Show your work
Two ideas, offered identically to every candidate and team in every race in Ontario’s 2026 municipal elections — free, and yours to steal. Doors knocked measure how hard you can ask. These demonstrate something closer to the job itself: what you can organize, and whether you actually listen — in public, with receipts your voters can check for themselves. There is nothing here to sign up for and nothing to submit. The playbooks are the whole offer.
The two ideas
- Act — convene a crew and put kilometres of clean, cared-for sidewalk on the record. The floor tier costs a box of gloves and a Saturday morning, in any municipality, at any campaign size. The playbook covers the metric, the receipts, and — non-negotiably — the safety and consent rules.
- Listen — run real consultation sessions in your own room, answer questions on the record, publish what you heard, and stand up a platform your constituents can reach you on all term.
Why these two? Because governing is these two — getting coordinated things done in a shared commons, and hearing the people it’s done for — and because both can be demonstrated honestly before voting day, by an incumbent’s record or a challenger’s Saturday crew alike, for almost nothing.
“Show your work” means publish it yourself
The whole move is one sentence: do the thing, and publish the receipts where your voters can see them — your campaign page, dated, photographed, counted at the time. The playbooks include a simple receipt standard so that what you publish is verifiable rather than just visible. Nothing flows back to us: no submissions, no registry, no scoreboard here. Your work, your page, your credit — and your voters’ own eyes as the audit.
EVERY BUTT — the bigger idea, for whoever wants it
Inside the action playbook lives a year-scale version: a jurisdiction cleared of cigarette butts within a year — people and technology together, measured by receipts, the number a target, labeled a target, because butts re-deposit daily and honesty about that is the point. It’s an idea any campaign, community group, or council could pick up. A campaign that starts counting butts in its cleanup rounds now is building the opening baseline of whatever its community later chooses to run with. The playbook has the details.
Worth asking, if you’re a voter or a reporter
These pages are written for candidates, but the questions they imply belong to everyone: what has each candidate in your race demonstrated — rounds run, kilometres cleaned, sessions held, questions answered on the record, what-we-heard notes published? Asked identically, of everyone, the question does its own work: the receipts are public or they aren’t. The comparing is yours — this site publishes ideas and definitions, and stays out of the referee’s chair on purpose.
Not just candidates
Any organization that knows how to mobilize — a resident association, a BIA, a faith community, a union, a service club — can run a cleanup round or host an assembly under its own name, and many already do. The ideas are free to everyone; so is the year the city is trying to have.
Why this election
The councils and school boards elected this October 26 will sit until 2030 — through the years in which decisions about AI in public services, surveillance and procurement, data governance, climate infrastructure, safety, and freedom get made or get missed, many of them at the municipal table. Steering that from the base of the pyramid starts with who files before 2:00 p.m. on August 21, and what those candidates do before October 26. Thinking of being one of them?
What this page is, and isn’t
- It is a free suggestion, made identically to everyone: two playbooks, a receipt standard, and the reasons they matter.
- It isn’t a program, a contest, or a record we keep. We don’t collect anything, rank anyone, or verify anyone’s claims — your receipts live on your page, answerable to your voters, which is exactly where they belong.