Taxes, Spending and Transparency

Your tax bill arrives with a number.

You deserve to know where that money went.

Government is going to spend money. Roads need maintenance. Snow needs to be cleared. Employees have contracts. Water systems need repairs. Fire trucks eventually need replacing.

A lot of that spending is already committed.

The choices Council makes are different.

When Council chooses to spend our money, we should know exactly what it spent, who received it, why it was spent, and whether it worked.

Transparency Has to Mean More Than a Bar Graph

North Cowichan’s budget dashboard is a great start.

It shows actual revenues and expenditures and is updated every two weeks.

But it is still mostly broad categories.

That is not enough.

When I look at Information Technology and see roughly $2.5 million in spending, I want to know what that means.

North Cowichan had 190 full-time employees in 2025.

Maybe $2.5 million is exactly what it should cost.

The public should not have to take that on faith.

I should be able to click on Information Technology and see what we bought.

Then I should be able to follow the spending back to the Council meeting where it was discussed and see why the decision was made.

Public information should not merely be available. It should be easy to understand.

Follow the Money

North Cowichan already publishes a great deal of financial information.

The problem is that the information is scattered.

Budgets are in one place. Financial statements are somewhere else. Supplier payments appear in Statements of Financial Information. Council decisions live in agendas and minutes. Other records have to be found separately.

The information exists.

Now connect it.

A resident should be able to start with a dollar amount and follow it all the way through.

We should not have to become experts in municipal government to understand where our own money went.

Explain the Overruns

Projects go over budget.

Sometimes there is a good reason.

Construction costs change. Something unexpected is found underground. Materials become more expensive. An emergency changes the work.

When that happens, say so clearly.

If Council approves a $1 million project and it costs $1.4 million, the public should be able to see the $400,000 difference and the explanation beside it.

Not buried in another report.

Not hidden three meetings later.

Right there.

Spending Has to Produce Something

Transparency does not end when the cheque is written.

We also need to know whether the spending accomplished what Council said it would accomplish.

Government has a bad habit of measuring effort.

Money spent.

Programs created.

Staff hired.

Reports completed.

Those are activities.

They are not results.

The measure of a program is not what we put into it. The measure is what came out.

When elected, I will push for major discretionary projects and programs to have a clear purpose before money is approved and a clear review afterward.

If it worked, show us.

If it did not work, say so.

Change it.

End it.

Move the money somewhere it can accomplish something.

There is no virtue in continuing to fund something that does not work simply because we have already invested in it.

Make the Information Usable

We have tools today that make all of this easier than it has ever been.

Municipal financial data should be online, searchable and sortable.

Residents should be able to drill down into spending instead of hunting through hundreds of pages of PDFs.

Modern AI tools can make the information even more accessible.

A resident should be able to type ordinary English into the municipal website and get a useful answer from public records.

How much did this project cost?

Who was paid?

What did Council approve?

How much did it go over budget?

What was it supposed to accomplish?

The technology exists.

The data largely exists.

Put them together.

When Elected

When elected, I will push for financial transparency that lets us follow our money from the decision to spend it to the result we got.

I will support clear explanations when projects go over budget.

I will push for outcomes to be measured, not just spending.

I will support making municipal financial data searchable, sortable and understandable to ordinary people.

And when something does not work, I will be willing to let it go.

Tell us where the money went. Tell us why. Then tell us whether it worked.