Platform

Every dollar the municipality collects is a dollar a family in Thorndale or Dorchester doesn't get to spend. Tim will hold the line on the tax rate and make every new expense justify itself against the services residents already expect to receive.

That work doesn't happen at the council table. It happens in the weeks before, reading the budget line by line, which Tim has done for a school board and for non-profit housing boards that had no room to be wrong.

Look up the Rome2Rio route for the train from Pearson International Airport to Windsor and read the list of stops. Why isn't Thames Centre one of them, even a few times a week? We have 4 interchanges of Highway 401 passing through. Service matters in rural Ontario too. Maybe not as often, and at a reduced level, but a service level none the less.

Tim will make sure Thames Centre is in the room with the Province, Middlesex County and the City of London, arguing for an alignment and an access point that work to our advantage. A line that runs past us at 300 km/h and never stops is worse for this municipality than no line at all.

Too many residents drive into London for care that could be delivered in Dorchester or Thorndale. Tim will bring the Thames Valley Family Health Team, our Ontario Health Team and area physicians to one table to work out what is actually deliverable here: nurse practitioner clinics, extended hours, virtual care access, and municipal space we may already be sitting on.

Council can't hire doctors. But, it can make Thames Centre the easiest place in Middlesex County to open a practice, and that part is entirely council's decision to make.

A business owner shouldn't have to file a formal delegation to talk to their mayor. Tim will start a regular Breakfast with the Mayor, rotating between Dorchester and Thorndale, open to any local business.

No presentation and no agenda. Coffee, and the mayor takes notes. Most of what a council needs to know about the local economy is already in those rooms, it just never makes it onto paper.

Highway 401 runs straight through Thames Centre and gives us 4 interchanges on the busiest highway in the country. Most municipalities in Ontario would give a great deal for one. We market over 1,000 acres of industrial land and we have not finished the sentence.

Tim will work with Middlesex County and the Province to steer serviced employment land, logistics and light industry to the interchange lands, where the jobs and the assessment growth belong, and away from the farmland and the village edges where they don't.

Thames Centre is a farming community with major towns and several hamlets in it, and that order matters. Tim will defend the farmland base against sprawl pressure from London, protect the drainage and road infrastructure that agriculture actually runs on, and insist that growth goes where servicing already exists.

Preserving Rural Ontario is the standard every planning application gets measured against. If a proposal can't answer for what it does to the farm next to it, it doesn't get a recommendation.

The Legion and other service groups, minor sports and the seniors' groups in Thorndale and Dorchester are already doing this work, on volunteer hours, without being asked. What they need is a municipal partner, not a new municipal program with a coordinator attached to it.

Tim spent 11 years on seniors housing boards and knows how far a small operating dollar travels when it lands with people who are already organized. He'll work with the partners we have to keep youth and senior facilities in both towns open, maintained and used.