Updates
What has changed on this site and what is new in the election, dated. This page is the freshness record: a glance tells you whether the site is still being maintained. It also holds the corrections log — every published error, what it said, and what it says now.
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| September 11, 2026 | What the candidates have said: second batch, 659 passages, 51 candidates Thirty-six BarrieToday election articles that our tools could not reach were archived from the pages themselves: the candidate profiles the outlet has been running since late August, the three mayoral question-and-answer pieces on top issues, homelessness and addiction, and project costs, and the nomination-close report. Seven campaign websites that had not answered our fetches were read the same way (Amy Courser, Donald Blais, Gary Harvey, Arif Khan, Sergio Morales, Pauline Stevenson, Dave Weingarten). The result is 234 further verbatim passages, every one proven word for word against its archive, taking the total to 659 passages from 51 candidates. Where a one-line feed summary stood in for an article, the full article now backs it. Every candidate in every race was read the same way. |
| September 11, 2026 | Candidate statements now fold: two passages open, the rest a click away On every issue page and every 2026 candidate profile, a candidate with more than two passages on one issue now shows the first two with the rest behind a "Show N more passages" control. Nothing is removed: every passage is still on the page, still verbatim and sourced, and a link into a folded passage opens it. This keeps the mayoral candidates, who have the most on record, from pushing the rest of a race off the screen. |
| September 11, 2026 | What the candidates have said: first batch, 425 passages, 48 candidates The first research batch is published on every issue page and every 2026 candidate profile: 425 verbatim passages from 48 candidates, drawn from 24 campaign websites archived September 10–11 and 107 news items, each linked to its source and dated, and each proven word for word against the archived copy before publication. The media index grew by 68 stories found by searching every candidate's name. Where BarrieToday's article pages could not be archived, the passage is the outlet's own one-line summary from its news feed, and says so. Every candidate in every race was read the same way; the 12 with nothing located are named on each issue page with the reason. Ten campaign websites could not be reached by our tools and are marked as such. Social media posts are not yet checked for anyone. Passages that fit no issue page — why a candidate is running, how they say they will work — appear under "General" on their own profile only. Six drafted passages were set aside in review. |
| September 10, 2026 | Debates and all-candidates meetings: none announced yet, and where to watch A new page, debates and all-candidates meetings, will list every public candidates' event for mayor, every ward and every school board with the host's own announcement as its source. As of today it lists none, because none has been announced anywhere we could find — Engage Barrie, CARP Barrie, the Chamber, the Library, the school boards, and the Simcoe.com and BarrieToday round-ups, each linked from the page. In 2022 the mayoral forum ran on October 1 and the ward meetings October 2–13; the page says so, and is re-checked. |
| September 10, 2026 | Candidate pages answer the questions people actually search Every 2026 candidate's page now opens with the plain questions a voter types — who they are, what they are running for, whether they are the incumbent, whether they have run before, how to reach the campaign, and who can vote for them — each answered from the record already on the page and marked up so search engines can show the answer directly. Page titles now lead with the candidate's name, the word Barrie and the office. The candidates page, incumbents and school boards are retitled the way people ask: who is running in Barrie, who is my councillor, who is running for trustee. |
| September 10, 2026 | Every candidate card now shows the election record in miniature The cards on the candidate list, the ward and school-board pages carry a small strip of the same chart each profile draws: a bar for every term held, a dot for every race lost, and a hollow mark for the 2026 contest, on a common 2003-to-2026 scale so a ward's field can be compared at a glance. Hover or tap a mark for the date and the result. Newcomers show a single mark at the right edge, which is itself the record. |
| September 10, 2026 | What the candidates have said: the rules go up before the words Every issue page and every 2026 candidate profile will carry a section for what candidates have said on that issue — verbatim passages from campaign websites, indexed news coverage and candidates' own social posts, each linked to its source and dated. The rules are published first, before a single passage: nothing is paraphrased, nothing is labelled for or against, a passage from news coverage says whether it is the candidate quoted or the reporter speaking, a candidate with nothing located on an issue is named as such with the date we looked, and a race is shown only once every candidate in it has been read the same way. Statements are gathered in a dated research batch, reviewed by hand, and a build check refuses any passage that is not found word for word in its archived source. The first batch follows. |
| September 10, 2026 | Certified ballot: 60 candidates, no acclamations The candidate list is now checked name for name against the City Clerk's signed List of Certified Candidates (Form EL07, dated August 24), and every filing time and contact detail is re-transcribed from the City's certified candidates page. Four people filed in the final two hours and were not on the City's list when we last read it: Christel Pena (Ward 6), William Cadeau (Ward 10), Candice Thomas (SCDSB Wards 4–6) and Rob Chiaramida (SMCDSB Wards 4/6–10). Samina Alim withdrew her Ward 7 nomination on the morning of nomination day and re-filed for Ward 8 five minutes later. The three races that had a single candidate in mid-August each drew a challenger, so no seat is acclaimed in 2026. Many campaigns added websites and social accounts to the City's list after August 21; a dozen profiles gained links. Brent Bowser (Ward 1) also wrote to us directly with his details; the one the City does not list, his Instagram, carries a new supplied tag beside the existing inferred and searched ones. |
| August 21, 2026 | Candidate list re-checked for nomination day: 56 candidates Six people filed in the final days before the 8 p.m. nomination deadline — Frank Casera (Ward 2), Nader Nasar George (Ward 6), Samina Alim and Michael Lewis (Ward 7), and Sean Fitzgerald and Chaudhry Farooq Haider Virk (SCDSB Wards 7–10) — and the candidate list is re-transcribed from the City's page as of August 21. A handful of candidate websites and social accounts turned up by our own web search, rather than the City's own list, now carry a searched tag distinct from the existing inferred one, so it is always clear where a link came from. The certified list is due August 24; expect another re-check then. |
| August 20, 2026 | Every campaign-finance filing now carries a published figure The 32 filings the campaign finance page had marked unresolved were re-read a second and third time, in places against a different archived copy of the scan. Nine verified outright or by recording the form's own printed bottom line as filed; three reclassified as self-funded where a declared $0 income conflicted with real, itemized spending; and the rest publish a partial or conventional figure with the gap explicitly flagged — none are silently estimated. Council expenses and campaign finance also now share one reconciled set of spending-type buckets, shown as colour-coded badges on every itemized table, and each candidate profile with either dataset gets its own chart, linked to the underlying data. |
| August 19, 2026 | Campaign finance and council expenses published: five cycles, thirty quarters Candidate financial statements are now transcribed across five election cycles — 2014, 2018, and 2022 general elections plus the 2016 Ward 7 and 2020 Ward 3 by-elections — at campaign finance. A companion page, council expenses, itemizes every disclosed line from the mayor and every councillor's quarterly expense reports, Q1 2019 through Q2 2026. |
| August 17, 2026 | Candidate list re-checked: 50 candidates, three races on acclamation track Five candidates filed with the City between August 10 and 14: Russell Tighe (mayor), Asmar Naveed (Ward 9), Darren Steeves (SCDSB Wards 7–10), Justin Heran (SMCDSB Wards 1/2/3/5) and Rachael Golem (Viamonde). The candidate list is re-transcribed from the City's page as of August 17. Races with a single candidate — on track for acclamation if nothing changes by the August 21 close — drop from five to three: Ward 6, Ward 7, and the SMCDSB Wards 4/6–10 zone. Details on acclamations. |
| August 17, 2026 | Media index re-swept: seven stories added The media index now carries election coverage published August 4–17, including BarrieToday's stories on the third and fourth mayoral candidates. Ottawa and provincial-politics pieces surfaced by the sweep were excluded under the index's standing rules. |
| August 17, 2026 | Population, budget and rate data get charts and history The population page extends back to the 2001 census for both the city and the metropolitan area, and adds 2021 demographics — age structure, households, tenure, income, immigration — each figure from the Statistics Canada census profiles. The budget, property tax, water rates and housing pages gain charts drawn from the same rows as their tables. |
Corrections
The policy
A correction is any published figure or statement that was wrong. When one is found, it is fixed on the page where it appears and logged here at the same time. The log entry stays up permanently, even after the error itself is long gone.
Formatting fixes and wording changes that do not alter a fact are not corrections; they appear in the updates above only when substantive. Updates in the ordinary course (a new candidate filing, a new budget year) are not corrections either: the site was right when published and the world changed.
How to report an error
Write to team@barrievotes.ca. Say which page, what the error is, and if you can, where the correct figure lives (a document beats a recollection; see what counts as a source). Reports are credited in the log unless you ask not to be named.
The log
No corrections to date. When the first one is logged, it will appear here with the date, the page, what was wrong, what it says now, and who flagged it.
How this log is kept: entries are written by hand at the same time the fix lands on the page, and a site error is never removed.