Drive any back road in North Frontenac and you're mostly driving past Crown land. It borders our lakes, backs onto our trails, and makes up a huge share of this township's footprint. For years we've talked about our housing crunch and our shrinking room to grow the tax base as if they're two separate problems. I don't think they are.
Here's what changed my mind. I spent time this year pricing out what it actually takes to get small-scale rural housing built here: communal well and septic, a Hydro One extension, zoning. The infrastructure costs are real and they don't go away. But the single biggest number on that page, every time, is land. And we are sitting on more of it than almost any township our size.
That's not a knock on anyone. Housing policy moves fast right now, faster than most small councils have the staff time to track. The federal government only stood up its current public land program, Build Canada Homes, in the past year, built on a land bank and leasing model that didn't exist when this council was elected. Ontario's process for a municipality to bring Crown land into a project has been on the books longer, but it wasn't built with today's housing shortage in mind, so someone has to pick up the phone, call MNRF, and ask the question. Based on the public record and what the Township has told me so far, nobody has.
New housing units go on the tax roll and stay there, year after year, which is exactly the kind of revenue that takes pressure off everyone's property tax bill instead of adding to it. And because the newest federal tools favour leasing Crown land rather than selling it, the township doesn't have to give up the asset to use it.
North Frontenac already has the tool to move on this without waiting a full term to talk about it. In 2025 the province extended strong mayor authority to North Frontenac, the same authority Toronto, Ottawa, and dozens of other Ontario municipalities already use. It exists for exactly one reason: so that a mayor can direct staff and set priorities on housing without that work getting stuck behind the normal pace of small town governance, because the province wants homes built faster than the usual process allows. The current mayor has said publicly he doesn't intend to use it. I think that gets the risk backwards. The risk was never a mayor using a tool the legislature built for this. The risk is a housing opportunity sitting untouched for another four years because nobody wanted to pick up something that's already sitting on the table.
If I'm elected, this is a first term priority, not a study for a shelf. I will use that authority to direct staff to check the federal land bank for anything already available to us, open a direct conversation with our MNRF district office about what a township-sponsored housing project actually requires, and get us registered in the Build Canada Homes process so we're in line instead of starting from zero when a site is ready.
Council still has its say. Under strong mayor rules, Council can amend or override a mayor's budget decisions with a two-thirds vote, and that check stays in place here too. Using the authority doesn't mean skipping Council -- it means not waiting on Council before even making a phone call. None of the fact-finding costs the township money to pursue. It costs someone deciding it's worth pursuing.
We have the land, and now we have the tool to use it. What we've been missing is a mayor willing to pick it up. That's what I'm offering.
Art Hannigan
Candidate for Mayor, Township of North Frontenac
Source note: Mayor Lichty's position on strong mayor powers is as reported by Frontenac News in its coverage of the 2026 election: frontenacnews.ca/article.php?id=19208