Sometimes I come home from the research portion of my job and sit on the couch struggling to find an angle, not because there’s nothing worth writing about, but because the way in which it has been presented to me is either simply baffling or else emotionally or cognitively exhausting to have to think about for more than a few minutes of the time.

Often, it’s some combination of the two.

This happens a lot, as you might imagine, at meetings of Peterborough’s city council. Whether it be an outright shouting match about homeless people’s right to live, or an hour-long debate over a matter of procedural pedantry, I often find myself spending long swathes of council meetings with my head in my hands, trying to make sense of how I will convey the minutiae of it all to the people at home.

On more than a few occasions have friends of mine sent me screenshots of the city council livestream, specifically those in which I’m visible giving the camera feed a thousand-yard stare. As a matter of fact, you rarely need to look further than the screenshots KawarthaNow publishes as covers on their council coverage to see me looking despondent, ticked-off, or some combination thereof. 

This was certainly the case on Monday, March 10th, 2025, when Peterborough city council reconvened after a week’s absence to discuss–among other things—Amendment planning for growth in the City’s Strategic Growth Areas outlined in its official plan, a rezoning application for a single family home, the longstanding sticking point of heritage designations, and Elon Musk’s ownership of the late Twitter dot com.

What experience had taught me could well have been a relatively short meeting if council stayed on track and on topic quickly ballooned into three hours punctuated by digressions and occasional oral volleys lobbed against City Staff, meaning I spent a lot of time rubbing my temples and got home, absolutely wiped, at around 9:30 PM. 

It’s times like these that I’m especially glad of the stalwart presence that is Joelle Kovach. I consider Joelle both a mentor and an inspiration—someone from whom I can learn just about every week. As someone who has years of experience covering council for the Examiner, she is regularly able to parse signals where I hear only noise.

However, as a Cultural Studies graduate and an aficionado of experimental Japanese music, I think there is a purpose to noise. 

While Joelle is able to pull the important points from a given council meeting and convey them in a clear and accessible way—a skill for which I think too few people show proper appreciation—I think there’s also something lost when people engage only with council as a piece of hypertext ephemera on the Examiner’s website or, worse, X, the everything app.

It’s not that the things council are discussing (well, some of them, at least) are not important in-and-of themselves—housing, a thing which almost everyone seems to agree is of pressing importance to the future of the city, was a central topic of discussion at Monday night’s meeting—but rather I think there’s something just as tacitly revelatory in the way in which councillors talk about these issues.

Take, for instance, the public meeting under the planning act for a property at 2248 Old Norwood Road, whose owners sought to rezone the property to accommodate an Additional Residential Unit (ARU) in the form of a detached bungalow at the back of the property.

In a city with a mandate to build more than 4,700 housing units between now and 2031, homeowners are being forced to appeal to council on an individual basis to install ARUs, a zoning category which includes everything from the detached bungalow which was sought Tuesday, to something as simple as an in-law suite.

And yet each week that the city is brought a rezoning application, at least one member of council inevitably seizes the opportunity to congratulate themselves and their colleagues for having contributed to the betterment of housing in the city (it was Kevin Duguay on Monday night, for the record).

While it is technically true that, yes, each ARU that council unanimously approves, such as the one Monday night, is (potentially) an additional dwelling in the city, at the glacial rate which ARUs are being built because of the onus to hold a public meeting under the planning act for each application, the actual difference they make will always be negligible.

Assuming the city approved one ARU every week for all 52 weeks of the year (so ignoring the weeks they take off every three weeks or so, and for all of July), it would take them 90 years to reach the 4,700 unit goal. Obviously ARUs are not going to be the way the city actually meets that goal—there is a clear and demonstrated need for urban intensification and the construction of high-density multi-unit residential buildings—but it’s interesting nonetheless to take the charade on its own terms, even if it’s nothing more than a thought exercise.

This sort of selective bending of the truth to flatter their own image is, however, only one of the discursive modes in which city councillors tend to operate. Grand statements and purple prose are equally common fixtures of the municipal rhetorician.

You see this tendency in both the City Hall bingo we ran to coincide with the municipal budget deliberations, or in the type of quote which so often makes the headlines here or at the Examiner.

City councillors, like many politicians, are skilled practitioners of the ability to say a lot of words without any of them meaning much of anything. Look beneath them and it's often hard to make sense of what the metaphorical invocations of balloons shrinking and plans on the back of napkins are actually referring to.

Moreover, on occasion councillors will single out an item from the consent agenda for discussion—not with the intention to actually debate them, but rather just to seize the opportunity to make a point.

With tariffs on the mind as the second Trump Administration continues to steamroll the Rule of Law, Jeff Leal did exactly that by pointedly asking City Staff where the electronic components of the city’s planned Next-generation 9-1-1 were manufactured.

It bears noting the language in which Leal framed the question: “In this world, where the Canadian Maple Leaf is shining brightly each and every day,” the mayor pre-empted, “where is this equipment coming from and where is it made?”

Staff provided a diplomatic response detailing the places from which the various parts and labour involved in the manufacturing process were sourced, but ultimately Leal’s question was a rhetorical gesture. I doubt Leal actually cares about where the parts are manufactured so much as he desired an opportunity to make another heavy-handed point about Canadian unity.

Just as often as it’s evident that councillors are asking one thing while meaning another, however, it becomes in one way or another apparent that councilors are speaking without even knowing what they are saying themselves, or—worse yet—what they’re supposed to be speaking to.

Last Monday’s example of this fact was staff’s presentation of a report on housing development for incorporation into an amendment to the city’s Official Plan. Specifically, the report was to give Staff direction in developing a Community Planning Permit System (CPPS), a provincially-defined mechanism that streamlines site plan and rezoning applications, thereby expediting the process of housing developments.

This item—which was accompanied by two fulsome appendices and a lengthy slide deck—took up most of the night’s meeting, and was met with colourful riposte by certain members of council.

“I was not consulted!” declared Councilor Keith Riel after Staff presented the initial report. “I have had absolutely no input and I want to have input.”

Riel was seemingly incensed at what he perceived to be council’s lack of involvement in the development of the CPPS guidelines, which were handled primarily by Staff with the help of Toronto-based consulting firms.

The thing is, the report is still in the very earliest stages of its development. What Staff were asking of council at the 10th of March meeting was not final, decisive approval of what is admittedly a complex, multifaceted, and integral issue to the direction of the city’s development, but rather a decision between three options presented to them of how Staff should construct a plan for approval at a future date.

In spite of Riel’s protestations, Staff reiterated time and again that council’s decision was not to be binding, strictly speaking, and that councillors would have input in the process from then until the presentation of the finished By-law amendment, which would itself be subject to council approval.

The amount of discussion on this item only belied a sense that very few members of council had read the full report, or were even entirely confident as to what the report contained.

One of the most striking moments in the whole Official Plan report, to me, was when councilor Alex Bierk was asking Staff about the possibility that the City intended to rezone the Little Lake South neighbourhood for buildings up to 15 storeys in height. Immediately behind him, in a shot some film directors could only dream of composing, was a slide from Staff’s PowerPoint deck clearly showing a 6-storey ceiling on expedited development approval in that area.

Follow council diligently enough and you’ll inevitably run into these sorts of scenarios, where the things councillors say and the fears they are expressing seem at odds with, or otherwise betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the materials being presented to them.

However the true pinnacle of the night came toward the end of the meeting in the form of a one–two punch of a notice of motion from Matt Crowley, and a rambling Other Business aside from Mayor Jeff Leal.

“Colleagues, we find ourselves in an age where falsehoods spread with alarming speed, where trust in our institutions are shaken, where the very fabric of public discourse is under siege,” Crowley declared. “In such a time, it is the duty of the city of Peterborough to stand firm, to act with purpose, to ensure the truth remains unassailable.

“The social media platform X, once known as Twitter, is now a platform where unbridled falsehoods flourish and where its ownership espouses values that stand in stark opposition to the principles of democracy and fair governance,” Crowley continued. “Suggesting a move away from X is not a matter of preference, it is a battle of integrity.”

The Monaghan Ward councilor’s statement continued in this overly-florid prosaic mode for some several minutes.

It’s not even that I disagree with him, per se. Those who know me know that I have never maintained an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter dot com, and have long been insufferably outspoken about that fact. I agree, in principle, with Crowley’s assertion that continuing to use a broken, angry, cesspool of a website with a terrible UI and an increasingly fascist user base as the city’s primary means of communicating bus cancellations is probably not the soundest of decisions from the perspective of municipal P.R.

That being said, I’m not sure why I, council, or anyone else for that matter had to be subjected to what amounts to an undergraduate essay in communication studies. Twitter bad! We all know that fact!

Municipalities should never have relied on the tech oligarchy to provide them with a reliable way of communicating with their constituents; #ptbo Twitter was a bad idea from day one. That’s in part why I find it so frustrating and self-serving to present the lowest-bar decision to divest—and even then only nominally—from “The Everything App” as a crusade on the side of virtue, with Matt Crowley as its shining armour-clad paragon.

“The battle for integrity is not fought in grand gestures alone, but the steady, unyielding determination to do what is right,” Crowley said.

It’s ironic coming from a member of a council whose track record on social spending, housing development, and policing is—charitably—iffy at best.

Even if Crowley’s voting record speaks to slightly more of a moral backbone than some of his colleagues’, the fact of whether or not the City of Peterborough is active on Twitter is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things to the average Peterboroughan.

Just ask me—as someone without an X/Twitter account, I’ve not been able to check bus cancellations for any of the five years I’ve lived here, because the site has always barred non-users from seeing up-to-date Tweets from users.

Though Crowley has implored Peterborough transit and public works to “lead the charge in forging a communication strategy that is built not upon the shifting sands of dubious information, but upon the solid ground of security, clarity and unwavering reliability,” he crucially did not provide a vision of what said communication strategy might actually look like.

Should the city take to Bluesky, like many in the media sphere have (us included!)? Should they bolster existing presences they might maintain on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok? Should they bring everything in-house, creating a dedicated site or RSS feed for city communiqués? 

Crowley can’t seem to decide, leading me to conclude that part of his motion (and the length of the speech which accompanies it) was done mostly out of a desire to hear himself speak.

If that seemed the case for Crowley, it was even more so in Other Business when Mayor Jeff Leal monopolized five minutes (at the end of a three-hour meeting!) to rebuke claims that he does not care for the wellbeing of abused women and children.

“As I was at home recovering from my surgery, I learned that in the public domain that it was suggested that I was indifferent to women and children fleeing domestic violence,” Leal told council.

“During my almost four decades in politics,” he continued. “I have always gone out of my way to make sure that women and children fleeing domestic violence would have a safe haven.”

Leal went on to list numerous projects from said fourty years in politics which he viewed as having furthered the cause of protecting women and children from domestic harm. I’ll not list them here as I’m frankly not interested. If you really care that much about it, go read Joelle’s piece recounting the whole thing.

I don’t want to give voice to Leal not because I don’t believe he cares at least a little for women and children fleeing domestic abuse, and not because I don’t think that it’s a just and deserving cause, but because using other business as an excuse to evangelize your own political accomplishments is conservative and self-serving.

Jeff Leal is a public figure, and people are inevitably going to form opinions about him. Some of those people—especially on the extremes of the spectrums of politics and NIMBYism—will see fit to voice those opinions in a public forum.

Leal’s response to these facts should not be to tote how virtuous he is; as a matter of fact he probably shouldn’t be rising to the bait. The mayor’s thin skin has landed him in hot water before, and it’s not worth his (or anyone’s) time responding to criticisms made in bad faith—especially if he believes that his political record speaks for itself otherwise.

To listen to Leal lecture a public who is almost certainly not listening to him about the aspersions they cast upon him is a laughable waste of the time and mental acuity of council and the people whose job it is to cover them (me, as it were).

But that’s council for you. The reason we pay people, ultimately, to cover these proceedings is because it’s necessary. Because barring a few exceptions whose devotion to understanding municipal affairs and routine delegations to council I cherish greatly, the average Peterboroughan doesn’t care enough to sit through hours of council’s self-indulgences almost every Monday night.

Someone needs to be there to make sense of it all, even when the fact that half of it doesn’t make sense is illustrative of a point in itself.

That point is this: councillors, much like everyone else, love to hear themselves talk.

This is a glass house sort of situation for me as someone who writes articles of this length and also hosts a weekly radio show, though I’ll say this much: I am not paid to make decisions on behalf of the electorate of the City of Peterborough. I am paid simply to show up, understand what is happening, and communicate it in as effective a manner as possible to the largest number of people I can.

I’ve seen a lot of misinformation and just plain misunderstanding in my time doing this job. Hell, often I’m even correcting my staff writers on the specific intricacies of council procedure up to the final minutes of the copy editing process.

Making council accessible is a tall order in itself, but it’s not helped when council themselves have no idea what they’re talking about; or else are doing so for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak.

To end this article with an appeal: please, for your own sake (and somewhat for mine), read local journalism. It doesn’t have to be mine, and you are free to tell me on council nights that I’m a woke hack who writes for a communist rag, but if nothing else quote someone who is paid to understand what council does in your infographic.

Also, if you’re the type of person who has a tendency to connect points with red string, please at least read to the bottom of the article before you accuse my friends and colleagues of being in the pocket of the PMO, the City of Peterborough, or the pickleball lobby. I don’t care if we never get another red cent from you, I just want you to be informed.

Lastly, to any councillors reading: you’re the reason I do all this. You know I love you in my own messed-up way, and I’m glad that you give me such great material to work with every week.

That said, you don’t have to write all your speeches trying to imagine how they’ll look on the front page of the Examiner the next morning. It’s someone else’s job to figure that out.

I don’t care how rhapsodic you imagine your oration to be; as a professional writer and a David Foster Wallace fangirl, trust me when I say I am not easily impressed. Better to save the both of us time by reading your reports before hand and getting down to business sans editorializing about the present lustrous qualities of the Canadian Maple Leaf, as—to paraphrase Ashburnham councilor Keith Riel—what we’re all left with otherwise is three hours of our lives that we’ll never get back.