In my previous column, I introduced the Untouchables; the risk-free insiders who have captured our local governments. But to understand how they maintain their grip, we have to look at their primary weapon: the Process.

Rural Ontario used to value the builder. The person who showed up, assessed the problem, and fixed it.

Today, we have replaced that person with the compliance officer. We have built a process moat around our municipal offices, a deep, murky trench of red tape, legislative cross-referencing, and standard operating procedures designed not to facilitate progress but to prevent it.

For the modern municipal administrator, the goal is no longer to fix the bridge, pave the road, or approve the subdivision. The goal is to ensure the file is beyond reproach.

In this world, a project that is never started is a success as long as the paperwork is filed correctly.

Conversely, a project finished ahead of schedule and under budget becomes a liability if a single provincial guideline was not cited in a 40-page staff report.

What we have is governance as a defensive crouch. They are not building a community. They are building a legal defence fund.

By the time a project survives the gauntlet of environmental assessments, heritage impact studies, and multi-stage visioning exercises, the original need has often passed and the budget has doubled. Nobody gets fired for that.

Nobody even gets questioned.

What should concern every rural taxpayer is that this outcome whether it’s a delayed project, an abandoned initiative, or ballooning cost, is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as the people running it intend.

The greatest casualty of the process moat is common sense.

In an earlier era, if a culvert washed out, a road superintendent and a backhoe operator fixed it. Today, that same culvert requires a hydrological study, a consultation with three provincial agencies, and a climate resiliency audit. The problem does not change. The water does not wait. But the file must be complete.

The insider loves this complexity because complexity is their job security. If the rules are simple, any engaged citizen can see when they are being broken. But when the rules are a labyrinth of interconnected frameworks and policy statements, the insider becomes the high priest. You cannot challenge them because you have not read the 600-page Provincial Policy Statement or the Municipal Act subsections they keep tucked in their back pocket like a shield.

They do not wield that document to help you.

They wield it to end the conversation.

This is not accidental. Complexity scales with the number of people needed to interpret it. Every new layer of policy justifies another position, another salary, another pension. The bureaucracy does not grow despite the complexity. It grows because of it.

This stagnation carries a human cost that rarely appears in any staff report.

It is the young family waiting three years for a severance to build a home on their parents’ farm. It is the small business owner who abandons an expansion because the site plan control process costs more than the renovation itself. It is the farmer who needed a drainage permit in April and received approval the following March, long after the season had passed and the opportunity with it.

The insider does not feel any of that. They are on a salary while you are on a clock. They have a pension while you carry a mortgage. Every day they spend reviewing the file is a day they are paid while you are losing money, momentum, and faith in the place you chose to build your life.

There is a cruelty to that arrangement that we have been far too polite to name.

We have been conditioned to treat delays as neutral, as if waiting is simply the price of doing things properly. It is not neutral. It redistributes cost from institutions to individuals, from the protected to the exposed, from those who earn a salary reviewing problems to those who earn a living solving them.

We are told this bureaucracy exists for our protection.

It does not.

It protects the administrator from the consequences of a decision. It protects the department head from accountability. It protects the consultant who charges $40,000 to produce a report no elected official will ever read in full. It is an insurance policy written by insiders, administered by insiders, but paid for by the people who can no longer afford the premiums.

The truly damaging part is that many of the people operating within this system are not malicious. Some are talented. Some genuinely believe that the process serves the public. But a system does not need bad intentions to produce bad outcomes. It only needs to reward the wrong behaviour, and this one does that with exceptional consistency.

The person who moves a file quickly and gets a project built takes on personal risk. The person who moves it slowly, who requests three additional studies and defers the decision to the next council term, faces none. The incentives are perfectly inverted.

If we want to save rural Ontario from this managed decline, we have to change what we measure and what we reward.

We need to stop measuring municipal success by the thickness of a staff report and start measuring it by the velocity of action. A department that approves twenty small business permits in six weeks has done more for a community than one that spent the same period commissioning a downtown revitalization framework.

We need a red tape sunset as a standing policy. Any process that a department head cannot justify in plain language to a room full of farmers and tradespeople should be abolished.

Not reviewed.
Not reformed

Abolished. The burden of proof belongs to the process, not to the people it inconveniences.

We need to stop promoting the professional survivor, the career administrator who has mastered the art of keeping their head down and their file clean and start hiring the operator who knows how to get something built and is willing to stake their reputation on it.

Most importantly, we need elected officials who understand that approving a complex process is not the same as governing.

Signing off on another study is not leadership. Leadership is telling your staff that the culvert needs to be fixed by Friday and meaning it.

The moat is rising. The farmhouse is surrounded. And the people inside are being told the water is fine.

It is time to start draining it or we will drown.

Watch for the Next article in this series which will be published on Gather 2030.

Local government in rural Ontario is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the “Civic Steward” a once accountable servant of the ratepayer, with a new, parasitic class of municipal bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.

By “Insider,” I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative apparatus that has captured the modern municipality. This includes the senior administrators who exist solely to accumulate tenure, the department heads who exist solely to protect their classifications, and the managers who exist solely to commission consultants.

These are the Untouchables of the council chamber. They are masters of the staff report. They wear the language of public service. They say the right words about “community engagement,” “asset management frameworks,” and “equity-informed planning.” But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition, and that ammunition comes directly from your property tax bill.

In a functioning local democracy, authority is tied to accountability. If you make a bad decision, you answer for it. That fear of consequence is the only thing that keeps government honest. It forces them to cut waste, obsess over the resident, and take ownership of what is broken. But today, we have severed that link.

We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the ratepayer loses.

If a program succeeds or can be made to appear successful through carefully selected metrics.. the Insider claims credit and earns a reclassification.

If a capital project runs thirty percent over budget, if a planning application that should take three months takes three years, if the same gravel road gets deferred for the fifth consecutive budget cycle, the Insider is quietly reassigned or simply waits out the council.

But they do not lose their pension. They do not lose their benefits. They retire on a defined benefit plan that the ratepayers funding it will never see. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than when they arrived.

This is what makes them untouchable.

We have normalized a professional culture where administrators are retained based on institutional longevity rather than their ability to deliver results. The senior municipal administrator is often a professional survivor, protected by employment agreements that make dismissal ruinously expensive, by provincial labour frameworks that make performance management nearly impossible, and by an inter-municipal network that ensures a soft landing at the next municipality if things go wrong.

Let us be direct about what this costs. A senior administrator in a small Ontario municipality may earn $100,000 to $200,000 in total annual compensation, retire on a defined benefit pension, and face no personal financial consequence for the mismanagement of tens of millions of dollars in public capital.

The ratepayer on a rural route or a fixed income, meanwhile, absorbs annual property tax increases framed as unavoidable while road conditions deteriorate and service levels stagnate.

And for what?

Most of these administrators are insulated from the consequences of their own decisions, governing through process rather than performance.

They treat their positions as tenured appointments rather than public trusts. They produce the right reports, attend the right conferences, and reference the right legislation, all while ensuring the machinery of local government remains too complex for any elected official or engaged resident to meaningfully challenge. I would know.

They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to manage the process. They are there to protect each other.

And what happens when these administrators face a genuine crisis?

We get the Delegation Economy.

When an Untouchable faces a problem, they do not solve it.

They study it.
They retain a consultant.

They pay a planning firm or a strategy practice thousands of ratepayer dollars to produce a report telling them what any long-time local resident already knows.

This is not governance. It is intellectual money laundering.

They use public funds to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they point to the process.

The failure belongs to the system, not to them personally.

They would rather preside over a slow, managed decline than risk a decisive action that might be scrutinized.

If we continue to fill our municipal offices with Untouchables instead of operators, we will lose something that cannot easily be recovered.

The time for polite governance is over.

We need a return to the Owner’s Mentality.

The era of the Untouchable must end.

Next article in this series will be published Tuesday.

In a bold move that affirms the people’s voice in Canadian history, MLA Tara Armstrong (Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream) has introduced the Freedom Convoy Recognition Act, proposing March 11 as an annual statutory holiday in British Columbia.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 — 𝟖𝟕 𝐯𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝟐. Only two Green Party MLAs stood opposed.

March 11 marks a turning point in B.C.’s recent history — the day in 2022 when provincial COVID mandates began to lift, including mask requirements and gathering restrictions. Armstrong calls it “a moment of healing, recovery, and democratic renewal.”

This day, if formally adopted, would be the first statutory holiday in Canada to recognize peaceful civic resistance against overreach — and to honour the legacy of every trucker, nurse, parent, pastor, and citizen who took a stand for freedom of choice, bodily autonomy, and democratic consent.

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝟏𝟏 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬

The 2022 Freedom Convoy was not just a protest — it was a defining moment in Canadian civic life. It was:

• One of the largest peaceful demonstrations in Canadian history.

• A rural-led, working-class movement for bodily autonomy and local decision-making.

• A global inspiration, igniting similar actions in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States.

𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐎𝐭𝐭𝐚𝐰𝐚. The federal response — including the invocation of the Emergencies Act — stunned observers across party lines. But in British Columbia, the grassroots pushback helped fast-track the end of mandates and public gathering limits.

This proposed holiday honours that peaceful perseverance and refusal to comply with top-down governance that failed to respect local realities, community needs, and personal freedoms.

Is It Controversial? Yes. But That’s Why It’s Necessary.

Critics are already mobilizing a recall petition against Armstrong, with some accusing her of “replacing” Truth and Reconciliation Day. That framing is misleading. The bill does not repeal or replace existing holidays — it seeks to recognize an additional day that reflects a different chapter in our shared history.

It’s telling that opponents are quick to label this “politically extreme” — but fail to address how government-imposed isolation, economic collapse, and loss of faith gatherings were tolerated without consent for nearly two years.

Armstrong’s courage deserves recognition. So does the truth of what everyday Canadians endured — and overcame — to restore common sense in this country.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐃𝐨?

📝 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐓𝐚𝐫𝐚 𝐀𝐫𝐦𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠.

💬 Send a thank-you message to her office:

📨 tara.armstrong.MLA@leg.bc.ca

📍 Constituency Office: Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream

This is about more than a holiday. It’s about whose voices get honoured in Canadian civic memory.

At Gather 2030, we support all peaceful efforts to restore transparency, consent, and citizen-led governance. We encourage every Canadian — regardless of political persuasion — to reflect on what this moment revealed about the balance of power in our institutions.

🛑 𝐍𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭.

✅ 𝐖𝐞 𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐜𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭 — 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞.

📅 Mark March 11 on your calendar. Whether or not the act becomes law, we will remember.

There is a rhythm to my life that has repeated itself more than once — a gentle season of tending the hearth, and a fierce season of stepping into the flame.

Lately, I’ve been in the quieter one.
Curating my home, not by adding more, but by letting things fall away.
Japanese minimalism — clean air, warm light, open space — the kind of simplicity that feels almost angelic. The kind that steadies your breath and softens your spirit.

Homemaking has always been my anchor.
It reminds me what is worth protecting.
It brings me back to the ground God planted me on.

And as I’ve been watching The Hobbit with my son, I’ve seen my own reflection in that story — the hobbit-woman who builds a refuge, who fills her home with peace and joy, who understands the holiness of ordinary life.

But every hobbit knows this:
There are moments when the world catches fire,
and even the quiet ones must rise.

The first time came in 2011. My son was just born, and yet the pull toward public life was undeniable — the federal election, the urgency of truth, the sense that silence would be a betrayal. I stepped forward because I had to.

The second time came twelve years later, during COVID.
The Freedom Convoy.
Being arrested for praying on the line.
Testifying at the POEC as a protester.
Then came the writing, the organizing, the networking — one step into another, the kind of mission that chooses you long before you understand what’s happening.

And across the country now, I see the embers spreading — ordinary people rising in their own towns, taking up local battles, refusing to bow. It confirmed what I already believed:
The work was never mine alone.
The fire was divine.
It will keep moving long after I rest.

But even in 2011, God had whispered something into my spirit:
“Give your children twelve years.
Aim them like arrows.
Their time with you is short — guard it.”

So I did.
And twelve years later — right on His timing — the mountain burned and the call came again. And I went. Because sometimes you don’t get to stay by the hearth. Sometimes the sky turns red, and you walk with your brothers straight into the flame.

Now, three years after the Convoy, I feel the shift again.
The Lord is calling me back to the quiet.
My children are 12 and 15.
Their remaining years under my roof are few, and fiercely precious.

So I return to the hearth — tending the fire with intention:
Rest.
Stability.
A regulated nervous system.
Peace.
Slow mornings.
A home strong enough to steady them as they grow.

And like every chapter before this, I wait again for His timing.
No rushing.
No forcing.
Just faith.

I believe this country is full of hobbits like me — people who love their families, love their homes, and yet carry the courage to step forward when the sky fills with smoke.
People who can live quietly, but rise without hesitation.
People who understand that tending the hearth is as sacred as standing in the fire.

So to the hobbits who aren’t home right now — the ones who are still in the heat, still holding the line, still facing the flames while the rest of us keep the embers burning:

We see you.
We honour you.
We pray over you.
And we keep the fire warm for your return.

And then there is I See Fire — a song that carved itself into my memory on the last day of the Convoy. Riot police pressing in. Cold air burning. Parliament spiritually ablaze. People locking arms, praying, singing, refusing to break. Strongholds falling. Shadows moving across the snow. A moment the world tried to forget but our spirits never will.

Oh, misty eye of the mountain below,
Keep careful watch of my brothers’ souls.
And should the sky be filled with fire and smoke,
Keep watching over Durin`s sons

Some of it’s ego. Some of it’s immaturity. And some of it looks a lot like intentional division.

Here’s the truth: not everyone is called to the same role. Not everyone is equipped to fight on the same front. That’s not a weakness—it’s the strength of a real grassroots movement.

Some protest. Some write.

Some organize town halls. Some dig into legal precedent.

Some speak at council. Some host barter circles.

Some study policy. Some grow food.

Some pray. Some educate.

Some build networks across provinces. Some hold the line in their local community.

Some push in courtrooms. Others push through conversation.

And all of it matters.

This is a cultural, legal, political, and economic battle. It’s not going to be solved with one tactic, one leader, or one message. It’s going to take thousands of people showing up in the ways they’re best equipped—and trusting others to do the same.

So if someone is hosting a protest, and your role is researching legal frameworks—great. If someone’s building a Substack and your calling is direct action—great. If someone is knocking on doors and you’re focused on building relationships with council—great.

Do your part. Let others do theirs.

And if you find yourself spending more time criticizing what others are doing than building something yourself, maybe pause and ask: what exactly am I contributing?

The idea that there’s one “correct” strategy is naive—and more often than not, it’s a distraction. This movement is about protecting sovereignty, truth, autonomy, and moral courage. That takes all of us, pulling in the same direction, even if we don’t always work together directly.

🧭 Gather 2030 was launched as a place to share those strategies. While I’ve been focused more recently on KICLEI’s work to exit global governance at the municipal level, I’m seeing incredible initiatives from people coast to coast that deserve to be shared. Over time, this platform will grow into what it was meant to be—a place to highlight all the different ways Canadians are defending what matters.

Because that’s how we win: 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐝𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐛𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐦 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐨𝐰𝐧 𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐨𝐟 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬.

That’s how we build the culture of courage we need.

That’s how we win.

—Maggie Braun

Gather 2030 | KICLEI Canada

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The Region of Waterloo is calling for applicants to fill the vacant Kitchener‐area seat on Regional Council following the passing of Coun. Kari Williams in April. This is a unique opportunity for any…

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I’ve just spent a week on the ground at Universal Ostrich Farms in British Columbia — walking the land, observing the daily operations, and sitting at…

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June is PTSD Awareness Month, and we know that many Canadians are still carrying the weight of trauma, not just from the Invocation of the Emergency Act on the Freedom Convoy, but from the years of m…

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📄 Download now:
🔹 PDF Version
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At our April national meeting, people from across Canada tuned in to share updates, spotlight grassroots organizing, and get hands-on with new tools that are changing how we engage our councils.

👀 In this full replay:

• 🎥 140-min national call replay (Oxford organizing + tool demos)

• 🛠️ Update from KICLEI Oxford County Branch

• 📊 The new CO₂ Context Calculator → Open Tool

• 🤖 How to use “KICLEI D” to write emails, reports, and motions → Use it here

📍 What Makes Our National Meetings Work

Every call is live and focused on real local action. These aren’t webinars—they are where strategy, support, and success stories meet.

➡️ Register for the next National and Regional Zoom Meeting

➡️ Subscribe below for the full replay

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Thank you for the opportunity to present this week on the implications of Oxford’s continued participation in the Partners for Cli…

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On April 23,…

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