Chief Administrative Officer, Clerk, and Treasurer are three separate legal duties in Ontario, held by different people almost everywhere, precisely so no single office can both make a decision and be the only one checking whether it was made and paid for correctly. In Carling, since 2025, one person holds all three.
Carling's $206,678 CAO salary beats Huntsville, Parry Sound, and McDougall — towns 2 to 14 times its population, running water, sewer and transit systems Carling doesn't have. Only Bracebridge, 11.6× Carling's size, pays more. McKellar is the closest match on size: 1,419 residents to Carling's 1,491, the same four staff on the Sunshine List. Carling pays its top job $63,865 more for a town the same size, doing comparable work.
Ontario Sunshine List 2025. StatCan 2021 Census population.
Widen the lens to all 13 Parry Sound–Muskoka municipalities and the pattern holds on a per-household basis too. Carling ranks 3rd of 13 in absolute pay — but every Muskoka town, all larger and more complex, pays 2.5× to 13.5× less per household for a CAO.
The CAO/Clerk combination isn't new — it was already there in 2022, dropped from the title for 2023–24, then reappeared in 2025 with Treasurer added.
Standalone Treasurer Sylvia Roy left in November 2024 for the Parry Sound District Social Services Administration Board, fully accounting for her absence from the 2025 list.
Carling's own staff directory shows who actually does the work: a Deputy Clerk and a Deputy Treasurer, both under the $100,000 disclosure threshold, still handle the daily records and finance functions. What changed in 2025 is who holds the statutory legal authority and signing power over both, layered on the CAO's own administrative authority — with no separate officer positioned to check any of the three.
Yes. Section 228 of the Municipal Act, 2001 requires every municipality to appoint a Clerk; section 286 requires a Treasurer; section 229 makes a CAO optional. Nothing in the Act sets a population threshold or bars one person from holding the Clerk and Treasurer offices at once.
"A municipality shall appoint a clerk."
"A municipality shall appoint a treasurer who is responsible for handling all of the financial affairs of the municipality on behalf of and in the manner directed by the council."
So combining the roles breaks no statute. What it does erase is the built-in separation the Act creates by imposing two independent legal duties on two different offices: the Clerk's duty over records and votes, and the Treasurer's duty over money, reporting, and investment compliance.
Widened to seven Parry Sound / Almaguin area townships of comparable size (979–1,491 residents), checked against each one's own staff directory.
Of seven townships checked, only Carling and South Algonquin merge all three roles into one person. Every other township that combines any roles keeps the Treasurer's money function separate from administration — the full triple merger is the outlier, not the norm.
The same pattern shows up a second time, outside the administrative office entirely. Ontario municipalities are required to have three independent accountability functions: a Closed Meeting Investigator, a Municipal Ombudsman, and an Integrity Commissioner, each meant to operate independently of council and of each other, so one kind of complaint is never screened by the office handling a different kind. Carling's September 17, 2024 Special Council by-law appoints one firm, Ron Shaw and Associates Inc., to all three roles at once — confirmed independently by the Ontario Ombudsman's own list of municipal closed meeting investigators.
The same firm, in its Integrity Commissioner capacity, already investigated and found against a sitting councillor now seeking re-election — a matter of public record in the Township's own minutes. The firm positioned as the independent check on council conduct is the same firm that would field a closed-meeting complaint about that council, or an administrative complaint about the office next door.
Sources: Ontario Ombudsman, official list of municipal closed meeting investigators; Township of Carling, September 17, 2024 Special Council meeting agenda; Municipal Act, 2001, ss. 223.2 and 239.2; Ontario Sunshine List 2022–2025; StatCan 2021 Census; Carling and comparator townships' own staff directories, accessed August 26, 2026.