Bitterness in Local Politics

Jeff Green | Jul 24, 2025

We have three levels of government, and the only one where we really know who is making the decisions, and more or less how they are made, is on the municipal level. We see our local politicians at the grocery store. We know where they live, who their friends and family are. And now, not only can we watch them in action on Youtube if we want to, we can talk about them on social media if we want to

Over the past few months, throughout the Frontenac municipalities, the tenor of what is being said about local politicians, both in person and on social media, seems to have taken an angry, bitter turn.

In North Frontenac, internal council divisions over the township’s role in promoting affordable housing, increasingly expressed as personality as well as policy disputes, have embroiled not only council, but staff as well on occasion.
In South Frontenac, Line Spike Festival organiser Jeremy Campbell clearly blames the township for the financial outcome of the festival. The response of many in the community to what he has been saying, many who have nothing to do with the festival at all, demonstrates a deeper well of anger and mistrust of the township than had ever surfaced before.

And in Central Frontenac, debate over a council decision to spend $1.6 million to purchase the Simonett building on Road 38 as a township office has not only split council, it has become a public issue.
People are angry about it, they feel betrayed by it. They think that a township that is always crying poor, should not have spent that amount of money on office space for township staff, when there are so many public priorities that always go begging.

There are many questions about the purchase. One of those is the fact that financing other township priorities by selling off surplus township properties had never been presented as an option by staff. But it suddenly emerged as a way to finance this particular project,.

To put a regional perspective on it, however, over the past 5 to 10 years every other municipality in our area has renovated their office space. The $1.6 million (in 2025 dollars) it cost in Central Frontenac to purchase instead of renovating, which has the added benefit of freeing up the former building for sale, is a lower cost solution than either South and North Frontenac, Frontenac County or Addington Highlands settled on when they all chose to renovate.
Aside from the specific issues in each of the townships, the willingness to question not only the wisdon, but the integrity of local politician and township staff, in the stores and coffee shops and on social media, is unusual. Part of it is the impact of social media, but there seems to be something more going on.

If our local politicians were corrupt, if they are taking personal profit from their decisions, if they were breaking the law, that would be one thing.

But there is no credible evidence of genuine corruption, no proof of anything, in any of these cases..

Some of us, most of us maybe, think some recent decisions were wrong, stupid even, and we do not agree with the explanations presented about how they were made and why.

I have folllowed these municipalities for most of their history. I have seen smart politicians, and not so smart politicians, sometimes in the same person, at different times. I have seen effective and ineffective administrators as well.
The current crop, in my view, are no better or worse, as a whole, than any in the past. But that is really neither here nor there.
There is an election coming next year.

If we don't like our incumbent politicians, we will have our opportunity to throw the bums out at that time.