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The following letter was sent to JSC for publication by Caledon resident Vadim Promotorov.
Last week my wife and I drove next door to Halton Hills for their mayoral debate. I went partly as a REALTOR® and partly as a curious neighbour.
Halton Hills is basically Caledon’s sibling next door: countryside, small towns, hamlets and farms, all under the same pressure from GTA growth.
Sometimes you cross the municipal border and cannot even tell you have left Caledon. My wife wanted to see how another town runs an election and what problems its residents are dealing with.
We drove home with the same ridiculous thought: I REALLY WANT CALEDON TO HAVE HALTON HILLS’ PROBLEMS.
Seriously. Please give us their problems.
They are worried about algae in Fairy Lake and too many geese taking over Prospect Park. They literally hired a dog to chase the geese away.
A dog chasing geese. That was a municipal controversy.
Do you understand how badly I want that to be one of Caledon’s big problems?
Instead, we are fighting over massive development, thousands of proposed homes, disappearing farmland, infrastructure that may not keep up, illegal land uses, public safety and fatal collisions. A Caledon resident died AGAIN just days ago in a collision involving a dump truck on King Street.
Driving home, I kept thinking: what the hell happened to our town?
I WANT BORING ELECTIONS.
Give me candidates arguing about roads, pools, parking, traffic, recreation centres, infrastructure, budget spreadsheets and geese. I will sit there for three hours listening to an argument about goose poop if that is the biggest scandal we have.
Municipal government should be boring. Fix the road. Enforce the by-law. Collect the fine. Build the infrastructure. Protect the water. Balance the budget. Answer residents. Go home. Then do it again.
At the Halton Hills debate, illegal truck yards came up. The Town investigated, laid charges and went to court. In June, it secured $35,000 in fines against an illegal truck-terminal operator, along with an order stopping the illegal use and requiring the property to be restored.
Not perfect. Not solved overnight. But you can see what happened: here was the problem, here is what we did, and here is the result.
That is government. Do the job. We should not need a Facebook victory parade every time somebody does the work taxpayers already hired them to do.
Then came growth, and underneath all the political language was one brutally simple question: who pays?
A subdivision is not just houses. It needs roads, water, sewers, fire protection, parks, recreation, libraries, transit and years of maintenance. Eventually, somebody gets the bill.
So when somebody says, “growth pays for growth,” do not clap. Ask for the math. How much? Who pays? When? What happens if the funding does not arrive? What happens ten years later?
In 2024, Caledon advanced 12 rezoning applications under mayoral direction. Council approved 11 in June, representing nearly 35,000 proposed housing units, and later approved the twelfth.
Nearly 35,000 homes. Not 35. Not 350. 35 freaking thousand!!!
Whatever your opinion of that decision, every resident should understand its scale.
THIS IS YOUR HOME.
Your street, your water, your tax bill, the trucks beside the school bus, the park your kids play in and the development behind your backyard are not abstract politics. They are your daily life.
So if you “do not do politics,” fine. Do your community. You do not need a lawn sign or a campaign shirt. You do not need to argue with strangers on Facebook. But please know who is asking for control over your town.
Read their record. Watch a council meeting. Go to a debate. Ask what they accomplished before election season. Ask whether they understand planning, infrastructure and municipal finance. Ask for numbers. Ask for sources. Ask how.
Yesterday I watched candidates in the town next door disagree about real municipal problems, and I came home genuinely angry because I miss boring Caledon.
I want algae to be our scandal. I want residents furious about geese at the beach. I want three-hour council fights over parking spaces. I want to complain that the pool is not big enough.
PLEASE GIVE ME THOSE PROBLEMS.
A good municipality should not constantly entertain you. It should quietly work. And a healthy community should not wake up only after something goes terribly wrong.
Municipal election day is coming. Research the candidates. Ask uncomfortable questions. Show up and vote for the person you researched, not the person Facebook told you to choose. And not the person I told you to choose either.
Caledon is not theirs. It is not the mayor’s, council’s, the developers’ or Queen’s Park’s.
Tell your family. Tell your neighbours. Drag the conversation out of Facebook and into real life. Read. Ask. Compare. Then come out and VOTE.
This is NOT politics – IT IS OUR HOME. And if we do not participate in it, somebody else will make the decisions for us.
