Preserving
Rural Ontario

I've spent most of my adult life at board tables. A school board. Housing boards in two cities. A national organization. Every one of them ran on money that came out of somebody else's pocket, and every one of them had people on the far side of the table who wanted something different than I did.

You learn one thing quickly in that seat. The job isn't to win the room. It's to listen hard enough that the decision still holds up a year later, when the people who lost the vote are still your neighbours.

Thames Centre is at a decision point it didn't ask for. Alto and the Province are working out what passenger rail into southwestern Ontario looks like, with recommendations due this fall. The 401 gets busier every year and we have 4 interchanges on it. London keeps growing east. Every one of those is an opportunity if we are in front of it, and a problem if we sit and wait for somebody to hand us the plan.

So who is at that table for us? Who is making the calls to the county, to the Province, to Alto, before the alignment gets drawn?

But, none of it is worth much if we lose the reason people moved here in the first place. The farms. The towns and hamlets. The fact that you still run into three people you know at the grocery store.

I'm not running to reinvent Thames Centre. I'm running to protect it, to put a fresh voice at the head of the table, and to make the handover an easy one.

If I've got something wrong, come tell me. I'd rather hear it now than read it in October.

Tim's full record