The Beautify playbook — KM CLEAN

Visible public work is the fastest honest way to demonstrate that you can convene strangers into coordinated action — the core skill of governing. This playbook offers every candidate and team in Ontario’s 2026 municipal elections, identically, a workflow that costs almost nothing, a metric that can’t be faked, and a receipt standard that lets anyone verify it. It’s a suggestion, free to take: your crew, your name, your receipts, your credit — nothing here to join and nothing to submit.

Part of Show Your Work — two ideas for every candidate. This page suggests; it never convenes — every round described here is run by a campaign or crew under its own name.

The headline metric: KM CLEAN

Kilometres of sidewalk cleaned. One number, additive, route-verifiable, comparable across every ward and all 444 municipalities. A kilometre cleaned in Kenora counts exactly like a kilometre cleaned in Scarborough. It reads as what it is: care for a shared commons, one stretch at a time.

Three tiers, so the metric stays honest about what was actually done:

CLEANED — litter and cigarette butts off the route. The true near-costless floor: a crew, gloves, tongs or grabbers, and bags. This is the tier every campaign can reach this week.
WASHED — the same route power-washed or scrubbed. A labeled bonus tier, not costless: equipment rental, water access, and — read the safety layer below — real municipal rules about what may go into a storm drain. Claim it only when you actually did it.
TRANSFORMED — paint, planting, signage repair, an eyesore fixed. Entirely consent-gated: property-owner permission and any required municipal permit come before the brush comes out. See “the one rule” below.

A route can claim more than one tier — report each tier’s kilometres separately. Never add tiers together into one number: 2 km cleaned + 1 km washed is reported as exactly that, not as “3 km.”

The receipt standard — what makes a round count

A round without receipts is a story. A round with receipts is a demonstration. For each round, publish on your own site or page:

Date, municipality, and route — start point and end point, named plainly (streets or intersections), and the distance claimed.
Photos along the route — before and after, every few hundred metres, so the route is verifiable end to end, not just at its best corner.
What came off the route — bags filled, and kilograms if you can weigh them.
The butt count — cigarette butts collected, logged per route segment. This is the sub-receipt that feeds the one-year grand challenge below; one walk produces all three numbers (km, kg, butts).
Crew size — how many people showed up. Convening is the thing being demonstrated; count it.
The tier claimed — cleaned, washed, or transformed, per the definitions above.

Count at the time, on the route — never reconstruct numbers afterward. If a number wasn’t counted, publish “not counted” rather than an estimate dressed as a count. An honest gap outranks a round number. If a photo shows a person under 18, get a parent or guardian’s okay before it goes online — or frame the shot so no child is identifiable.

Repeatability is the real demonstration. One round proves a weekend; a cadence of rounds — same metric, growing crews, receipts every time — proves you can convene strangers into coordinated action again and again. That is the capacity governing actually takes.

The safety and consent layer — non-negotiable

This section is not fine print. A campaign that skips it is not demonstrating capacity; it is demonstrating carelessness with volunteers. Every rule here rides every round.

Sharps — the rule that protects your crew

Cigarette butts co-occur with needles. This is Ontario; say it plainly at every crew briefing.
Nobody picks up anything by bare hand. Gloves and tongs or grabbers, every person, every round.
Needles and other sharps are never collected by your crew’s bags. If your municipality offers a sharps-disposal or 311-type reporting channel, use it; many public health units and some pharmacies accept sharps in approved containers. Know your local channel before the round starts.
No minors on any site where sharps are found or expected. If a route turns up sharps, anyone under 18 moves to a different segment, immediately and without exception. Plan family-friendly segments (parks fronting main streets, BIA blocks) apart from segments where sharps are likely.
Hi-vis for anyone working near a curb; the crew lead walks the route once before the crew does.

Disposal — finish the job

Collected bags go where your municipality says they go — a round that ends at an overflowing public bin has moved litter, not removed it. Ask your municipality’s waste line or 311-equivalent where a community-cleanup’s bags should land; many municipalities run cleanup programs that will collect bags from a named point.

Washing — the tier with real rules

Power-washing takes equipment, a water source you have permission to use, and attention to runoff: in many municipalities, sewer-use rules restrict what may enter a storm drain, and wash water carrying detergent can violate them. Default to water-only. Use detergent only after confirming your municipality’s sewer-use by-law allows what you plan to do — ask the municipality, not this page.
Washing a public sidewalk in front of a consenting shop is the easy case; washing municipal property at scale may need permission. When unsure, ask first. The answer is a receipt too — publish it.

The one rule everything else is a footnote to

Beautify only what you have the right to beautify. Litter off a public sidewalk needs no one’s permission. Paint on a wall needs the owner’s consent — written is better — and, on public property, the municipality’s. A mural nobody asked for is vandalism with good intentions, and it loses the argument this whole program exists to make. This is the same ethic as our postering rule: post only where you have the right to post — beautify only what you have the right to beautify.

EVERY BUTT — the bigger idea, for whoever wants it

The butt count inside a KM CLEAN receipt is more than a footnote — it’s the seed of a year-scale idea any campaign, community group, or council could pick up: a jurisdiction cleared of cigarette butts within a year, by people and technology working together, measured entirely by receipts. The year-scale number is a target — labeled a target, never claimed as a count — because butts re-deposit daily and honesty about that is the whole point: eradication measured by receipts, never a claim of “done.”

A campaign that starts counting now is building the opening baseline of whatever its community later chooses to run with. No campaign should promise to finish anything by voting day — “every butt by October” is a claim nobody can verify and nobody should make. What a campaign can demonstrate by October is the thing that matters: crews that show up, rounds that repeat, receipts that hold up.

Publish your receipts

Your rounds belong on your own page, under your own name — dated, photographed, counted at the time, standing for the whole term you’re asking to serve. That’s the entire mechanism: receipts your voters and your local press can check with their own eyes. Nothing flows back to us — no submissions, no registry, no scoreboard here. Comparing candidates is the public’s seat, and the public is welcome to it.