey captured how people felt before they had the full picture. This one will capture where the community stands once it does — and that informed voice, yours, is what will carry this forward.

Read it. Then tell us where you stand.

Take the follow-up survey

https://forms.gle/jQYz8CWvmELTKZUNA

Introduction

It is fair to say we are all frustrated with government — at every level. Service that is slow when it should be fast. Costs that climb when they should fall. And too often, an inability to deliver even the basic things we are already paying for. Many of us are simply fed up.

And then, once in a while, something cuts through. A flash of brilliance — instead of asking us to clean up the mess after we are inundated, a solution is offered that gets ahead of the problem before it overwhelms us. That is rare in public life.

That is what is on the table now. Working under the direction of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, the Honourable Rob Flack, our MPP Brian Saunderson has advanced exactly that kind of solution. It is called a Municipal Services Corporation — an MSC.

A note before we begin. While none of this has yet been announced, we are going to take some literary licence and proceed on a set of assumptions. We will assume that a Municipal Services Corporation will be created in the County of Simcoe, that it will be established in the fourth quarter of 2026, and that it will allow the Town of The Blue Mountains — though it lies in Grey County — to be bound to it. Everything that follows is built on those assumptions.

We have a regional water and wastewater problem. Wasaga Beach, Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview Township each plan their own utilities, approve their own growth, and assume the pipes will keep up. They have not. They will not. And what matters most is that we are headed for huge tax bills our politicians insist will never come.

The idea behind an MSC is simple, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The concept is based on recognizing that water does not follow municipal boundaries. Neither does sewage. The systems that move and treat them need to be built around geography — a watershed, a shoreline, a single bay — not around the lines politicians drew on a map.

Yet we govern that one interconnected system as if it were four.

This paper makes three arguments, and backs each with the public record.

First, that this is one system, not four — a single regional network of plants, pipes, wells, and outfalls that four governments happen to own in fragments.

Second, these four municipalities, acting alone, consistently make bad decisions — expensive ones, wasteful ones, and in some cases dangerous ones. Costs that triple. Plants that bypass raw sewage into Georgian Bay, wells that run dry and pipes that break in the winter because the systems have not been properly maintained, and what is most important, create future debt to pay for huge infrastructure that no small tax base can carry.

Third, that a Municipal Services Corporation is the mechanism that fixes this — a single, professionally run utility with the engineering depth, the financial scale, and the mandate to plan and manage this infrastructure properly, and at lower cost for the people who pay for it.

In the second week of June 2026, MPP Brian Saunderson made his case to the community across several local outlets, explaining the benefits of a Municipal Services Corporation for the region’s water and wastewater. It was clear, well written and should have generated applause from our politicians and bureaucrats.

What is an MSC?

● An MSC is a public utility, regionally structured within a natural geographic boundary such as the County of Simcoe and owned directly by the taxpayers who live within it.

● It develops a single regional plan — mapping every asset, assessing every failure point, and sequencing the investment needed to fix what is broken and build what the region needs.

● It is run by experienced professionals who manage contractors and deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget,,

● As a public utility, it can finance capital projects at lower interest and over longer terms than any single municipality.

For you, the taxpayer, the result is one regional structure delivering higher quality, better management, and lower cost.

Unfortunately, not everyone is on board. As you will see we have created both a political culture and a bureaucracy prepared to misuse the trust that they have been given, spending public money to protect themselves rather than to serve the people who provided it.

Collingwood

The Rosy Picture

Not twenty-four hours after MPP Saunderson’s proposal reached the public, a video appeared on YouTube — a polished segment under the banner “Collingwood Community News.” Drone footage of the town on a perfect summer day. And a headline stretched across the bottom of the screen: “Robust Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Ready for Growth,” with the reassurance beneath it that “existing systems can support hundreds of new homes immediately.”

And in Collingwood Today, the response from the Mayor and Deputy Mayor to the idea of a regional Municipal Services Corporation was not engagement, not curiosity, not relief that someone was finally proposing a solution to problems they should be intimately aware of. Instead we received an icy petulance: “they had not been consulted”.

So let us ask the obvious question. Why do politicians present a rosy picture when the picture is anything but rosy? Do they think we are too dumb to understand the problem? Too weak to handle it? Too frightened to be told the truth? Unfortunately, the problem is more insidious.

Here is the truth. Collingwood is not capable of managing this water and wastewater infrastructure on its own. It has not done so, it is not doing so, and on its current path it will not do so. What this town needs — urgently — are people on council supported by the managing bureaucracy with the capability to steer us through what is, and what will increasingly be, an environmental and financial reckoning unless we choose the path toward Saunderson’s proposal.

What Goes Into the Bay

I have presented this analysis before and I will do so again by presenting the undisputed facts regarding what went into our bay this spring. The facts do not present a pretty picture.

Between 2020 and 2025 there were at least six bypass events at the Collingwood Wastewater Treatment Plant — six occasions on which sewage, untreated or partially treated, was discharged into Georgian Bay because the plant could not cope. Each one was larger than the last.

Here is some news…global warming is creating bigger storms and more flooding every year.

On April 3, 2026, a single full bypass lasting over twelve hours sent 21,161 cubic metres of untreated wastewater into Collingwood Harbour. An Olympic swimming pool holds 2,500 cubic metres. That is more than eight of them — raw — in twelve hours.

And here is the part that should stop you cold. Collingwood draws its drinking water from Georgian Bay, at an intake off Sunset Point roughly one kilometre along the same shoreline as the plant’s outfall. Provincial source-water-protection modelling identifies the wastewater plant as a direct contamination threat to that intake — currents can carry bypass discharge eastward, toward where the town draws its drinking water, within hours.

Do you think this is a problem?

Collingwood’s Response: Check Your Sump Pump

So how did the Town respond to its sewage entering the bay?

Immediately after my article screaming that this needs to be addressed, the Town responded. Collingwood Today carried the official message.

The Town’s advice to residents: check your sump pump. Make sure your roof leaders drain to your lawn. Limit your showers. Hold off on the laundry. Watch your backwater valve.

No kidding.

A sixty-eight-year-old plant is discharging raw sewage into Georgian Bay, and the public-facing solution is a household hygiene checklist. That is not a plan. It is a deflection — a way of converting an infrastructure failure into a personal responsibility, so that the institution that owns the plant does not have to own the problem.

This Pollution Is Not Benign

It is tempting to treat all of this as an accounting matter — cubic metres, capacity thresholds, line items. It is not. What goes into the bay does not stay in the bay, and it does not stay abstract.

Is there anyone reading this paper who has not been touched by cancer? Who is not, or does not love, someone who has faced it? That is not rhetoric. It is the lived experience of nearly every family in this community.

The water carries more than bacteria. It carries pharmaceuticals, hormones, heavy metals, microplastics, and the class of industrial compounds known as PFAS — the “forever chemicals” — none of which conventional treatment removes, and none of which provincial testing is even required to look for. These are precisely the exposures that research increasingly ties to chronic disease.

Consider Parkinson’s. It is the fastest-growing neurological disease in the world. And the research is increasingly clear that it is overwhelmingly environmental in origin — studies attribute as much as 90 per cent of cases not to genetics but to environmental exposure: pesticides, industrial solvents, and contaminants of exactly the kind that move through water systems. We are not discharging an inconvenience into Georgian Bay. We are discharging a long-term threat to human health into the source of our own drinking water.

This is why “check your sump pump” is not merely inadequate. It is an insult.

The $300 Million Question

Suppose we accept all of this. Suppose Collingwood resolves, on its own, to build the new plant it needs. Two problems arrive immediately — and the first is the one nobody wants to say out loud: even if we could afford it, where would we put it? There is no site within Collingwood’s boundaries that works. A real plant needs land, and an outfall reaching well out into open Nottawasaga Bay, far from the drinking-water intake. That alone pushes this beyond Collingwood’s borders. It is, by its very nature, a regional project.

But set the site problem aside and look only at the money, because the money is decisive on its own.

A new wastewater treatment plant is, at the very minimum, a $300 million undertaking. Finance $300 million over 25 years at 4.5 per cent and the bill is roughly $20 million every year. Collingwood, on its own, is about 30,000 people — call it 15,000 households. Divide it out and every home in this town carries roughly $1,350 a year — that is an extra $112 a month — on top of your current water bill, for twenty-five years. And that is the optimistic figure. It pays for the plant alone: not the outfall pipe, not the forcemain network, not a single day of operating the thing.

The Water Treatment Plant: “It Will Cost You Nothing”

If the wastewater plant is the failure you can see, the water treatment plant is the one being hidden — behind an accounting story so tidy it should make you angry.

Here is what we were told. Collingwood’s drinking-water plant — the Raymond A. Barker Water Treatment Plant — is being expanded at a total cost of about $270 million. The province is covering roughly $150 million of it through the Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund. New Tecumseth, which buys Collingwood water, carries about 63 per cent of the remaining net cost. Collingwood’s own share is about $44.4 million. And that $44.4 million, we were assured, would cost ratepayers nothing — because it would be paid for entirely by development charges. Growth pays for growth. No debenture. No tax levy. A minimum increase to your water bill (18%). The Town’s existing long-term debt would be retired by 2034, and not a dollar of new debenture debt was issued in 2024 or 2025.

It is a beautiful story, but it is smoke. The Town’s own numbers destroy it. Three of them, in particular.

1. The development charges that are not coming

The entire promise rests on one assumption: that development charges — the fees builders pay on new construction — will roll in fast enough to cover the $44.4 million. So look at what those fees have actually done.

In 2021, Collingwood collected $12.85 million in development charges. In 2022, $6.10 million. In 2023, $3.73 million. By 2024, organic collections — the real fees on real new construction, stripped of one-time rental prepayments — had fallen to roughly $2 million. That is a collapse of about 84 per cent in three years, settling toward a floor of perhaps $1.5 million a year. Building permits are already down. And in 2025, the Town actually cut its water-treatment-plant development-charge rates — lowering the very revenue it claims will fund the plant.

Take a drive around town and try to find the vast wave of development that is supposed to pay for all this. It is not there. We have no significant new land to bring on, and we are in a building recession. The development-charge engine the entire plan depends on has stalled. To make matters worse, the reserve is draining far faster than it fills — $11.9 million flowed out of the development-charge reserve in 2024 against just $4.7 million coming in. Two and a half times as much out as in.

2. The debt the Town does not call debt

When development charges don’t cover the bill, the bill does not vanish. It just stops being called a development charge and becomes something else: debt.

Only about 21 per cent of Collingwood’s real water obligation shows up in the column the Town labels “debt.” The $44.4 million water-plant share sits off to the side, hidden behind the development-charge assumption. Add it to the $12.1 million the Town does acknowledge, and the real obligation is roughly $56.5 million — about 4.7 times what the Town calls its debt.

3. The bill that lands on you

So who actually pays? You do. It arrives, as it always does, on your water bill.

Under the Town’s approved rate plan, the typical household water-and-wastewater bill already climbs from about $1,182 in 2026 to $1,400 in 2030 — an 18 per cent increase. But when the development-charge fantasy collapses and the $44.4 million is financed as a debenture on the rate base — which is exactly what the numbers above say will happen — that same bill rises to about $1,685 by 2030. That is a 43 per cent increase in five years: roughly $503 more per household, every year, beginning in 2029 when the plant comes online and the development-charge reserve has already run dry, which is forecasted to be around 2028.

One more fabricated picture

This is the pattern, again. We are told the plant will cost us nothing. We are shown good management, and growth that pays for itself. And then, quietly, the bill arrives — because the growth was never coming, the reserve was always draining, and the debt was always going to be ours.

Where the Resistance Really Comes From

So who is actually against this MSC? The easy answer is the politicians — the mayors and councilors who bristled at not being “consulted.” But that is the wrong answer. Councilors come and go, they are the talking heads; we can replace every one of them in October.

Look instead at this chart. This is the Town of Collingwood — and it is a masterpiece of bureaucracy.

A community of fewer than 25,000 people, administered through four layers of management and nine directors — including, remarkably, two separate Directors of Finance, and a fire service carrying both a chief and a deputy chief on six-figure pay. A workforce of 270 full-time-equivalent positions — 352 people counting seasonal and part-time — of whom 72 earn more than $100,000 a year, under a Chief Administrative Officer paid more than a quarter of a million dollars. No private-sector organization of this size would ever be built this way, because no private sector organization could afford to be built this way.

This is an organization closed to change and resistant to innovation. You find this only in government — and there is a reason. In a business, money, efficiency, optimization, and accountability are the measures of success. In a structure like this one, they are not measured at all. Nothing in the design rewards doing more with less, because nothing in the design has to.

That is why the opposition will never announce itself honestly. It will not say “this will cost us positions.” It will say the process was rushed, the consultation inadequate, the jurisdiction unclear, the timing wrong. It will commission a study. It will run out the clock. The language will always be procedural. The motive will always be preservation.

Understand this and the whole pattern snaps into focus. The rosy video. The “we weren’t consulted.” The fourth environmental assessment. The sump-pump checklist. None of it is stupidity. All of it is an institution protecting itself.

People say: government is not a business. It is the reflexive defence, and it is nonsense. No one is asking the Town to turn a profit. But the Town of Collingwood is a $198-million-a-year organization — $71 million in operating costs and $127 million in capital in 2026 alone — and its entire reason to exist is to deliver one thing: the most efficient, effective services your tax dollars can buy. Water, sewage, roads, recreation, safety. That is the job. “Not a business” is not a licence to be unaccountable — it is the opposite.

And here is the final point, and it is the simplest one. You could remove a hundred people from this organization — a hundred positions out of three hundred and fifty — and the only thing you would lose is bureaucracy. At a fully loaded cost of roughly $100,000 each, that is $10 million a year.

And here is the hardest part. There is no one to blame but us. We elect the councils. We nod at the rosy videos. We let the studies pile up and the bills arrive, and we look away. The structure survives because we permit it to.

The question for me is what do we as a community have to do to change this self-perpetuating paradigm because it is ugly?

The Town of The Blue Mountains: A Water and Wastewater Basket Case

Last week, Peter Bordignon — the current Deputy Mayor of The Blue Mountains, and a candidate for Mayor this fall — sat down with me and a group of concerned and informed community members for a candid discussion of how an MSC would address the Town’s financial and engineering problems. It was a positive, intelligent and very thoughtful dialogue.

That meeting points to the one real difference between the two communities at the center of this crisis. Collingwood is still telling its residents that everything is under control. The Blue Mountains has stopped pretending. Its wastewater problem is now so plainly beyond what the town can carry on its own that the conversation here has already turned to the solution — a Municipal Services Corporation.

A Pattern of Overruns, Not an Accident

TBM is a very small town trying to address very big, complex problems and the result has been a history of poor decision making and nonexistent project management. Examples include…

● The Thornbury Wastewater Treatment Plant Phase 1A expansion was approved at $18 million. It was delivered at $34.5 million — a 92 per cent overrun.

● The Craigleith Lift Station and Bay Street Forcemain bundle was approved at $34.79 million. At approximately $32 million council was told only two plants were completed

● Mill street, the 3^rd plant is now projected to cost an estimated $19 to $20M more.

Plants That Are Out of Room

TBM owns and operates two wastewater treatment plants, plus twelve sewage pumping stations across the municipality.

The Craigleith plant serves the resort corridor. A $45 million upgrade is on the table — and TBM has paused it, because it cannot afford the bill. The plant itself still has room; this is a town stopping to think because the money isn’t there.

The Thornbury plant was expanded to 5,330 cubic meters — a project just completed in 2026, on budget and under cost estimate. But it was a short-term fix, not a solution. The plant had already reached 74 per cent of design capacity in 2024, and it exceeds its design peak flows in wet weather. The next phase, Phase 1B, which would lift it toward 7,080 cubic metres a day, remains unfunded and still in engineering. Again, the issue is money.

The Verdict

Serial wastewater overruns, a debt line heading for $72 million on a tax base under 13,000, driven first and foremost by wastewater. One plant already past 74 per cent of capacity with its next phase unfunded, and another whose upgrade the town has paused because it cannot afford it. To make matters worse there is a collection network leaking an unknown volume of sewage into the ground. This is not a town with a manageable wastewater problem. It is a town that cannot, on its own, manage wastewater at all.

The difference — and it matters — driven under the leader of Peter Bordignon, is that The Blue Mountains is taking control. Its leadership is at the table, working through the implications, looking squarely at the one mechanism that can carry infrastructure of this scale: a regional Municipal Services Corporation. That is exactly the posture this crisis requires.

Clearview Township: A System With No System

Clearview is where the argument stops being theoretical. More than any municipality in this region, Clearview proves that the water and wastewater here already function as one regional system — supplied, operated, and drained straight across every municipal boundary — while being governed as four separate islands. Trace where Clearview’s water comes from and where its sewage goes, and the map of pipes makes a mockery of the map of governments. Clearview does not really run its own water and wastewater. It depends on Collingwood, on Wasaga Beach, on a developer, and on the province — and nobody is responsible for the whole.

Stayner: A Town That Ran Out of Water

In March 2023, Clearview told every landowner in the Stayner settlement area that the municipal water supply had reached capacity. Building permits were frozen. They remain frozen — and will until a new plant is commissioned, expected in early 2027. Stayner, the township’s largest and fastest-growing community, has been effectively shut to new homes for over two years.

The fix is the Klondike Park Road well project — about $70 million. Clearview could not finance it alone. It took a provincial grant, a mortgage-secured County loan, and, remarkably, a requirement that the township pre-sell its future water by getting developers to pre-pay their charges before it could even apply.

Read the structure and the fragility is obvious. The County loan is short and variable-rate, secured by a first mortgage on the plant itself — default and the County has first claim on the asset. Repayment leans on developer pre-payments arriving on schedule, in the middle of a building slowdown. And because water is funded by rates and development charges rather than property tax, it is the ratepayer who ultimately backstops the whole thing.

The Pipeline That Passes Them By

Now look north. A ~60-kilometre pipeline carries treated Collingwood drinking water across Clearview to New Tecumseth — built in 1999 specifically to supply Honda’s expansion in Alliston. It crosses the township to serve somewhere else. Within Clearview, only the small New Lowell system is connected to it; Stayner and almost everything else runs on groundwater wells — the same wells that ran dry.

So treated Collingwood water flows straight through Clearview to Alliston, while Stayner runs out and spends $70 million drilling for more. And the demand case behind Collingwood’s own $270-million plant expansion — of which New Tecumseth carries 63 per cent — leans heavily on Alliston’s growth, which was to be supercharged by Honda’s $15-billion EV expansion. That project was indefinitely suspended in 2025–26. The pipes are being sized for growth that is, right now, evaporating.

Nottawa: The Whole Crisis in One Village

And then there is Nottawa — a single village that contains the entire regional failure in miniature.

For fifteen years, across councils in 2006, 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2020, Nottawa residents were told the same thing: a large subdivision (the DelZotto lands, now Georgian Communities) would finally bring municipal water and sewer to the whole village. Councillors called servicing the village “the responsible thing to do.” A Ministry-of-Environment-approved Environmental Assessment recommended watering Nottawa by tapping the Collingwood pipeline — and a connection was installed near the village back in the late 1990s. The plan was clear, endorsed, and physically half-built.

Then, in April 2024, it was quietly reversed. Report PW-009-2024 made two decisions. First, the development would no longer draw Collingwood water from the pipeline at all; instead, Clearview would drill new local wells (expanding the McKean system) — pulling more from the very aquifer beneath a village that residents say already has dry and contaminated wells. Second: Council resolved “to not proceed with servicing the remaining Village of Nottawa with full municipal services” — citing the financial burden. The sewage would go to Collingwood’s wastewater plant; the existing village would be bypassed.

For the people who were promised those pipes for fifteen years, the cost of the broken promise is precise:

The per-house cost to existing residents jumps from roughly $43,000 to $159,000 (and in McKean, $29,200 to $110,000) — because the trunk pipes are re-routed around the village toward Batteaux instead of through it. Nearly $23 million of promised “community benefit” simply vanishes. Residents who held off replacing aging wells and septics for fifteen years because “pipes were coming” are now told they are on their own — and may face Ministry orders to remediate failing private systems.

So What Is the Motivation?

It looks like madness. It is not. It is what happens when every party optimizes its own narrow interest and the costs are pushed onto whoever has the least power to refuse.

The developer wants a water source it controls, cheaply and quickly — its own wells, rather than a contested, capital-heavy allocation negotiated out of Collingwood’s constrained plant. The township wants the growth and the development charges, but not the cost of servicing existing residents, so it keeps the profitable new subdivision and sheds the expensive village. Collingwood gets a paying sewage customer, with the developer covering the upgrades. Every party at the table comes out ahead. The losers are the people not at the table: the existing villagers, left on failing wells, and the shared aquifer, asked to give up still more water.

None of it is irrational for the individual actor. It is only insane for the region — because no one is optimizing the whole system, and no one’s job is the existing ratepayer rather than the next subdivision. So a village sits beside a pipe full of clean water and is told to drill into its own failing aquifer, a fifteen-year promise is erased on a spreadsheet, and the sewage is shipped to a plant that already overflows into Georgian Bay.

The Plants Clearview Does Not Run

The pattern holds on the wastewater side, and it gives the game away. Clearview owns two sewage treatment plants — Stayner (1984) and Creemore (2000) — and both are operated under contract by the Town of Collingwood. The regional utility this paper calls for is not hypothetical: a working fragment of it already exists, with Collingwood staff running a neighbour’s plants. These are aging facilities, too — the Stayner plant logged effluent-flowmeter failures in 2023 and an effluent-quality exceedance in 2024.

And Stayner’s growth has already outrun its own plant — so much so that Clearview is contractually committed to piping 2,500 cubic metres a day of its sewage into Wasaga Beach’s plant (more on the consequences when we reach Wasaga). One township’s growth, parked on another township’s plant.

The System View

Now total it up. New Lowell drinks Collingwood water. Stayner and Nottawa drink from a stressed local aquifer the Province had to spend $35 million to expand. Clearview’s two sewage plants are run by Collingwood. Nottawa’s sewage will be piped to Collingwood. Stayner’s overflow sewage is dumped on Wasaga Beach. The rescue cheques are written by Queen’s Park.

That is not a township managing its own water and wastewater. It is a node in a regional system that no one governs as a system — supplied by one neighbour, operated by another, drained into a third, and bailed out by the Province. Every actor optimizes its own fragment, and the collective result is duplicated cost, stranded infrastructure, broken promises, and sewage in the bay.

This is the case for a Municipal Services Corporation, written by one township — a single body that would water Nottawa from the pipe that already passes it. Today, no one is responsible for making that decision.

Wasaga Beach: A Problem Yet to Unfold

Drinking Water: A Plan to 2063

Wasaga Beach draws its water from seven wells in two fields, Jenetta Street and Veterans Way, tapping a deep, confined aquifer protected by low-permeability layers above. Supply is 31,415 cubic metres a day; 2022 maximum-day demand was 18,888 — about sixty per cent of capacity — and per-household demand has fallen for two decades. Sitting on a major aquifer, Wasaga’s fresh water supply is simply not in question.

Sources: Water Supply System Expansion Class EA Addendum (Ainley Group, 2023); WPCP Performance Report (OCWA, 2024).

Wastewater: The Same Trap as Everyone Else

Turn to sewage, and Wasaga rejoins the regional pattern. Its single Water Pollution Control Plant on Woodland Drive is rated at 15,433 cubic metres a day. On dry months it runs comfortably, but in wet weather the peaks climb fast — in April 2024, after 196 millimetres of rain, the daily peak hit roughly 78 per cent of rated capacity — and raw flows are rising year over year. The plant exceeded its rated capacity once already.

The plant as with all the others in the region is being patched, not expanded: a long list of capital repairs — UV system, biosolids, barscreen, pumps — keeps an aging facility running.

Wasaga Beach is committed to receiving an additional 2,500 cubic metres a day of Stayner’s sewage once development targets are reached; the forcemains between the two towns are already contracted.

Stayner’s input won’t take a decade to bite — it will consume essentially all of the plant’s remaining wet-weather margin on connection. After that, Wasaga’s own rising flows erase what little average-day room is left.

The upgrades Wasaga’s plant will need to absorb those flows have not been engineered or funded by either municipality.

Wasaga sits on a shallow, sensitive shoreline — a 14- kilometre swimming beach over a surface sand aquifer. Once capacity is reached there are no practical and environmentally acceptable options for expansion.

Let’s Do the Math: The Province’s Bill

Step back from the individual files and add up one number: what the Province of Ontario has had to put in just to keep this region’s water and wastewater functioning and growing. Not the municipalities’ own spending — only the provincial cheques, and only the recent, traceable ones.

More than $220 million in committed provincial funding — heading past a quarter of a billion dollars with the next application in the queue — for water and wastewater in four small municipalities, in roughly two years. That is not strategic investment. It is serial rescue: the Province stepping in, file by file, because four municipalities cannot plan or finance this infrastructure on their own. Every grant was applied for separately, justified separately, and announced separately. The reality for the province is that this is not feasible in the long term. The lack of planning, the waste, the overlapping and competition for scarce resources simply cannot continue.

You Don’t Build a Water Plant for Ten Years

There are two fundamental problems with how the government is funding these projects across the region.

1. You do not build water and wastewater infrastructure on a ten-year horizon. Major treatment plants are engineered for twenty-five to fifty years — that is the entire point of building at scale. You size a plant for a generation precisely so you are not back in the ground, and back at the bank, every decade. A plant built for ten years is not an investment. It is a down payment on the next emergency.

2. The second issue is the obvious lack of a regional systemic approach. The hard facts are that some of these projects would not be built at all if there was a regional plan that optimized need, technology, location, geography and environmental management.

Today, none of these issues are being managed. The provincial money catalogued earlier is being spent a decade at a time — each town funding a small increment of growth capacity, on its own, with the next expansion already looming before the concrete has cured.

This is not speculation. It is what the municipalities’ own documents and consultants say, plant by plant — and the wall they are heading for is the early-to-mid 2030s, on both dimensions that matter: capacity and physical space.

Read down that table and the failure is twofold, and each half is fatal on its own.

The first failure is horizon. Each municipality plans and funds project by project, to the next council term or the next grant deadline — never to the real thirty- to fifty-year demand curve a treatment plant is supposed to serve. So the money buys a decade, the plant fills, and the cycle restarts. By the mid-2030s, on their own numbers, all four are back where they started — except more is owed, more has been spent, and the sewage has kept flowing into Georgian Bay the entire time.

The second failure is space, and it is the one no cheque can fix. Even if these towns had the money to build a proper long-horizon plant, they have nowhere to put it. Collingwood’s wastewater plant is boxed in by the harbour, the escarpment, and built-out residential — it cannot be rebuilt where it stands. TBM’s Craigleith plant is pinned between Georgian Bay and development. Wasaga Beach’s plant cannot expand in its current location. You physically cannot build a generational facility on a landlocked site, so each town is forced into small patches on dead-end land — paying premium prices for solutions that were obsolete before they opened.

Part Two — What an MSC Is, and Why It Will Address Our Needs

3 Driving Forces

Force 1. Scalability and Regional Infrastructure

Wastewater Systems

Municipal councils do not think about infrastructure. They defer it, underfund it, and hope the problem belongs to the next council. The evidence across this region is unambiguous — overruns, bypasses, aging pipes, and treatment plants running at capacity while the population keeps growing. There is no plan.

The first mandate of an MSC is to fix that. It builds a ten-year regional infrastructure plan that maps every asset, assesses every failure point, and sequences the investment required to repair what is broken and build what the region needs. Not a study. Not a report for a shelf. A plan with capital commitments, engineering timelines, and accountability to a board whose only job is to execute it.

Apply that discipline to wastewater and the scale of what we are facing comes into focus. Across the region we are running, in effect, six wastewater treatment plants on life support.

Each one is up against a different wall:

• Collingwood’s plant is physically boxed in, harbour to the north, escarpment to the south, neighbourhoods on either side, with nowhere left to grow. Even if a new site could be found, the treated effluent would still have to be carried past the harbour spit and out into the deep water of Nottawasaga Bay — a marine outfall several kilometres long that, on its own, would run on the order of $100 million or more.

• Wasaga’s WPCP discharges its treated effluent to the Nottawasaga River, which empties into Georgian Bay beside Beach Area 1 — the main beachfront at the heart of the town, and the busiest stretch of the 14 km beach that drives the local economy.

• Thornbury (TBM) was just expanded to 5,330 m³/day at a cost of roughly $34.5 million — yet the next phase, to 7,080 m³/day, is already needed and remains unfunded.

• Craigleith (TBM) — the problem is its collection system, not the plant. A $45-million program of lift-station, trunk-sewer and forcemain upgrades is needed to handle wet-weather flows (sewage backed up into Craigleith homes during a 2023 storm) and to service the resort corridor’s growth. It has been paused because the town can’t afford the bill.

• Stayner (Clearview) is a 41-year-old inland plant whose growth flows have already outrun it — so much that Clearview is committed to piping 2,500 cubic metres a day of its sewage to Wasaga Beach rather than expand it.

• Creemore (Clearview) is a small inland plant on the Mad River, with the limited headroom of a village system and no funded plan for the growth the township keeps approving.

This is precisely what no single municipality can solve on its own, and exactly what an MSC is built to do. Planning at regional scale, it does not patch six dying plants one budget cycle at a time. It asks the question none of the four towns is structured to ask: where, across the whole region, should treatment capacity actually be — on a site with the land to grow and the deep water to discharge — and how do we sequence the move there. One regional plan, one set of decisions, sized to the next generation rather than the next election.

The Status Quo: A Bill That Will Never Be Paid

Start by doing the arithmetic on the path we are on. If each of these plants is rebuilt on its own — the only option available to four municipalities acting separately — the minimum price today is roughly $300 million per plant, and as we have already seen, that is a conservative number. Add them up across the region and you are looking at something on the order of $2 billion.

No municipality here, or all of them combined, can carry $2 billion. For the go-it-alone approach to work, the Ontario government would have to cover the overwhelming majority of it — on the order of 80 to 90 per cent, or somewhere between $1.6 and $1.8 billion. And remember: this is one small corner of the province. The same crisis — aging plants, broken pipes, growth outrunning capacity — is playing out in dozens of regions across Ontario at the same time.

So ask the honest question: does anyone realistically believe a cheque of $1.6 to $1.8 billion is coming for this region alone? It is not. Which means the true outcome of going it alone is not a row of rebuilt plants. It is nothing — more studies, more bypasses, more patching, while the bill compounds and Georgian Bay keeps paying the price.

The Regional Solution: One Plant, Not Six

This is the second question an MSC exists to ask, and no single town is structured to ask it: what does a genuine regional solution actually look like?

Instead of six aging plants on six constrained sites, imagine one. A single, purpose-built regional treatment plant on a properly chosen site in deep water north of Thornbury — with the region’s wastewater conveyed to it and discharged safely into deep, open water, far from any drinking-water intake or swimming beach. One modern plant, with the most modern technology and screening that exists, sized for the next fifty years, doing the work that six failing ones cannot.

The numbers move decisively in the region’s favour. Against the roughly $2 billion it would cost to rebuild six plants separately, a single regional facility could save somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. And the result would not merely be cheaper — it could be world-class: modern treatment, real capacity, and a deep-water outfall that finally takes the discharge out of the harbours, rivers, and beaches it now fouls.

The timing is achievable. With an MSC formed and planning begun, construction could start around 2030 — roughly the moment the existing plants hit the wall.

That is the whole choice in a sentence. The status quo is a fantasy that depends on a cheque no one will ever write. The MSC is a plan the region can actually build.

Part B — Water Systems

If we set out to design a system to be more inept, more disentangled, more suboptimized we would still fall below the bar that has been set for how fresh water is managed in this region.

The Need for a Regional Water Plan

Everything said about wastewater applies to drinking water — and on the water side the case is even stronger, because here the regional system already physically exists. A region’s drinking water should be planned as one system: a single assessment of every source, every plant, every pipe and booster station, and every community’s demand to full build-out, with one sequenced plan to supply it.

That is not what we have. Four municipalities plan their water in isolation — one expands a plant, one opts out of paying for it, one freezes building permits, one drills its own wells — and no one is responsible for the whole. The first mandate of an MSC on the water side is the same as on wastewater: build a single regional water plan that maps every source and asset, projects demand to a real horizon, and sequences supply so that no community runs dry and no plant is oversized, stranded, or duplicated.

The Current Mess

Start with what is already true. Collingwood’s Raymond A. Barker Water Treatment Plant is not, in any meaningful sense, a Collingwood plant. It is a regional plant. It already supplies New Tecumseth through a roughly 60-kilometre pipeline, The Blue Mountains through the Mountain Road Booster Station, and Clearview’s New Lowell community. The pipes already cross every municipal boundary in this region.

And yet it is governed as four disconnected decisions, each made in isolation:

Collingwood identified a capacity problem in 2019, did nothing for two years, ran the plant past 80 per cent of capacity, and was forced to freeze development with an Interim Control Bylaw. And what is now underway is not really an “expansion” at all — at $270 million, up from a first estimate of about $65 million, it is effectively the construction of an entirely new plant. Even that proceeded only because the province stepped in with roughly $150 million.

The Blue Mountains is connected to that same plant and buys Collingwood drinking water — up to 1,250 cubic metres a day, with provision for more — through the Mountain Road Booster Station. Yet in January 2024 it opted out of the expansion, paying none of the $270 million. A customer, not a partner. Its own system is nearly out of room — about 2,900 connection units left of 16,357 system-wide, and the fast-growing resort corridor down to roughly 345 — and when a Collingwood water main broke in December 2025, TBM had to isolate its system to protect its supply. The infrastructure connecting the two towns exists. The shared planning does not.

Clearview lives the contradiction most sharply. Its New Lowell community drinks Collingwood water off the regional pipeline, while a few kilometres away Stayner runs on its own municipal wells — wells that hit capacity in March 2023, froze building permits across the town, and forced a $70-million well project that, again, only proceeded with a provincial rescue of $35 million.

Wasaga Beach is the exception that proves the point. Drawing on a deep, protected aquifer, it has planned its water supply all the way to 2063 — proof that long-horizon water planning is entirely possible in this region when someone chooses to do it.

So here is the conclusion, and it is almost embarrassing in its simplicity. The regional water infrastructure already exists — a regional plant, sixty kilometres of pipeline, booster stations, and supply agreements spanning four municipalities. What is missing is not pipe. And it is not even, strictly, the will —the problem is that every town is working hard at its own water problem trying to optimize within its own boundaries. One town expands the plant and carries the cost; its neighbour buys the water and opts out of the bill; a third drills its own wells while drinking the first town’s supply. Every one of those decisions might seem rational within strictly defined borders but the sum of them leaves the region fractured and in pain.

To be clear, full integration cannot happen overnight. The new Collingwood plant will not be operational until 2029, and a unified regional water system can only be built around it once it is running. But that is exactly why the planning must begin now. The MSC, the regional water plan, and the integration framework all have to be in place before the plant comes online — not cobbled together afterward. That is the gap a regional water plan, executed by an MSC, is built to close, and the time to start closing it is now.

Force 2. Long-Term Capital Financing

The second fundamental benefit of a major utility like the MSC is its capacity to finance infrastructure over the long term — to spread the cost of assets built to last fifty years across the decades that actually use them.

Ontario law limits municipal debentures to a maximum term of 15 to 20 years. An MSC, structured as a utility corporation, can issue infrastructure debentures over 40 years. That difference is decisive.

And this is what changes everything about who pays. Under the go-it-alone approach, the region waits, hat in hand, for a provincial cheque that will never come — and so nothing happens. Under an MSC, the region does not wait. It finances each project itself, at utility scale and over the long term, and pays for it directly through water and wastewater rates.

One of the concerns people voiced was losing control of their water system. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We don’t have control of our water system. By removing the Ontario government from the equation, for the first time the region controls its own destiny instead of pleading for a rescue that is not coming.

These towns have already committed to upgrading their systems, and that committed water and wastewater debt will be transfered to the MSC to be financed over the long term:

• Collingwood — about $44 million, its share of the Raymond A. Barker Water Treatment Plant expansion.

• The Blue Mountains — about $32 million for the Craigleith lift station and Bay-Grey works now in execution.

• Clearview — about $35 million for the Klondike well project, net of the provincial grant.

• Wasaga Beach — nothing today; its upgrade is a future need that has not yet been incurred.

In all, roughly $111 million in already-committed water and wastewater debt — each town’s own — moves onto the MSC’s balance sheet, where it can be financed over 40 years instead of 20. Let me say this one more time, because it is at the essence of everything we are talking about. The debt moves from the town to the utility, from a short term debenture to a long term… the result is you will pay less.

Force 3. Professional Talent, Quality, and Focus

Finally and critically, what sets an MSC apart from the small, stretched teams in each town is what it brings to the table.

None of these municipalities — not one of the four — can attract, afford, or retain the calibre of engineering and project-management talent that water and wastewater infrastructure demands. What each gets instead is a young engineer learning on the job — practising, on a $50 million capital project, skills they have never applied before. The overruns are not surprising. They are inevitable.

An MSC changes that equation entirely. A regional utility serving all four communities recruits differently. It attracts the fifty-year-old project manager who has built treatment plants, managed contractors, and delivered complex infrastructure a dozen times over. It creates the conditions for mentorship — where junior engineers learn from seasoned professionals rather than from their own expensive mistakes. Talent follows the mandate, and the mandate of an MSC is singular: run the infrastructure competently, and nothing else.

There is one more thing that sets an MSC apart, and it may matter most of all: who runs it. An organization of this size and complexity is led by people who have run a major utility before — people with the education, the skill, and the experience to oversee an operation on this scale. That is leadership a single small town cannot attract, cannot afford, and could not keep busy enough to justify. Four towns competing for it separately will lose. One regional utility offering it a real mandate will win.

And above the management sits a board built for the task: professional experts in engineering, finance, and investment, working alongside representatives of the owners — the member towns and townships. The expertise to run the system and the accountability to the communities that own it, in the same room. That is not how any of the four municipalities is governed today. It is how infrastructure of this magnitude has to be.

Let’s Grasp this Opportunity

We have now walked through four towns, and the striking thing is how alike their troubles are. Collingwood insists everything is under control while raw sewage reaches the bay and a $300-million plant looms. The Blue Mountains is carrying overruns and debt a town of 13,000 cannot absorb. Clearview cannot supply its own water, run its own sewage plants, or treat its own growth. Wasaga Beach faces the same trap, just a few years behind. Four towns, one crisis, repeated four times.

And the cause is not the one people assume. It is not a lack of money — the province is already writing the cheques, $35 million here, $70 million there. The problem is structural. Four municipalities, each attempting to optimize their resources within their borders unable to solve a problem that does not respect those borders. The water and the sewage already move across the map as one system. Only the governance pretends otherwise.

A Municipal Services Corporation ends the pretence. It builds to a regional scale, one right-sized system instead of six undersized plants. It finances infrastructure over the decades recognizing the tenure of the assets, rather than cramming the cost onto one town’s tax bill in a fraction of the time. And it puts the work in the hands of people who have done it before — seasoned management and a professional board — instead of young engineers and a council with a 4 year vision. Scale, financing, talent. Each town is short all three. One regional utility has all three by design.

None of this is theoretical any longer. The bills are already arriving, and they will keep arriving. The Ontario Government has come up with a plan that is timely, capable, and provides us with not just financial relief, but the technical, managerial, and organizational relief that we need to address our environmental and infrastructure crisis before it deepens any further. A Municipal Services Corporation is that plan. So, Brian kudos to you.

Read this. Then tell us where you stand. I have enclosed a survey that will take you one minute to fill and the results are important and they will be shared.

Take the follow-up survey

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It takes two minutes. It asks who owns the mess, what to do about Mill Street and Craigleith, and what this town needs from its next council. Your answers are already shaping this work — and the more of them I have, the harder they are to ignore, at the council table and at the ballot box.

If you haven’t yet, add your voice: take the two-minute survey.

Then read on. What follows is built partly on what you’ve already told me.

The Town of The Blue Mountains has a Conundrum.

It was created by the departure of two of its most senior staff: Monica Quinlan, director of corporate and financial services, and Tim Murawsky, chief building official and acting director of planning and development.

To understand the conundrum you must first understand the four interactive forces that drive the Town of The Blue Mountains’ administrative functions. But first, some clarity.

Last month I documented what I saw inside a Blue Mountains council chamber. The conclusion was not about a single bad meeting. It was about an institution that has lost its capability to solve problems, that is filled with infighting, finger-pointing, guile, and just plain incompetence. Sounds harsh, maybe.

To understand my rant you need to recognize both the perceived problem which is what we focus on and then the real problem, the one that got us here.

The perceived problem is the growing mountain of debt. The debt is real and it is already authorized.

The town carries $57.31 million in committed wastewater capital debt by 2028. At 4.5% over twenty years — a current Ontario municipal rate — that alone costs $4.41 million a year to service.

Sitting in planning, unmentioned to ratepayers, is a $45 million Craigleith treatment plant — above and beyond the committed bundle, not folded into it.

And then there is the $15.8 million Craigleith fire hall we couldn’t live without.

Add it together — the committed wastewater borrowing, the Craigleith plant, the fire hall — and the number is $118.11 million. That figure does not appear anywhere in the town’s books. It has never been presented to ratepayers as a single obligation, because the town has never assembled it as one.

That is the problem on paper. But the real problem came in two directions.

• From management, which I would frame as arrogant incompetence.

• From council, a body best described as a ship without a rudder.

It was an astonishing scene to watch, and again it came in two parts.

Council directed staff to explain a capital overrun in December. Five months later no answer was delivered. The CFO explained to council that this was a really hard process and doubted she could deliver a response quickly. Since I was able to do an analysis of the problem in about 2 hours, you decide what was going on.

And then the second part. The CAO is responsible for the administration. The fact that it was not managed falls on his shoulders, and that should carry crushing weight.

Prior to the meeting I attended council gave him the task of coming back with a report outlining the advantages and possible disadvantages of joining a Municipal Services Corporation.

His report runs seven pages. It never states the town’s wastewater debt. It never names the $4.41 million in annual debt service. It never mentions the $45 million Craigleith plant, or what any of it does to the water bill. He was asked whether this concept would address a problem that threatens house sales, property values, and ultimately tax revenues — and wrote as if the problem did not exist.

Worse, he was holding the answer. His own report confirms the MSC delivers exactly what TBM needs: relief through moving the debt off TBM’s books and up to the utility, professional governance, and capital planning scaled across municipal boundaries. Then he recommended against it.

He also ignored the one ally who matters. Council directed him to work with MPP Brian Saunderson, who is advancing MSC legislation at Queen’s Park. Saunderson appears once, in the background section, and never again.

Debt Is the Symptom

The debt is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be managed. What we need to talk about is how.

The debt is the symptom. The institution is the disease.

When the $19M shortfall surfaced, members of council expressed outrage. Their message to staff: we were blindsided; incompetence and dysfunction reigned. Not one part of that analysis focused on their own — that is, Council’s — mismanagement, lack of fiduciary structure, and overwhelming hubris.

I can only imagine that this cannot be a place where staff look forward to going to work. Failure, frustration, lack of accountability, lack of a financial strategy — and added to this happy tale, you have me loudly exclaiming that the operating costs are out of control and there are too many bodies for a town this size.

Some Feedback From the Survey

Last week I posted a survey, and it is worth looking at some of the results:

· 83% of respondents are deeply concerned by TBM’s financial trajectory

· 44% believe staff and 56% believe council bear prime responsibility for the overrun

· In terms of Mill Street and Craigleith, 19% believe council should keep Mill Street and pause Craigleith, and 57% believe everything should stop and the new council should figure things out

· In terms of council, 57% believe a new majority with fresh direction is needed and 38% believe a clean slate is required after the next election

That election is four months away.

All put together, if you are competent, you must be dusting off your resume. The best people will leave this ship before it sinks and this very likely includes the CAO who has to be feeling insecure.

But there is a problem that has to be addressed now and here lies the conundrum.

What TBM needs is an experienced Director of Finance to get hold of the town’s finances. That is the test now in front of council. That creates the next problem. The two senior roles now have to be filled — and under the current rules of engagement, the responsibility for filling them lies with the CAO.

The conundrum is driven by…

• a mayor rarely in the chair — citing her duties as Warden of Grey County — who has stated she is not running, meaning a new broom takes office in October;

• a council seemingly incapable of making decisions that will probably be dramatically changed after the next election;

• a CAO under intense personal heat over performance, which the next mayor will address; and

• an organization unsettled enough that, predictably, several more people will bail before the election.

At this point, no competent financial executive in their right mind would quit a secure job to come to TBM.

Let’s start thinking ahead

This needs a complete rethinking of strategy and priorities. Given the mess and the lack of stability, my recommendation would be to go to the Town’s external auditor and have them bring in a temporary accountant to manage the town’s finances until the election — and allow the new mayor and council to be part of the decision.

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The responses that did come in were striking. But I want a real sample before I publish them.

So here’s the survey on its own — no article to re-read, no subscription needed to answer. Eight questions. Two minutes. Share it with anyone in Collingwood or The Blue Mountains who pays a water bill.

I’ll publish the results next week.

Take the survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeNrL3ErkqSC6NMkY9KxHh7UeuR4WnHrJofAiAPn2TEt7D5iQ/viewform

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The Debt: Past, Near Future, and the Craigleith Bomb

TBM’s wastewater debt did not arrive all at once. It accumulated in layers — and most ratepayers have only been shown one of them.

$19 Million and Counting

The Craigleith Main Sewage Lift Station, the Mill Street Sewage Pumping Station, and the Bay–Grey linear works were bundled into a single $34.79 million contract. At $32 million spent — nearly the entire budget — the contractor reported that Craigleith and Bay–Grey were complete. What remained for Mill Street: $2–3 million. What Mill Street was projected to require: $19–20 million more. A $34.79 million contract heading toward $51–52 million — a 50% overrun.

How did TBM end up here? It happened because the system failed at every level.

Failure Level 1: The Contractor

A project of this magnitude runs on milestones, deliverables, and cost checkpoints. The alarms were never raised. Serious questions remain unanswered: Where did TBM find this company? Who checked their references? Why weren’t local engineering firms hired?

Failure Level 2: Internal Project Management

Staff were TBM’s eyes on this project. Their job was to monitor the contractor, track the budget, and report to council. The project began in May 2022. Council did not learn of the overrun until November 2025. Three and a half years. No milestone reports. No financial updates. No one, formally, with their name on the line. The most charitable explanation: no one thought it was their job.

Failure Level 3: Council

Every dollar spent on every project in this town is authorized by the people sitting around that council table. They approved the budget. They approved the contract. They established no milestone reporting. They required no financial checkpoints. They asked no one — for 3.5 years — whether the project was on budget. When the bill arrived, they expressed outrage.

That outrage is misplaced. The outrage belongs with the ratepayers who elected them — and the ratepayers who didn’t vote.

The Craigleith Bomb

Above and beyond everything already committed, TBM is already paying consultants to plan a project ratepayer haven’t been told is coming. The Craigleith Wastewater Treatment Plant — built in 1984, overwhelmed by growth — requires approximately $45 million in capital work to stay functional through the near term. Not to replace it. To sustain it. The town’s own Wastewater Master Plan, completed June 2025, presents no legitimate future options.

Add it together: $57.31 million in committed wastewater debt, plus $45 million in Craigleith obligations waiting in the wings. That is over $100 million in wastewater capital — and none of it, in any meaningful way, has been presented to the people who will pay for it.

What This Means for Your Water Bill

This will be paid for in your water bill.

Today, the annual water and wastewater bill per connected household runs at approximately $1,045. In 2027, when the W&W bundle debt service lands, that bill jumps to $1,927. By 2030, when the Craigleith WWTP obligations are added, it reaches $2,619.

That is a 150% increase in five years — on approximately 5,000 connected properties across The Blue Mountains

.Annual water & wastewater bill per connected household. No intervention scenario. Per household (~5,000 connected properties).

This is the no-intervention scenario. This is what staying the course looks like on your utility bill — before a dollar of the broader tax impact is counted.

What an MSC Does — and Why TBM Needs It

MPP for Simcoe Grey is Brian Saunderson. He is creating legislation for a Municipal Services Corporation under the direction of Minister Rob Flack,. The bill is before Queen’s Park and is expected to reach third reading before the House rises for the summer.

TBM is in Grey County, but the legislation allows municipalities to cross county boundaries to participate. But council must vote to join.

Brian Saunderson is sending TBM’s sinking ship a life raft.

An Msc does 3 things…

1. Manage Long-Term Capital Financing

Under the MSC, TBM’s water and wastewater assets transfer — and the debt transfers with them.

All $57.31 million. Off TBM’s books. Gone.

TBM’s annual debt service charge of $4.41 million disappears from the municipal budget entirely.

2. Provide Professional Talent, Quality and Focus

A municipality of 13,900 people cannot attract or retain the engineering talent water and wastewater infrastructure demands. What it gets instead is a young engineer learning on a $50 million capital project for the first time. The overruns are not surprising. They are inevitable.

An MSC recruits differently. It attracts the 50-year-old project manager who has built treatment plants a dozen times over. The mandate is singular: run the infrastructure competently, nothing else.

3. Scalability and a Plan

Municipal councils think municipally. Each town solves its own problem, builds its own plant, sends the bill to its own taxpayers. It is the most expensive, least effective way to run infrastructure.

An MSC asks a different question: not what does TBM need, but what does this region need — and what is the most intelligent way to build it?

Six Questions. Your Answers Matter.

Council is moving forward. But the public meeting that was proposed hasn’t happened. Your voice belongs in this conversation — before the August 13 deadline, not after.

Please take two minutes to answer five questions. The results will be published. They will be shared with council.

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I went to hear Don May make his presentation on the Municipal Services Corporation.

The following represents my analysis of the meeting in 3 parts, but with one conclusion.

John Milne: A Professional Presentation

John Milne, a local resident delivered a professional, well-prepared presentation. Charts. Data. A concrete motion. He was asking about a $19.7 million sewage infrastructure overrun that council had formally directed staff to explain back in December 2025.

Five months later, the answers still haven’t come.

Milne proposed a June 1 deadline to force a response. Staff said they couldn’t meet it. It was settled on June 8, but the CFO seemed to be making it quite clear that was an unreasonable time frame as this was a very complex request.

That was the first thing I learned sitting in that room.

What the Room Got Wrong

Here is what is strange about the request and the lack of an appropriate response. Everyone in that room knew the Mill Street project hasn’t started. $19.7 million hasn’t been spent. It won’t hit the books until 2027 or 2028 at the earliest. And yet somehow, the conversation stayed fixed on that number — as if it were the whole story.

It isn’t. It isn’t close.

The CFO was in the room. Monica Quinlan sat there while Milne made his case. She said nothing. She did not tell him — or council — that $19.7 million is not the problem. It is the next problem. The current problem is already on the books, already in execution, already accruing debt service.

She let a materially incomplete picture stand. Unchallenged.

At the meeting, Deputy Mayor Peter Bordignon and Councillor June Porter were clearly frustrated by the intransigence of the CFO and CAO to deliver a report that council had directed months earlier, but they were clearly powerless.

The Real Numbers: What’s Already Committed

The Craigleith Bomb

Above and beyond everything already committed, the town is already paying consultants to plan a project it hasn’t told ratepayers is coming — a $45 million obligation that exists nowhere in the public conversation about TBM’s finances. Who is going to pay for it?

This will be paid for in your water bill

.But the Craigleith WWTP is not the end of it. Add everything together — committed wastewater borrowing, the Craigleith plant, and the fire hall — and the full weight of TBM’s capital obligations comes into view

A Council Without Control

The motion Milne brought was reasonable. The question he asked was legitimate. But it was the wrong question at the wrong scale.

The question council should be demanding an answer to is this: how does TBM service $52 million in wastewater capital debt by 2028 that rises to $97M by 2030, along with $21M in capital debt when the Craigleith Fire Hall comes on board in 2028.

These figures above do not include interest. At 4.5% — a current Ontario municipal debenture rate — debt service on the $52M commitment adds $2.34M annually. At $97M, that rises to $4.37M per year. Neither number appears anywhere in TBM’s public accounting.

This is a council that does not know — or has not been permitted to know — the full weight of the debt it has already authorized.

Part Two: The CAO Report

Council directed CAO Adam Smith to explore Municipal Services Corporation opportunities for The Blue Mountains.

He was given one month.

This is what he produced.

The report runs seven pages. It contains no statement of TBM’s wastewater debt. No reference to $52 million in committed borrowing. No mention of $4.37 million in annual debt service. No acknowledgment of the $45 million Craigleith WWTP obligation sitting in planning. No projection of what any of this does to the water bill.

A report evaluating whether a solution fits the problem — written as if the problem doesn’t exist.

Failure One: He ignored MPP Saunderson.

Council directed him to work with MPP Brian Saunderson. Saunderson is actively pursuing MSC legislation at Queen’s Park under Minister Rob Flack. He is the single most important external ally TBM has on this file.

He appears once in the report. In the background section. Then nothing.

No consultation documented. No legislative update. No assessment of what Bill 98 or the WWPC Act means for TBM’s options. The politician doing the work at the provincial level was treated as a footnote.

Failure Two: He argued against his own evidence.

His own report confirms the MSC delivers exactly what TBM needs. Debt relief through the Annual Repayment Limit. Professional governance. Scaled capital planning across municipal boundaries.

Then he recommended against it.

His stated reason: no neighbouring municipality is actively pursuing an MSC. That is not analysis and had he done what he was supposed to, talk with Brian Saunderson he would have had a different view.

Failure Three: He recommended the status quo and called it a next step.

Council asked for recommended next steps. Option 3 — his recommendation — is to continue identifying opportunities for service modernization.

TBM has been identifying opportunities for years. The Craigleith WWTP is still in planning. The debt is still accumulating. The water bill is still rising.

Identifying opportunities is not the next step. It is what got this town here.

Where This Leaves Council

This council is stuck.

Not for lack of will. Deputy Mayor Bordignon and Councillor Porter made that clear in the room. There are members of this council who want to move. Who understand the urgency. Who have been asking the right questions for months.

They can’t get answers.

When the data finally arrives — as it did today in ADM.26.033 — it arrives without the numbers that matter. No debt position. No cost of inaction. No honest accounting of what ratepayers are facing,

That is not acceptable. Not with $97 million in wastewater obligations bearing down on this municipality. Not with reserves turning negative. Not with an EOI deadline of August 13 that closes whether council acts or not.

A council cannot govern without data. A municipality cannot plan without honest analysis. And a CAO cannot be permitted to evaluate solutions to a crisis he has declined to name.

Don May walked into that room with the numbers, the analysis, and the solution. He did the CAO’s job.

A Pause. Before Don May.

Two tasks. Two failures.

Council directed the CFO to explain a $19.7 million capital overrun. Five months passed. When Milne pressed for a deadline, staff said the request was too complex. June 1 became June 8. Monica Quinlan said nothing more.

Council directed the CAO to evaluate the MSC. He produced seven pages containing no debt figures, no cost of inaction, and a recommendation against the one tool that addresses the problem — justified by the absence of neighbours who had tried it.

I spent thirty-five years as a strategy consultant to Fortune 500 companies across four continents. In that world, when a CEO turns to a CFO with a hard question, she opens her laptop and answers it. In rare cases — genuinely rare — she asks for a day. In rarer situations still, a week.

When a CEO directs a VP to analyze a problem, that VP analyzes the problem. A VP who returns with an analysis of a different problem — one shaped to fit a pre-existing conclusion — has a short future.

What I saw in that council chamber was not a bad day. It was an organizational signature. The visible expression of how this municipality responds when accountability is requested and inconvenient.

In one meeting, TBM revealed why it is where it is — financially, organizationally, and culturally. Not because the problems are unsolvable. Because the institution is not designed to solve them.

The responsibility for that rests with the Mayor — who is, in the corporate analogy, the CEO. Mayor Matrosovs has pioneered a new form of remote work: she no longer shows up. Without a Mayor who leads from the chair, council has no centre of gravity. It flounders. And this is what we are watching.

Part Three: Don May

Don May came prepared.

He addressed the CAO’s central objection directly. Yes, the Simcoe Municipal Services Corporation does not yet exist. The legislation is pending. But the City of Orillia — which is not even in Simcoe County — has formally asked to be included. That request has been accepted. The precedent is established. The door is open.

Before making his ask to council, Don explained why the MSC matters. Three reasons. TBM needs all of them.

What is a Municipal Services Corporation Designed to Do?

Long-Term Capital Financing. Ontario caps municipal debentures at 20 years. An MSC issues at 40. TBM’s wastewater debt transfers to the MSC. It disappears from the town’s books. Spread across the member municipalities, the cost impact on any single ratepayer drops substantially. To be clear: the current $52 million transfers off TBM’s books entirely. What is even more important is that the MSC may choose not to go forward with Craigleith. Given the nature of a regional plan they may establish something more cost effective with a greater long-term benefit.

Professional Talent, Quality and Focus. TBM cannot attract or retain the engineering talent this infrastructure demands. An MSC recruits project managers who have built treatment plants a dozen times over. The mandate is singular: run the infrastructure competently. Nothing else. A professional organization does not have a $19.7 million overrun.

Scalability and a Plan. TBM has no credible infrastructure plan. This is in fact documented in their planning literature. MSC’s first mandate is a ten-year capital plan — every asset mapped, every investment sequenced. Not a study. A plan with a board whose only job is to execute it. TBM was the second fastest-growing municipality in Canada between 2016 and 2021. The infrastructure must be built for where it is going — not patched for where it has been.

It was a clear, actionable, time-sensitive request. The EOI deadline is August 13. The window is open now.

What Followed Was Instructive

Several members of council did not do their homework.

One raised the concern that TBM would lose control of its water system. It is a reasonable concern in the abstract. In the context of this municipality it is breathtaking. This is a council that just overran a single project by $19.7 million with no oversight and no accountability. Control of the water system is not something TBM currently possesses.

Another member kept returning to the need to negotiate with Collingwood separately. Don had to explain — more than once — that Collingwood would be embedded in the MSC. The negotiation is the MSC. That is the point. I will leave what that exchange revealed about council preparation to the reader.

Council’s Proposed Resolution

THAT Council directs staff to make a submission through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing Expressions of Interest (EOI) for implementing a Water and Wastewater Public Corporation model;

This is a major win for the town.

AND WHEREAS it is essential for both Council and the public to have a comprehensive understanding of the legal, financial, and operational implications of a Municipal Servicing Corporation and Water and Wastewater Public Corporation

AND THAT Council directs staff to hold a public education meeting for the purpose of education regarding Municipal Servicing Corporations

AND THAT Council directs staff to continue to identify opportunities for service modernization and transformation of water and wastewater services within the municipality, in accordance with Option #3;

This last clause placates the CAO. It is unnecessary. The EOI submission renders it moot.

The Community Meeting

Don finished with a suggestion that has real merit. Hold a community meeting. Bring this to ratepayers directly. Let them understand what is coming and what the alternative looks like.

Your water bill is going up over 100% — or TBM can join the MSC.

That is the headline. That is the choice. Ratepayers deserve to hear it plainly before the bills arrive.

A Closing Thought

I came away from that council chamber shaken by two things.

The first is the gap between staff and council. The intransigence. The inadequacy of the analysis. The willingness to let a governance failure persist in plain sight.

The second is something I need to say directly. I have been unfair to some members of council. I have written about TBM council as if it were a uniform body of complacency. It is not. There are members in that room who are fighting. Who are frustrated. Who have been asking the right questions for months and getting nothing back.

In fact, it is my understanding that the Deputy Mayor, Peter Bordignon did what the CAO was supposed to do and met with MPP Brian Saunderson to informally express interest in TBM joining the MSC. It was at his direction that the resolution was rewritten.

They deserve better from their staff. And they deserved better from me.

Don May’s community meeting idea is the right next step. Not because council has failed entirely — but because the people paying the bills deserve a seat at the table before the bills arrive.

Why you need to vote

The October 2026 election is the reset. One council. One chance to elect people who understand what an MSC is, what this town can actually afford, and what the consequences of another four years of inaction look like on your tax bill. What I learned is that there are people on this council that have no business running a $50 million business.

If you are a permanent resident — you are already on the voters’ list.

• If you are a renter — you are eligible. Register at RegisterToVoteOn.ca by August 12, 2026. Vote.

• If you own a property in TBM but live elsewhere — you are eligible as a non-resident elector. Register. Vote.

• If you rent from a landlord — tell them. They have more at stake than anyone.

You have two options. Stay home in October — and pay for it on your tax bill, in your rent, and in the value of your property. Or show up and be part of the solution.

The choice is yours. The bill is not.

Thank You. And an Ask.

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this was sent by Paul Andrews….thanks… common people lets get the vote out..

You are correct. The $57.31 million in water and wastewater infrastructure debt will be recovered through utility rates, not the property tax levy.

Here is how it breaks down.

The current average annual water and wastewater bill for a TBM home connected to municipal services is $1,045. The $57.31 million in debt carries $4.41 million in annual debt service. Spread across approximately 5,000 connected properties, that adds $882 per household per year — an 84 percent increase on the current bill. That increase hits in 2027.

This is not the end of the rate story. The Craigleith wastewater treatment plant requires seven additional infrastructure projects with a combined budget of $45 million just to remain functional. At the same financing terms — 20 years at 4.5 percent — that adds another $3.46 million annually in debt service. Spread across 5,000 connected properties, that is an additional $692 per household per year on the utility bill.

For renters, most pay their own water and wastewater charges directly. The $882 annual increase lands on the utility statement — not the landlord’s tax bill.

A utility bill that increases 151 percent in three years.

Please subscribe to be kept informed.

shulmanr.substack.com

To them: thank you. Genuinely.

To everyone else: if the work has been useful — if it’s changed how you think about what’s happening at TBM or Collingwood — a paid subscription is how you keep it going.

https://shulmanr.substack.com/subscribe