Priority 04
Funding certainty for recreation programming and facilities, so families do not outgrow what the town can offer.
Header image: An empty municipal park with a curving path, sports field and play structure
Recreation is the first budget line to get squeezed and the last one residents forgive. In a ward filling up with young families, ice time and programme space are not luxuries.
The pattern is familiar: a subdivision is approved, the parkland dedication is taken as cash-in-lieu, and the park itself arrives years later, or somewhere else. Meanwhile registration for the local programmes closes in minutes and the waitlist quietly becomes the service level.
Parkland dedication and community benefits charges should be planned against the neighbourhoods generating them. Where cash-in-lieu genuinely makes more sense, residents deserve to know where that money went and what it bought.
Facilities also need an honest maintenance conversation. Deferring capital renewal on a rink or a community centre is a decision to pay more later, and it should be recorded as such when the budget is passed.
The rest of the platform
