The facts on where Chris stands.

• Residential property taxes fund 58% of city revenue. Commercial property taxes fund just 14%. That imbalance is the pressure behind every tax increase.
• The fix is a bigger commercial tax base, so businesses carry more of the load and homeowners carry less.
• Every dollar the city earns outside your tax bill is a dollar it doesn't have to take from you.

Sources: City of Burlington 2026 Budget Summary · Understanding your property tax bill

• Push for local hiring preferences in city contracts and RFPs: Burlington businesses first.
• Advocate for tax policies that reduce the city's reliance on residential property taxes by growing the commercial base.
• Fill the empty storefronts. The residential tax rate is about 0.97%; the commercial rate is slightly more than 2%. Every vacant lot or “for lease” unit that opens grows the commercial tax base and takes pressure off homeowners.
• New businesses bring licence and permit revenue to the city, plus steady work for local contractors and trades.
• Local businesses hire local kids. With youth unemployment climbing in Canada, a first job helps family budgets and gives young people a résumé to build on.
• Turn cost centres into profit centres: open city facilities to local pop-up shops for a day, a weekend or a month, with permit revenue coming back to the city.
• Oppose unnecessary red tape and permit delays that slow down small business openings.
• Work to reduce overhead in city operations so savings can be passed back to residents and local employers.

• Convene police, community services, and provincial partners at the same table — not in separate silos.
• Advocate directly to Queen's Park for provincial funding of mental health and housing supports that municipalities cannot afford to carry alone.
• Reform the escorted e-scooter and e-bike program, which has created documented safety and accountability gaps on Ward 6 streets.
• Push for community-based early intervention programs that reduce downstream policing costs.
• Oppose approaches that treat visible homelessness as a bylaw problem rather than a housing and health problem.

• Install roundabouts/4-way stops at key intersections to calm traffic flow and give pedestrians safe crossings.
• Install speed bumps on side streets where residents request them, so families are safe from speeding cars.
• Push Halton Regional Police for a ticketing blitz in Alton Village so traffic laws, roadways and community safety are respected.
• Convert dangerous 3-way stops to roundabouts/4-way stops — giving residents the safer, fully-controlled intersections they have been calling for.

• Push for spending discipline and line-by-line accountability before every budget vote.
• Call out wasteful programs publicly — the speed camera signage rollout is the example: the city spent money erecting signs after the fact, only for the province to ban the program entirely.
• Oppose tax increases that are not tied to measurable service improvements Ward 6 residents will actually see.
• Burlington's property taxes rose 44.91% over the past eight years — a no-vote that still passes every year did not protect Ward 6 families.
• Support development that generates its own revenue rather than further burdening residential ratepayers.

• Coordinate signal timing along Brant Street, Guelph Line, Walkers Line, and Appleby Line — a fixable problem that costs nothing except political will.
• Push for snow gate systems on residential plows so driveways stop getting buried after every pass. Shovelling heavy snow is linked to a higher risk of heart attack, so this is about safety, not just convenience (CMAJ, 2017).
• Improve public transit reliability on Ward 6 routes through direct advocacy at the Regional level.
• Prioritize maintenance of existing parks, trails, and community spaces before new capital projects.
• Reinvest in the services Ward 6 residents actually use daily, not projects driven by optics.

• Demand public updates from the province on the Ministerial Zoning Order (MZO) process — residents deserve to know where this stands.
• Require clear, public criteria for any future development phase before a decision is made, not after.
• Brownfield and underutilized sites must be prioritized before any public greenspace is touched — this is a firm position, not a preference.
• Commit to a specific next step — not a general statement — whichever way the Minister's decision goes.
• Aggressively fight to restore Millcroft residents' green space and hold all parties accountable to that outcome.
• The developer had fences up and construction was planned for spring. This is not a future threat — it is the current reality.