6 questions for Fort Frances’ council incumbents

The 2026 municipal election is off to the hustings, with two candidates for mayor and nine candidates vying for six spots on Fort Frances council. Both races feature incumbents and newcomers.

Municipal government is not for the faint of heart, and experience in public office can certainly be an asset. But experience is only valuable if it produces good judgment.

After four years, Fort Frances’ incumbents have a record. They have made consequential decisions about litigation, public assets, spending, economic development, transportation, and the culture at town hall. Now they are asking voters for another four years.

So the question is not simply whether they have experience. It is whether their record gives voters reason to trust their judgment.

As candidates start pounding the pavement ahead of the October 26 vote, there is an obvious appetite for renewal in Fort Frances.

But before returning anyone to office, voters should demand answers to some basic questions from those looking for re-election. Here are the most important ones to ask:

1. The Point Park litigation

Why did you support continuing the Point Park litigation when a resolution had been within reach just five years earlier? Why did you continue spending taxpayers’ money when there were repeated signals from the court that the Town was headed for defeat?

One-fifth of the eventual $5.5 million price tag was incurred during your term in office. At what point did you ask whether the Town’s litigation strategy still made sense? What was your limit? Was there one?

If you could not recognize when it was time to stop spending taxpayers’ money on a losing legal battle, why should taxpayers trust your judgment the next time millions of dollars are at stake?

2. The sale of Sunny Cove Camp

How do you expect Fort Frances to credibly promote itself as a waterfront tourism and recreation destination when you supported selling Sunny Cove Camp — the municipality’s only waterfront recreational property?

Waterfront property is finite. Once a municipality sells a strategic public asset, getting it back may be impossible.

What was the long-term vision behind that decision? Where is the replacement opportunity? How does selling waterfront recreational property advance a strategy based on tourism, recreation, and quality of life?

If council could not recognize the strategic value of the waterfront property it already owned, why should voters trust it to build the community’s tourism economy for the future?

3. $39,000 in legal fees over a $13,000 lawsuit

Why did you spend approximately $39,000 hiring a Bay Street law firm to litigate simple a $13,000 Small Claims Court claim for routine expense reimbursement? Even a complete victory could not make that arithmetic sensible for taxpayers.

Who was watching the meter? At what point did anyone on council ask whether spending three dollars in legal fees to fight over one dollar made financial sense? What principle was supposedly important enough to justify that expense? Or was your willingness to burn public money about spite rather than value for money?

If you approved spending $39,000 fighting over $13,000, why should taxpayers trust your judgment about value for money, or that personal grudges aren’t driving spending?

4. The half-million-dollar airline subsidy

Why did you write what amounted to a half-million-dollar blank cheque to a private company to provide expensive, infrequent, and impractical passenger air service from the Fort Frances airport?

Who was this service actually designed to benefit? How many ordinary Fort Frances residents could realistically afford to use it?

And why should local property taxpayers subsidize airfare for non-resident government and industry travellers whose employers would ordinarily pay the cost of getting them here anyway?

What measurable return were taxpayers promised for their half-million dollars? Did they get it?

If council is prepared to risk that much public money on a private venture, what evidence do you require before saying yes — and why should voters trust that standard? What other essential industries are you willing to prop up with public money? How would you decide?

5. The culture at town hall

What is your plan to weed out obstructionism within the municipal bureaucracy and replace it with a culture that asks “How can we make this work?”

Residents, developers, entrepreneurs, and community organizations should not have to fight their own municipal government to invest, build, organize, or create opportunities here.

After four years in office, incumbents cannot simply blame “staff” or previous councils for dysfunction at town hall. Council hires the CAO, sets policy, approves budgets, and is ultimately accountable for the organization it governs.

So what have you done to change that culture? What will you do differently next term?

If you have been unable or unwilling to change an obstructionist culture during your current mandate, why should anyone believe another four years will be different?

6. Who gets heard at council?

Only one woman is running for council this election, while retirees continue to be heavily represented among candidates.

Council cannot control who puts their name on a ballot. But it can control whose voices it seeks out, whose experiences inform its decisions, and whether municipal government feels accessible to people who do not have the time or circumstances to sit through daytime meetings and endless committee processes.

What will you do to ensure that young people, working families, women, newcomers, entrepreneurs, and other underrepresented residents have a meaningful voice in your decisions?

What will you change about how council consults, communicates, schedules meetings, and recruits people to boards and committees?

If municipal government keeps hearing from the same people in the same rooms, how can voters trust it to understand the community Fort Frances is becoming rather than the community it used to be?

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None of these questions requires voters to dislike the people currently sitting around the council table. Public service deserves respect, and municipal office can be thankless work.

But incumbency is not an entitlement to re-election. Experience is not a substitute for results. And longevity in office is not evidence of sound judgment.

Incumbents have something newcomers do not: a record. They should be prepared to defend it.

Before voters give anyone another four years of authority over their taxes, property, public assets, and community’s future, they should ask themselves one question above all: Has this council earned our trust to make the next big decision?

-Douglas W. Judson