Six commitments for Ward 3, grounded in what Council has already done and what is still left to finish.
The Town’s own resident survey put managing growth at the top of the list, with residents asking that infrastructure keep pace, that small town character be protected, and that recreation grow alongside the population. That is what Keith is hearing at the door, and it is what these six commitments are built to answer.
PILLAR ONE: A strong voice for Ward 3, from a councillor who listens first
Council is seven people. A Mayor and six ward councillors, one for each ward, and that is the whole of it. Which means Ward 3 gets exactly one voice at that table, and how much this ward gets out of the next four years depends a great deal on whether that voice knows the streets it is speaking for.
Keith was born in Stouffville and has always called it home. He currently lives here with his wife Sonja, and he raised four children in this community. His business is in Stouffville, not in an office somewhere else, and most days you can find him in it. When someone stops him about a road, a park, a permit or a drainage problem, it is usually happening on a street he has known his whole life.
That is the part of the job that never makes the news. Most of what a ward councillor does is not votes at a microphone, it is following up on the things residents cannot get answered anywhere else, and staying on them until somebody actually calls back. Keith would rather be judged on that than on speeches.
PILLAR TWO: Keeping Stouffville the safe community it has always been
Stouffville has always been a safe, close community. That is not a slogan and it is not something to talk down in order to campaign on it. It is the reason a lot of people moved here and the reason more of them stayed.
Safety in a town like this is not only a policing question. It is whether the streets are lit and maintained, whether parks and paths feel looked after, whether downtown is busy enough in the evening that people are around, and whether neighbours still know one another well enough to notice when something is off. Those are municipal responsibilities, and they are the ones a councillor can actually affect.
Keith has spent decades investing in exactly that fabric, hosting celebrity charity events that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local community initiatives and for Markham Stouffville Hospital. A community that looks after its own tends to stay the kind of place people want to live, and keeping Stouffville that way is the point of doing any of the rest of it.
The Town’s resident survey said the same thing in different words. Alongside managing growth, residents asked for more to do here: youth programming, parks and trails, and services for seniors and families. Recreation is not separate from keeping a community close-knit, it is a large part of how that happens, and Keith will push for it to grow with the population rather than trail behind it.
PILLAR THREE: Controlled development that delivers the roads, water and services to go with it
The planning is done. Council adopted a new Official Plan in May 2024, the Province approved it in September 2025, and the framework for how this town grows over the next generation is now set. Roughly 11,659 residential units sit in the town-wide pipeline, including about 1,162 units approved at Tenth Line and Bethesda in December 2024.
What is not settled is the timing, and the timing is the whole argument. Servicing for the Highway 48 block is targeted at 2028 on an interim basis, with the regional works behind it running to somewhere between 2033 and 2035. Homes get occupied on a faster clock than sewers and water mains get built. Whitchurch-Stouffville also has one public secondary school, Stouffville District Secondary School, with roughly 1,356 students, while the York Region District School Board is already capping enrolment at three of its secondary schools.
Keith was in the room for all of it, including the employment lands framework Council adopted in June 2026. Schools are a Provincial responsibility and no municipal councillor can build one, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What a councillor can do is sequence approvals against the servicing and capacity that has to carry them, and keep the pressure public when senior governments are the ones holding things up.
PILLAR FOUR: More commercial and industrial business to help alleviate the tax burden of residents and provide work where you live
A town that is only houses makes residents pay for everything. Every road, every rink, every fire truck comes out of the same pocket, because there is nobody else on the assessment roll to share it. That is the structural problem underneath most tax conversations in Stouffville, and it does not fix itself.
On June 17, 2026, Keith moved the motion that created the Town’s Non-Residential Development Charge Deferral Program. It gives an employer building here a five year deferral on the Town’s development charges and a five year exemption on the Town’s portion of tax on the new assessed value. The program opened on July 1, 2026, runs to June 30, 2029, and gets evaluated before it expires. The same meeting adopted the Town’s new employment lands framework, which protects industrial land from being quietly converted to something else and designates Stouffville’s employment lands as Business Park, meaning offices and service commercial as well as industry.
That is a foundation, not a finished job. The incentive has only been open a matter of weeks and it would be dishonest to claim results already. What it does mean is that when a business is choosing between here and somewhere down the highway, Stouffville finally has something to put on the table. More of them locating here is how residents stop carrying the tax base alone, and it is how more people get to work in the town they live in.
PILLAR FIVE: Transparent governance and straight answers residents can count on
Start with a number most people have never been told. In 2025 the total tax bill raised in Whitchurch-Stouffville was about $138.5 million. The Town’s share was roughly $47.5 million, York Region took about $59.3 million, and the school boards about $31.6 million. So when a resident says their taxes went up, roughly two thirds of that bill was set by governments other than this one.
That is not an excuse and it is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of an honest one. Residents are entitled to know which level of government is responsible for what, so they know who to hold accountable, including when the answer is this Council. The stormwater charge that moved off water bills and onto tax bills in 2025 was a Town decision, and about 4,000 properties saw it for the first time.
Keith’s view is that people can handle the real answer, including the parts they will not enjoy, and that a councillor who only shows up with good news is not much use. Straight answers, consistently, are what earn the benefit of the doubt on the harder decisions.
PILLAR SIX: Strong leadership that unites our team at Town Hall
Nobody on Council gets anything done alone. It is one vote out of seven, which means every road, every budget line and every project that matters to Ward 3 requires convincing at least three other people that it is worth doing. A councillor who cannot work with colleagues is a councillor who cannot deliver for the ward, however good the speeches are.
Keith spent his working life on teams, at a level where results were the only measure that counted, and then twenty years running a business where 50 to 60 people depend on the place being well run. Both of those teach the same lesson: you get further by making the case and building the room than by making noise.
The next four years are a delivery term. The plan is written and agreed. What it needs now is a Council able to actually execute it, and a Ward 3 councillor who can keep this ward’s roads, services and priorities in the conversation while that happens.
