He wrote “Section 88.3” on a Post-it note. It doesn't say what he told me it says.
On Monday, August 17th, I met alone with Carling's CAO/Clerk/Treasurer to go through nomination papers for Mayor and for Council. I told him I needed one more day to seek counsel before deciding, and asked for a Tuesday meeting; he said he was booked all day. My meeting to sign was set for Wednesday, August 19th, around 1:30 p.m. What followed was nearly two hours of him trying to talk me out of filing, including a threat that he might not certify me, on the strength of a legal citation that turned out to be wrong.
I asked him directly: was there a formal complaint? He said yes. I asked who filed it. He said he couldn't tell me. At 12:40 p.m. that same day, before our 1:30 p.m. meeting had even started, a former long-serving mayor called me, urgent and anxious, to say he'd heard I had a “website” up as a private citizen and was “offside the rules,” even though I hadn't yet filed anything. He was never in the room. Only township staff were present at any point that day; no resident, even in the lobby, was told anything. I asked the former mayor who told him. He stammered, then hung up.
“Candidates' election campaign advertisements, 88.3 (1) In this section, ‘election campaign advertisement' means an advertisement in any broadcast, print, electronic or other medium that has the purpose of promoting or supporting the election of a candidate.”, Municipal Elections Act, 1996, s. 88.3(1)
A rule about how a candidate's ads must identify themselves. Nothing about nomination filing, and it only applies to a “candidate,” a term the Act itself defines: “‘candidate' means a person who has been nominated under section 33.” At the time he raised it, I was neither nominated nor certified. There is no legal category for what I was doing before I filed, I was simply a private citizen.
The Municipal Elections Act governs a candidate. It starts applying to a person the moment they file nomination papers, not one moment before. Whatever I did as a private citizen, before I filed, was not his business, or the business of any competing candidate, or any former or outgoing mayor.
Before that Wednesday, exactly one person outside my household knew I'd booked a meeting to discuss filing: the CAO/Clerk/Treasurer, through his own intake process. I'd had an unpublished coming-soon page up on my personal domain, standard practice while a site is being built. I don't know how a private conversation and an unpublished page turned into a phone call to a former mayor within a day. I'd like an answer to that as much as anyone.
What I do know, because it's in writing: certifying a candidate is a narrow, mechanical duty under a fixed deadline, not a judgment call for the returning officer to slow-walk with an ambiguous, misquoted section of the Act. Two days after telling me he'd consulted township counsel on whether he could certify me, I raised it again, and he said he'd had nothing to do with it. Those two statements can't both be true. I filed anyway. He certified me anyway, on schedule.
Two days later, he confirmed a formal complaint had in fact been filed, but by his own account, his position had already reversed. On the 19th, he'd suggested he might not be able to certify me. By the 21st, in writing, he told me the opposite: certification would proceed regardless, and any dispute over the website would go to the Audit Committee and, if it went further, the courts, after the election, not before it. Even his own lawyer's opinion, which he says found a technical issue with the page, didn't change that answer. That was exactly the law's position from the start: it was never his call to make.
Carling deserves an administration that follows its own rules instead of testing whether candidates will fold under pressure. Ten years of one office holding this much unchecked authority is how a township ends up here. I don't cave under pressure, that backbone is the same thing that has me volunteering in one of the most dangerous slums in the world. The CAO/Clerk/Treasurer needs to stay in his lane, and confidential conversations need to stay confidential.
Source: personal account and contemporaneous notes, call logs, and calendar records, meeting of August 19, 2026, corroborated by a written email exchange with the CAO/Clerk/Treasurer dated August 19–21, 2026, and by the domain host's own visitor analytics for the period Aug 17–19, 2026. Township of Carling certified candidates by the statutory August 24, 2026 deadline.
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