Strong-mayor veto needs a public protocol

On November 17, 2025, Mayor Don McIsaac issued his first strong-mayor veto, striking down a Council amendment that would have added approximately $700,000 to the City's reserves for road and sidewalk work. Council attempted to override the veto at a special meeting on November 28, 2025, falling short of the two-thirds threshold required under the Municipal Act, 2001 (Part VI.1). The override failed.

Whether you agreed with the specific veto is a separate question from the one I want to put on the table: a tool this powerful, with an override threshold Council has already failed to reach once, should not be used without a publicly written rulebook for when and how it gets used.

Strong-mayor powers were extended to Orillia by the Province in 2025. They cannot be repealed by Council. What Council and the Mayor CAN do is bind themselves, publicly, to a protocol that constrains how the veto is exercised. That protocol is what is missing today.

I would commit, in writing and before taking office, to a four-part veto protocol. First: no veto without a written rationale released to the public the same day — naming the provincial priority a by-law veto is in service of, or, for a budget veto, the specific fiscal reasoning behind it. Second: a minimum 72-hour advance notice to Council before a veto is filed, so the Mayor and Council can attempt to resolve the disagreement in the open. Third: no veto on routine procedural matters, appointments, or by-laws unrelated to a stated provincial priority. Fourth: an annual public review where every veto exercised that year is reviewed against the protocol.

The protocol does not change the override threshold. What it does is make every veto a deliberate, defensible act with a paper trail. If I am elected and Council wants to enshrine the protocol in a formal Council resolution that future mayors would have to publicly repudiate to ignore, I would support that. The provincial authority is not going away. The question is whether the city sets norms around it or lets each mayor define their own.