One item I feel strongly about is the lack of accountability held to our councillors on their voting records in council. If you haven’t tried, it is extremely difficult to determine how any of our representatives have voted in the past on particular issues. You would have to know the exact item you are looking for, the exact date it was discussed and then search through the entire Minutes of the council meeting just to see who voted what.

If elected, I will be proposing that all council votes be detailed and documented on an online database for the general public to easily search for how their representative voted on each and every item brought forward in council chambers. You could search for certain topics via “keyword tags”, how just a certain councillor voted in general or a combination of both.

E.g. #1: If you were interested in how Councillor ‘X’ voted on recreation items you would simple check off “Councillor X” and “Recreation”, a time frame to search in, if any, and then press the search button. This would show you all the instances recreation came up during council, the date they came up in council and how Councillor ‘X’ voted on it. It would also provide a link(s) to the council minutes for each appropriate item found.

E.g. #2: If you only have a vague idea of what exactly you are looking for, you would type in keywords, similar to how Google works, and it would bring up all the instances that match your keywords. Once again, it would provide a link(s) to the council minutes for each appropriate item found.

Do not let critics of this idea fool you by stating the costs to implement and maintain such a system would be expensive. As a graduate of St. Clair College’s Computer Systems Technician program, I am very familiar with the ease and the very minimal cost of implementing a database system such as this.

Allowing the public easy access to these types of records would hold our elected officials accountable to all decisions they have made in the past. Councillors are elected by the people to represent the people. It is time to make it easier for the citizens of our city to see if that is what their representatives are actually doing or whether they are just all talk during an election year.