About Clearerview

Clearerview is an independent, volunteer-run project that monitors municipal council meetings in the Township of Clearview, Ontario. It is not affiliated with the township, any political party, any candidate, or any developer. It does not receive funding from anyone.

The project exists because council meetings are public but functionally invisible. The agendas are posted as PDFs on the township website a few days before the meeting. The meetings themselves are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The minutes are approved at the next meeting. At no point in this process does anyone summarize what happened in plain language or ask whether the decisions made any sense.

That is what Clearerview does. We read the agendas, watch the meetings, and write up what happened. We are not neutral about it. We think council should be watched, questioned, and held accountable, especially on issues involving public money, land use, and the kinds of decisions that are easy to make quietly when nobody is paying attention.

What We Are Not

We are not journalists. We are not lawyers. We are not urban planners. We are residents who think the baseline level of civic attention in most Ontario townships is dangerously low, and that someone should at least be writing down what happens at council in a format that doesn't require 45 minutes of YouTube scrubbing to understand.

We do not speak for the township. We do not represent any ward. We do not have inside sources. Everything we reference comes from publicly available agendas, meeting recordings, and official minutes posted on clearview.ca.

Our Bias

We are skeptical of council by default. Not because the people on it are bad, but because municipal government operates with very little scrutiny and a lot of institutional inertia. When nobody watches, bad habits form. When nobody asks questions, questionable decisions go unchallenged. We would rather ask a question that turns out to have a reasonable answer than let something slide because nobody bothered to look.

If council makes a good decision, we will say so. If they make a bad one, we will say that too. If they spend 40 minutes on something that should have taken 5, we will note it. Our goal is not to be fair in the journalistic sense. Our goal is to be honest and to pay attention.