I am not a politician. I am a ratepayer who kept asking questions.

I live here. I pay taxes here. Months ago I started asking the Township simple questions, about its positions on things that impact us, and on our own finances, and I couldn't get straight answers, so I started reading the filings myself — the audited statements, the by-laws, the agendas, the agreements. What I found is the reason I am standing for Mayor.

I became a dad eight years ago. I had prayed as a boy for one son one day; I was given a houseful, my own sons and foster sons who are family now in every way that counts. That is where I learned the thing this campaign really turns on: you do not get to say "trust me" and skip the explaining. You show your work.

I am not angry at the people who work for the Township. I am asking for a Council that reads its own financial statements, answers for them in public, and treats every dollar as somebody's tax bill — because it is.

Born in Parry Sound. Fifty years in Carling. Family here since the turn of the 1900s.

I was born in Parry Sound and raised between there and Carling, where I have lived for the past fifty years — in Dillon until this past December, and in Pengally Bay since. My family's roots in this area go back to the turn of the 1900s, which is a long time to watch a place change.

For thirty-one years of my working life I was also a weekend cottager here, after buying my family's land in 1995 from my late grandfather's estate. So I have paid taxes in Carling as a year-round resident and as somebody driving up on a Friday night, and I know both of those bills feel different. Seasonal and island ratepayers pay the same rates and get the least service for them. That is not an abstraction to me.

Forty years running companies. Forty years answering to a board.

I hold a Bachelor of Engineering and Management degree and spent forty years as a technology executive, running companies and global regions. I have started and run companies of my own along the way, and still do, Dawell Consulting among them. I have sat on boards of directors, and for most of my career I reported to one.

Both halves of that are this job. A mayor has to run the room — set the agenda, get a council to a decision, then own it in public — and answer to residents the way I answered to a board: numbers read out loud, hard questions expected, and no file that exists only as a verbal update.

Carling has a year-round community of about fifteen hundred people and a summer community roughly twice that size, and the two have spent years talking past each other. Year-round residents feel decisions get made for people who are only here for part of the year. Seasonal residents feel they pay full rates for a fraction of the service, and that their voice counts for less than their tax bill does. Both of those feelings are legitimate, and both are usually aired to the wrong audience.

I have lived in both roles here for decades — fifty years in Carling, and thirty-one of my working years driving up on a Friday night to the family land. I know what it is to plow out in February and I know what it is to arrive in July and find the dump closed. Neither group misunderstands this township. They are each seeing a real part of it.

And here is the thing both sides agree on the moment you show them the numbers: nobody — resident or cottager, mainland or island — asked to be over-collected by twenty per cent a year and told nothing about where it went. That is common ground. It is what I intend to run on, and it is why I want the finances read out loud in public where everyone can see them.

Ask me anything, in person.

I will come to your kitchen table, your dock, or your association meeting and go through the numbers line by line. Every figure I use is public, and I will show you where it comes from.