If you feel like Bradford West Gwillimbury is getting the short end of the stick, you’re not alone.
Mayor James Leduc and Deputy Mayor Raj Sandhu are hoping to convince their fellow councillors around the County of Simcoe council table to reconsider both the size of council, and more importantly its voting system, through a motion for reconsideration at the upcoming Jan. 14 meeting.
“If we’re going to make change at the county, we need to make significant change,” Leduc said.
In an interview with BradfordToday, the pair explained they’re hoping to convince council to downsize to 16 members plus a full-time warden, as well as implement a voting system weighted by population for all votes.
That requires council to reconsider their decision from Oct. 8 to approve the recommendations of the governance committee from Sept. 24, which kept the 32 council members and added a full-time warden for the 2026-30 term, and essentially kept the established voting system.
Currently, county council only uses a weighted vote when requested and only when in council, not committee of the whole, and those municipalities with more registered voters receive more of the 145 total votes.
However, Sandhu and Leduc explained weighing the vote by electors unfairly disadvantages those growing municipalities with larger populations of youth and people who have recently immigrated to Canada. Sandhu emphasized those people are still contributing to the community, but their voices aren’t properly counted at county council.
“This way it’ll be fair,” Sandhu added. “We’re not tipping the whole scale, but it evens it out.”
According to a report from county chief administrative officer Mark Aitken and clerk Jonathan Magill, under the current system Bradford receives 14 of the 145 total votes — or 9.66 per cent — but in a system weighted by population, Bradford would have 21 of 173 votes or 12.14 per cent, based on the 2021 census population of 42,880.
By comparison, Tiny Township currently receives 10 of 145 votes (6.9 per cent), despite only having a 2021 census population of 12,966, which would result in six out of 173 votes (3.47 per cent).
The imbalance is even more pronounced during regular votes, as each municipality gets two out of 32 votes (6.25 per cent), regardless of population or number of electors, and the same county report noted that “the frequency of weighted vote use at council meetings is low.”
“I would love to have a weighted vote for everything,” Leduc said. “I don’t know if that will get there, but that will be discussed at the table.”
During the Nov. 26 county council meeting, that discussion was just barely allowed to return to the table, though, and initially failed to receive the needed two-thirds majority under the standard vote to even be scheduled for the upcoming meeting. It then found 100 of 145 votes under the weighted system — demonstrating the impact weighing the votes differently can have.
“Perspective and input of all Councillors is always welcome,” County Warden and Ramara Township Mayor Basil Clarke said in an email.
He emphasized talk of altering council composition has a history of being reviewed each term, and while he voted to reduce the size of council, he supports another collective review and also respects the “good rationale” to keep the current composition.
“I truly believe that county council will continue to function effectively, efficiently and fairly for all our residents regardless of our council size,” he said.
When it comes to the voting system, Clarke supports the current one and noted municipalities usually update their data on registered voters more frequently than the long-form census updates population figures. He said arguments could be made for representation on a number of factors, including taxation or assessment in addition to population or electors.
Sandhu explained mayors and deputy mayors of five southern municipalities — Bradford, Innisfil, New Tecumseth, Essa and Adjala-Tosorontio — have been collaborating on common issues.
Based on the 2021 census (the most recent year available), those five municipalities had a combined population of 164,113, about 46.86 per cent of the county’s 350,222 population at the time (not including the separated cities of Barrie and Orillia).
One of those issues from the county’s 2025 budget was the addition of two new program supervisors to the county’s emergency management department.
“That’s a classic case of where it doesn’t benefit any of us in the south,” Leduc said, explaining that most of those municipalities already have their own emergency preparedness coordinators and their own emergency plans, which are re-certified each year.
While neither Bradford representatives are against helping their fellow municipalities in the county, they feel the costs can be unfair.
Different costs for different towns
Another way in which Leduc and Sandhu feel the system doesn’t do Bradford justice is how the county tax levy is collected by each municipality based on residential property assessments, which requires more funding from municipalities with greater assessment than those of lesser assessment.
As an example, the approximate tax increase as a result of the county’s 2025 budget is reportedly $10.86 per $100,000 of assessment value, which works out to about $56.14 for Bradford residents with an average residential assessment of $516,919, compared to only about $26.20 for Tay residents with an average residential assessment of $241,212.
According to budget documents and information from towns' staff, the average residential assessment across all municipalities in the county is about $371,000 (not including the separated cities of Barrie and Orillia), putting Bradford about 71 per cent higher than average.
As a result, Leduc argues that Bradford residents are paying more than double what some other county residents pay for any service funded out of the general tax levy, such as garbage collection.
“When the county says one service fits all, well it doesn’t,” he said. “We are subsidizing other people in the county with their garbage.”
However, Clarke noted that county services and systems are regional, being both population and needs-based, and available to all residents regardless of where the services may be located.
The warden emphasized that a home with the same assessed value will pay the same amount to the county, regardless of whether it’s in Bradford or Ramara, and even within each municipality, there are some areas where home assessments are greater than others. That means the same argument could be made for those municipal tax systems, which follow the same proportional approach.
“In the county there are no borders, and all residents are Simcoe County residents,” he said. “That’s why communities in the south part of Simcoe County are seeing significant investments.”
Those include in paramedics, major road projects, community housing and homelessness prevention, childcare funding, long-term-care and seniors services, and transit, according to Clarke.
County staff said that in 2024 Bradford was expected to collect about $24.98 million from its residents on behalf of the county, or about 11.95 per cent of the roughly $209.1-million county budget levied to its 16 municipalities, while Bradford had about 12.24 per cent of the county's population (based on 2021 figures).
Leduc and Sandhu noted the issue of assessment has been particularly noticeable for Bradford residents and councillors since the last round of assessments from the province’s Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) in 2016, before the provincial government postponed the four-year cycle of assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was later extended through to the end of 2024.
In a report to Bradford council on June 19, 2018, CAO Geoff McKnight summarized several key findings from a review by StrategyCorp.
While the report cautioned the county did not apportion its operating budget on a municipality-by-municipality basis, it estimated Bradford was impacted the most among the county by the tax shift that resulted from the 2016 assessment. That saw Bradford’s portion of the county levy increase 5.16 per cent.
That was attributed to both the town’s assessment base and property values growing at a higher rate than the other member municipalities.
The same report found that Bradford households contributed more to the county’s operating costs than other county towns, and on the same basis even paid more than the separated cities of Barrie and Orillia for comparable county services such as paramedics and social housing.
Long road to change
Leduc said he has long wanted to see change at the county level.
“I’ve been up their for 10 years now fighting for this change,” he said. “It has been an unfair and imbalanced representation up there.”
Both he and Sandhu are still confident the town could reduce its costs by becoming a separated city, which was discussed following the release of the StrategyCorp review, both at the local council and county council in 2019.
However, the town’s work on that front has been on hold as the province has been looking at potentially restructuring Simcoe and other regional governments through multiple reviews. Most recently, representatives for Bradford participated in hearings with the province’s standing committee on heritage, infrastructure and cultural policy on July 8 and Jan. 17, 2024 as well as Nov. 26, 2023.
On multiple occasions, Bradford’s mayor attended and stressed several key points, including the need for:
- fair representation
- structures and policies to ensure good governance
- greater autonomy for lower-tier municipalities
- clearly defined responsibilities and reducing redundancy
“Planning is our number one redundancy. We know our community best,” Leduc said. “Having to go through the county all the time is just another level of bureaucracy that slows everything down.”
The pair still agree the county should be given the chance to comment on plans as one of several agencies to which proposals are circulated, but feel the county should focus on regional aspects like natural heritage and environmental protection rather than getting involved in growth targets and official plans which are already required to meet provincial planning policies.
They were pleased that Bill 185 passed, removing planning authority for upper-tier municipalities, but the province has provided no date for when that comes into effect for Simcoe County.
Other areas where the pair feel the county has a useful regional role to play include economic development, roads, transit, waste collection and water/wastewater.
“I don’t hate (the) county,” Sandhu said. “It has a value, but it has to be fair.”
The provincial committee was tasked with the regional review following a cabinet shuffle on Sept. 4, 2023, after Steve Clark resigned as municipal affairs and housing minister. Previously, Clark was posed to appoint regional facilitators by Sept. 11 to determine the fates of Simcoe County, along with York Region, Durham Region, Halton Region, Niagara Region and Waterloo Region.
Leduc said participants were expecting a report on the results of the hearings sometime in November, but the province still hasn’t released it yet.
That delay follows the provincial government's decision to withhold a 2019 report from its previous regional governance review, that was instead held in cabinet confidence.
The pair were disappointed provincial efforts had stagnated, especially as Leduc noted Premier Doug Ford had repeatedly committed to dealing with the issue of county governance.
“All levels of politicians need to put that greater good in front of them,” Sandhu said. “It seems like other motives come in front of making the right decision.”
Meanwhile the pair had some suggestions on how the province could make things better, including possibly eliminating upper-tier municipalities and uploading those responsibilities to the province.
As an example, Leduc pointed to the Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) that helps plan, build and operate water and wastewater projects, and Edmonton’s EPCOR Utilities Inc. (formerly Edmonton Power Corporation) that manages utilities including water, wastewater, natural gas, and electricity in various Canadian provinces and American states.
“InnServices has the right idea. I wish we had partnered with them from the beginning,” he said, noting the town is currently exploring the idea. “We have to look for ways to generate revenue without going through taxation all the time.”
As a result of the provincial review, the county launched its own regional governance review task force in 2019 to look at service delivery, and a report from John Daly, then-county clerk, from September 2022, summarized the task force’s conclusions.
The group was tasked with investigating the potential to reduce duplication of services, find cost savings and ensure services and infrastructure are effective, and the report includes a long list of recommendations related to conservation authorities, fire services, land-use planning, library services, stormwater management, legal services, transit, plus water and wastewater.
Those resulted in a series of further reviews, and discussions at the county council table, leading to decisions such as dissolving the 74-year-old Simcoe County Library Co-operative, which was opposed in Bradford.
Leduc and Sandhu were clear their loyalties remain to the residents of Bradford.
“We will keep fighting for Bradford,” Sandhu said. “Are we successful? Many times, no, but that’s not for lack of trying.”
“We are two votes out of 32 at the county,” Leduc added. “We try to make change when we can, but it’s difficult.”
— With files from Jessica Owen, Nikki Cole, Jenni Dunning, Jack Hauen and Natasha Philpott
