💦 THE SHULMAN REPORT | The End of Rescue Money
The Province is out of room, the region is out of excuses — and the plan starts with water. Part One of the plan.
A home for the Report
This week the work moves to a permanent home: shulman.report.
It started as a Substack — somewhere to think out loud with my neighbours.
It has grown into something with a name and a mandate: The Shulman Report, independent accountability journalism for South Georgian Bay.
Not a newsletter, and not a campaign. A standing record of the decisions, the dollars, and the growth reshaping Collingwood, The Blue Mountains, Clearview, Wasaga Beach, and the county around them — and a place where every paper in this series lives, alongside the arithmetic behind it: the model, the sources, the numbers, open for anyone who wants to check my math.
That is the whole point.
For thirty years I was paid to read past what large organizations say about themselves and watch how the money actually moves.
The Report brings that same lens to the town hall. When a council says the plant is “handled,” or that a bill “won’t land on taxpayers,” the Report does the one thing no press release ever does: it checks.
Follow the dollars. Check the arithmetic.
The plant is in the wrong place
As part of this process, I am meeting with a wide range of very smart, connected people who advise and criticize, and I learn.
Here is something I did not expect to hear, and then heard again and again, the Raymond A. Barker plant is in the wrong place.
Their argument is simple… On the merits of water alone, you would not have put this plant in the Collingwood harbour — you would have gone deep, maybe somewhere close to Thornbury, and drawn the region’s supply from the best source on the shoreline.
Set aside whether they are right. The location is not the point; the thinking is. Ask why the plant sits where it sits and you find the flaw under every water decision this region has ever made: a boundary.
Every choice here has been made because municipal lines have governed them, town by town, because that is the only frame the region has ever had. No one has stood above those lines to ask the one question that matters — where, along this whole shoreline, should the region draw it and treat it?
The boundary decided by default: not the geography, not the depth or cleanliness of the water, not the way it moves along this coast.
Those lines feel like they were drawn in a horse-and-buggy century to divide survey lots and administer local roads — an administrative convenience, never an environmental judgment.
You cannot un-build the Barker plant, and you should not try. But you can stop letting the next hundred years of decisions be made by lines a surveyor drew for reasons that have nothing to do with our water environment. That is what a regional utility is for. Ours is called an MSC, a Municipal Service Corporation.
A Bit of Background
Why does an MSC make sense — it is a utility
An MSC is a public utility, structured within a natural geographic boundary like South Georgian Bay and owned directly by its member municipalities. In this case — Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, The Blue Mountains and Clearview — the towns whose residents it serves.
- It consolidates fractured systems where four partner towns plus one customer each keep their own plan, their own priorities and their own budget. The utility creates a single regional plan — mapping every asset, finding every failure point, and sequencing the investments to fix what is broken and build what the region needs.
- It is run by experienced professionals who deliver complex infrastructure on time and on budget — and who hold the region’s water to the highest environmental standard, drawing on the best treatment technology in the world and holding every town to the same mark.
- As a public utility, it finances capital at lower interest and over longer terms than any single municipality — and carries that debt on its own balance sheet, not the town’s, freeing each town’s borrowing room for roads, parks, growth, and everything else.
- For you, the taxpayer, the result is one regional structure delivering higher quality and better management. The most important point is that this will be delivered to you at lower cost.
An MSC changes the game, and it does so with three Driving Forces.
Force 1. Scalability and Regional Infrastructure
Today, the region runs three water plants, two of them on life support. In Stayner, a well field cost $70 million — because hooking the town up to a pipe of fresh water running right through it was judged too expensive. Next door, Nottawa is running out of water and, for the very same reason, cannot tap that same pipe. And a builder with 500 homes to construct is being forced to spend an estimated $25 million drilling its own wells and building a treatment plant to supply them.
Our vision: one plant that serves all of these needs.
The beneficiaries:
● You, the taxpayer — because your water bill goes down.
● The Province — no more handouts.
Force 2. Long-Term Capital Financing
The second fundamental benefit of a major utility like the MSC is its capacity to finance infrastructure over the long term — to spread the cost of assets built to last fifty years across the decades that actually use them.
Ontario law limits municipal debentures to a maximum term of 15 to 20 years. An MSC, structured as a utility corporation, can issue infrastructure debentures over 40 years. That difference is decisive.
And this is what changes everything about who pays. Under the go-it-alone approach, each town waits, hat in hand, for a provincial cheque — and that cheque will never come. So nothing happens: not a new water plant, not a new wastewater plant. Stop and think about what that means — new building stops, and pollution rises.
Under an MSC, the region does not wait. It finances each project itself, at utility scale and over the long term, and pays for it directly through water and wastewater rates.
So what about losing control of your own water system? In fact, it is exactly the opposite.
How do I convince you that we don’t have control of our water system? Look at the facts.
Ask yourself, how can the Town of Collingwood build a fancy new water treatment plant that ended up costing $250 million. The answer is they went to the provincial government, hat in hand and pleaded for the money. Simple, no money no plant.
By removing the Ontario government from the equation, integrating across a regional population, and creating a corporation with utility-grade financing, the region controls its own destiny for the first time — instead of pleading for a rescue that will not come.
Force 3. Professional Talent, Quality, and Focus
Finally and critically, what sets an MSC apart from the small, stretched teams in each town is what it brings to the table.
None of these municipalities — not one of the four — can attract, afford, or retain the calibre of engineering and project-management talent that water and wastewater infrastructure demands.
What each gets instead is a young engineer learning on the job — practising, on a $50 million capital project, skills they have never applied before. And the results show it: not one project in any of the towns has ever come in on budget. Not one!
The Blue Mountains could build only two pumping stations for the $35 million that was supposed to cover three; Collingwood’s water plant started at $65 million, doubled to $121 million, and is now targeted at $270 million; Stayner tried to drill wells for $35 million and the cost doubled.
An MSC changes that equation entirely. A regional utility serving all four communities recruits differently. It attracts the fifty-year-old project manager who has built treatment plants, managed contractors, and delivered complex infrastructure a dozen times over.
It creates the conditions for mentorship — where junior engineers learn from seasoned professionals rather than from their own expensive mistakes. Talent follows the mandate, and the mandate of an MSC is singular: run the infrastructure competently, and nothing else.
There is one more thing that sets an MSC apart, and it may matter most of all: who runs it. An organization of this size and complexity is led by people who have run a major utility before — people with the education, the skill, and the experience to oversee an operation on this scale.
That is leadership a single small town cannot attract, cannot afford, and could not keep busy enough to justify.
And above the management sits a board built for the task: professional experts in engineering, finance, and investment, working alongside representatives of the owners — the member towns and townships.
The expertise to run the system and the accountability to the communities that own it, in the same room. That is not how any of the four municipalities is governed today. It is how infrastructure of this magnitude must be.
Is this a new concept?
There is nothing new here. Strip away the acronym and the legislation, and what I am describing is a utility — the most familiar structure in modern life.
You already live with them. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant; you buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires — in Collingwood, that utility is EPCOR — and pay by the kilowatt-hour. Gas is the same. So is water — everywhere but here.
Ontario already has water utilities doing exactly this:
- The Union Water Supply System Inc., owned jointly by Leamington, Kingsville, Essex, and Lakeshore, runs one plant and one trunk system and sells bulk water by volume to its four members.
- The Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation builds and operates communal water and wastewater across the county’s rural townships, full-cost-recovery.
- Edmonton has delivered its own municipal water for more than a century, today through EPCOR, a city-owned utility.
- Peel — Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon — is moving its water and wastewater into a single publicly owned corporation right now.
This is not an experiment. It is how the developed world handles exactly the problem this region has. What follows is simply the case for doing it here.
Why is the Province driving this forward
Every conversation about water in this region ends the same way: not to worry — we can ask the Province for a grant. Look, we did it last time and they were wonderful.
Time to give our collective heads a shake
Ontario is running a $13.8-billion deficit for 2026–27, on debt near $485 billion, and the interest alone now runs about $17.2 billion a year — its fourth-largest expense. The budget projects a small surplus by 2028–29; the Financial Accountability Office doubts it.
The point is simple: a region should not stake nine-figure infrastructure on the most optimistic line in someone else’s budget. Betting the next plant on the next rescue is not planning. It is gambling.
What the rescues have already cost
Look at what this region has drawn from that shrinking well in just three years. The Raymond A. Barker plant expansion: $150 million. Stayner’s well field: $35 million. That is $185 million across two files — drawn down grant by grant, with no mechanism of control and no plan behind it. And the next ask is already on the table: The Blue Mountains has taken a $66-million water treatment plan to the Ministry of Infrastructure.
And the asks have not stopped. Stayner still needs to replace the aging pipes its $70-million wells did not buy.
Every one of those files assumes the same thing — that the cheque will come. It will not. The honest response is not to complain; it is to stop needing it. This region must learn to stand on its own.
This group of documents proposes the mechanism for half of that need — the water-treatment side — without going to the Province and without raising your bill. Wastewater, the harder half, gets its own paper.
The plan: the South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation
The plan is a regional water utility — the South Georgian Bay Municipal Services Corporation, a public utility. The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, passed in November 2025 and being refined at Queen’s Park through Bill 98, is built to move water out of town halls and into arm’s-length public utilities — with the power to make a regional system exclusive, borrowing that lives off the towns’ balance sheets, and a first pilot underway in Peel.
One entity owns the regional plant and trunk system, sells water at a wholesale rate to every member town, and finances the region’s water infrastructure on its own balance sheet — over the life of the assets, without a provincial cheque.
I know the first response, because I have heard it in every coffee shop in three towns: this will cost me more money, or we will lose control of our water systems. These things will not happen — and we answer that with arithmetic, not assurances.
The Practical Application
The division of labour is simple, and it answers everyone who fears a takeover.
The Players
The utility will have 4 regional partners, Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview and one customer, New Tecumseth.
The Payout and Transfer of ownership
The MSC once incorporated will repay each town’s outstanding project debt and then will finance the acquisition over the asset’s 40-year life.
The utility will take over the ownership and management of the plant, the trunk mains, and the booster stations — everything from the intake to each town’s gate.
Under the Legislation, the operators, maintenance crews, and compliance staff transfer to the corporation by transfer by-law, with employment, seniority, and successor-employer protections intact, on day one.
The Price of Water
It sells to every member, that is every town and township, at one published wholesale tariff, the same terms for everyone, set by a cost-of-service study and published for all to see. This is important… this rate will be lower than what any town could charge on its own and we will explain why.
What Stays with Your Town
Your town keeps everything from the gate to your tap: the local pipes, the meters, the billing, the retail rate your council sets. Your bill still comes from your town, and the money for your local pipes comes back every year through the Fund.
So — will you pay more?
No. Here is the arithmetic, in three parts.
Priced on today’s water — and today is the low-water mark
A water utility’s costs are almost entirely fixed: debt service, operators, lab, and head office cost the same whether the plant treats 7 million cubic metres or 12. Only chemicals and electricity rise with volume — pennies per cubic metre.
So every new customer lands on costs already paid. Spread $15 million of fixed cost across 7.2 million cubic metres of water and it is about $2.08 for each; grow to 10 million and that cost drops $1.5 per cubic metre. This really isn’t rocket science. Growth does not strain the system; it makes the water cheaper for everyone already on it. That is the opposite of the town-by-town model, where every new subdivision triggers the next $60-million plant.
And the ‘profit’?
There isn’t one — by charter. The MSC recovers operations, maintenance, debt service, and a capital renewal reserve, and nothing leaves the system. It pays no dividend. Every dollar above cost is locked to one purpose: to upgrade the region’s water infrastructure — the regional system the utility owns, and the local systems the towns keep.
That is the quiet revolution: a region that stops begging for its infrastructure and starts funding it. Here is how.
The Infrastructure Development Fund
Each year, once debt service and reserves are funded, the utility will distribute its surplus to the member towns through what will be called the Infrastructure Development Fund. Distributing its surplus in proportion to each of the partners’ water purchases, ring-fenced to water infrastructure, and conditional on one thing: a current, honest asset-management plan. No plan, no cheque. It is paid from surplus, never promised as an entitlement — the lenders always stand ahead of it — and that is what makes it durable. By the mid-2030s the surplus runs on the order of $7 to $8 million a year — real renewal money, in every town, every year. Watermains, not wishes.
The Reserve Fund
A fixed share — say 20 per cent — is set aside first, into a Reserve Fund for the day something breaks. Not maintenance — catastrophe. The kind of day Collingwood lived this past December, when a cast-iron main laid in 1968 blew out at Hume Street: the tower drained, the town went under a boil-water advisory, and crews worked to 2:45 in the morning. Today a town’s only options are to drain its reserves, issue an emergency debenture, or phone the Province. The Reserve Fund replaces all three — the money is already there, the repair mobilizes in hours, and no council meets in emergency session to decide which service to cut. Rescue money ends, because the region finally carries its own rescue fund.
Your Town, Your Implications
This section takes each town in turn and puts the numbers where they belong — on your household. We begin with Collingwood.
Collingwood
Collingwood has been told, twice, that its water problems are handled. Both times the real bill was hidden. Here is what the current path actually costs a Collingwood household, and what the MSC changes.
The water plant you were told was free
Collingwood’s own share of the Raymond A. Barker plant expansion is $44.4 million.
Residents were assured that $44.4 million would cost them nothing — development charges would pay for it. In Collingwood Today, the Town’s message was exactly that: the fees developers pay would carry it, and “current taxpayers won’t be the ones faced with the bill” (Jessica Owen, CollingwoodToday.ca).
Let me state something very clearly. This isn’t true and Council’s presentation of this is simply unacceptable. Here is why? And you check it out yourself.
Development charges have collapsed 84 per cent in three years, from $12.85 million in 2021 to roughly $2 million by 2024, and the reserve is now draining about two-and-a-half times faster than it fills. Look around the town and find this massive development that is going to generate the millions.
When the charges fail — and the Town’s own numbers say they will — the $44.4 million lands on the rate base as a debenture. What does that mean for you?
On the water bill — where a treatment plant’s debt is recovered — the $44.4 million works out to roughly $230 more per household every year once it lands in 2029, on top of what you pay today. (That is the water share alone; the fuller picture, with the wastewater side added, comes in a later chapter.)
Counted honestly, Collingwood’s real water obligation is about $56.5 million — the $44.4 million plant share plus the $12.1 million the Town already owes and in fact acknowledges — yet only about a fifth of it appears in the column the Town calls “debt.”
The chart shows it plainly: going it alone, the water bill climbs; under the MSC, it holds.
Under the MSC, the plant will be purchased and that debt will be retired, at closing.
The Blue Mountains
TBM is in trouble financially… In this section we will only talk about the Water Treatment needs and they are significant, but more importantly, there is no way the town can pay for this infrastructure without the province, and the province isn’t going to cooperate.
The water plant it cannot build
The Town’s Thornbury water treatment plant is roughly fifty years old and has to be replaced. The replacement program carries a $66-million target — and on this region’s record of overruns, it points toward $100 million. On a base of roughly 9,000 water-billed homes, a town this size cannot finance a plant of that scale on its own.
And the money that was supposed to pay for it is gone. The development-charge reserve — the fund that was to make growth pay for growth — built to a $33-million peak in 2022 and is now collapsing toward zero.
On appeal, the Town was forced to cut its development-charge rates by 40 per cent and to refund more than $1 million (CollingwoodToday.ca), while the reserve that remains is already committed against more contracts than the money it holds. The growth was never coming, and the bill was always going to land on the ratepayer.
What the MSC changes for The Blue Mountains
Under the MSC, The Blue Mountains never builds the plant. It buys its water from the region at the published tariff, from capacity the region already owns, and the $66-to-$100-million program — and the debt behind it — simply disappears.
Clearview
Stayner: too late to help
Stayner ran out of water in 2023 and froze building. Its $70-million well fix leaned on a $35-million provincial rescue and a fragile, first-mortgage County loan backed by forced developer pre-payments. That money is committed and cannot be un-spent — for Stayner the MSC arrives too late. It stands here as the warning, not the saving.
Nottawa: give the village water
Nottawa is where the MSC arrives in time. The village sits beside the Collingwood pipeline yet was quoted $159,000 a home to connect while the subdivision developer, Georgian Communities, was pushed to drill its own wells. The MSC ends the toll: it runs the trunk main to the village for about $10 million — roughly a dollar a month spread across the regional system — and connects homes at the normal $12,000 to $15,000. We give Nottawa its water, and it barely moves the regional bill.
And the developer wins too. With pipe access at no cost, Georgian Communities drops the roughly $25 million it would spend on its own wells and treatment plant — about $50,000 off the price of every one of its ~500 homes.
New Tecumseth
New Tecumseth is the easiest yes in the room. It has bought treated water at wholesale, by the cubic metre, under committed minimums since 2000 — the MSC asks it to keep doing exactly that, on better terms, with its capital returned.
Currently, New Tecumseth buys its water wholesale from Collingwood at a cost of $0.62 a cubic metre, and by contract that rate rises 2% every year, with a $0.04 fee added on top once the expanded plant is running, targeted for 2029.
But that rate leaves out that New Tecumseth is also paying, separately, its $75.6-million share of the new water plant expansion — and once that is counted, its real cost of water is about $1.94 a cubic metre.
Servicing that $75.6 million costs the town roughly $5.7 million a year, for twenty years.
Under the MSC, that debt is repaid at closing— so the $5.7 million a year comes off New Tecumseth’s books and back into the community, freeing it to reinvest in the roads, services, and growth the Province has ordered it to deliver by 2051.
For New Tecumseth, signing on to the regional rate turns out to be a savings.
Wasaga Beach
Wasaga Beach is a full partner in the corporation — an owner with a seat on the board — but on the water side it is an observer. It sits on a deep, confined aquifer — seven wells running at about 60 per cent of capacity, its fresh-water supply, in the Town’s own words, simply not in question — so it draws nothing from the regional plant and buys none of its water. Wasaga’s stake is wastewater, and that is where its seat will matter most: in the next paper, not this one.
The bottom line
Here is the whole chapter on one page. Down one column, five towns each building or borrowing alone — a separate plant, a separate debenture, a separate rescue. Down the other, one plant, one published price, and open access to a pipe that has been in the ground for twenty-five years.
Your water bill does not go up when this happens. It goes up if it doesn’t.
First, Educate. Then, Vote.
None of this happens on its own. A plan is only as good as the council that takes it up — and that council is the one you are about to elect this October. Two things stand between reading about this and shaping it: getting informed and getting to the ballot box.
Educate — Meet the Candidates
There is a Meet the Candidates session on Monday, August 10th at the Windfall Shed, 140 Crosswinds Blvd. in Windfall. It runs from 5:00 p.m. to about 7:00 p.m. — a welcoming chance to listen, connect, and share ideas and opinions in a positive community conversation with the people running for Council.
For The Blue Mountains, you can learn about all of the candidates running for Town Council at commonsensecollective.ca.
Vote — Are You on the Voters List?
This is the key question, and it is an easy one to get wrong: are you on the Voters List? Even if you were registered for the last election, there is a new list — so check.
You can register until August 12, 2026 at RegisterToVoteON.ca. After that date, changes can be made starting September 1st at Town Hall.
And one question that trips up a lot of people here: can I vote in the municipality of my primary residence and my vacation property? You sure can. If you are a qualified voter and own property in another municipality — or are the spouse of someone who does — you can vote in both.
The provincial rules for registering a second property are here: registertovoteon.ca — additional property registration.
A word on who pays for this
Nobody does — except you. The Shulman Report takes no advertising, no corporate sponsorship, and not a dollar from any town, party, developer, or campaign.
It is written for the people who live here, and supported in the only currency that matters: your attention — by reading it, checking it, arguing with it, and passing it to a neighbour.
That independence is the whole point. It is why the Report can say plainly what a press release never will, and why, when it tells you to check the arithmetic, you can trust that no one was paid to write the answer.
If the work has been useful, become a paid subscriber and share this paper with someone who votes here.
Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.
