Riel says he’ll be “ready day one”

By Lindsay J. Blake Freelance writer and radio broadcaster.

Walk into Peterborough City Hall on any given Monday night, and you will likely find councillor Keith Riel digging through a mountain of paperwork, entirely prepared for a marathon session. After 16 consecutive years representing the residents of Ashburnham Ward (Ward 4), the veteran politician has seen almost every trick and excuse in the municipal playbook. He has watched freshman councillors collapse under the weight of 300-page budget binders dropped on their desks without warning, and he has witnessed a steady erosion of democratic access as critical public debates have been condensed into rigid, four-person talking windows.

Now, Riel is stepping up to run for mayor, and his pitch to the electorate is entirely devoid of political fluff: he says he does not need a map to find the senior staff offices, he knows the municipal budget inside and out, and he will not require a single day of buffer time to start steering the city in a new direction. His campaign mantra, "ready day one," is a promise that a Riel administration will bring immediate, decisive action to a city hall that he believes has become plagued by stalled projects and unnecessary political noise.

Riel’s unique strength as a political leader stems from a rare professional duality that allows him to command respect from both sides of the economic aisle. To the local working class, he is a certified engineering technologist, an industrial electrician by trade, and a battle-tested former union president who directly managed the workplace protections, benefits, and livelihoods of 2,000 active employees and 2,000 retirees over more than 30 years at the local General Electric plant. Conversely, to the local business community, he is a seasoned entrepreneur who has repeatedly risked his own capital. 

He owned and operated a popular local bar at the age of 23, went on to build the largest disc jockey entertainment company in the Kawarthas, employing ten people, and later opened and successfully ran The Green Door gift store on George Street alongside his wife for over five years. This blend of deep labour advocacy and authentic small-business ownership gives him a distinct advantage at the council table, where multi-million-dollar corporate decisions must coexist with a heavily unionized city staff. Riel proudly points out that during his 16 years on council, the city has never suffered a labour disruption, largely because senior management and union executives alike trust his word when negotiations hit the final wire, and everyone looks to him to ask if they have a viable deal.

While fiscal responsibility is a cornerstone of his platform, Riel has spent the last several years rolling up his sleeves to confront Peterborough’s most agonizing social crisis: chronic homelessness and the rise of dangerous encampments. Alongside fellow councillor Alex Bierk, Riel took direct ownership of the city's housing portfolio and fundamentally rejected the previous, flawed strategy of placing highly vulnerable, unsheltered individuals directly into traditional market apartments without transitional support, a practice that frequently resulted in destroyed property and alienated local landlords. 

Instead, Riel and Bierk collaborated with city staff to pioneer a modular housing transitional model. Within a brief six-month window stretching from May to November, the city successfully dismantled a massive, entrenched tent city by transitioning 50 of Peterborough's hardest-to-house individuals into structured modular units. Riel emphasizes that when an individual is trapped in severe poverty or battling acute addiction, their daily existence is a constant, exhausting war focused strictly on short-term survival, finding food, securing a safe place to sleep, or obtaining their next fix. By utilizing modular housing as a stabilizing circuit-breaker, the city can actively teach vital life skills and humanely prepare people for what Riel calls their "forever home." 

As a long-standing board member of the Peterborough Housing Corporation, he reveals that the city currently has plans to build 1,500 units of deeply affordable, geared-to-income housing trapped in the pipeline. They possess the land and the engineering blueprints, but are strictly waiting on financial partnerships from upper levels of government to break ground.

Riel’s critique of the incumbent mayor, Jeff Leal, is rooted in a desire for greater operational efficiency and corporate transparency. Despite Leal’s extensive resume at Queen’s Park as a provincial politician and cabinet minister, Riel argues that the current administration has failed to leverage those connections to open doors for Peterborough, pointing specifically to Leal's unfulfilled campaign promise to secure new employment lands within his first 100 days in office. Furthermore, Riel expresses deep frustration with a lack of transparency surrounding major municipal developments, citing instances where massive, neighbourhood-altering projects, such as a controversial 17-storey building on Aylmer Street, high-density builds on Chemong Road, and a 16-court pickleball complex at Bonnerworth Park, were advanced behind the scenes without comprehensive council consultation or community input. 

To fix what he considers a broken administrative system, Riel plans to overhaul the city’s procedural by-laws by restoring a week-long buffer between general committee debates and final council votes, eliminating the current restrictions that muzzle public delegations to just five minutes for four people, and forcing all portfolio-holding councillors to deliver mandatory quarterly reports so that critical updates stop sliding through the cracks. He also intends to physically move the local media from the back corners of the council chambers straight to the front row, ensuring journalists can clearly hear and report on the public's business.

Ultimately, Keith Riel views the city of Peterborough as a half-billion-dollar corporation that must be managed with the disciplined oversight of a private enterprise, where the local taxpayers are treated as the primary shareholders. He warns that Peterborough is currently borrowing money at an alarming rate to maintain standard municipal services while its commercial tax base erodes, calling the current financial trajectory a clear recipe for disaster that will inevitably lead to crushing property tax hikes if left unchecked. To rectify this, Riel intends to introduce an intensive, weekend-long post-election municipal retreat where incoming and veteran politicians can separate their absolute needs from their casual wants, consult with leading municipal authorities on the strict limits of their legal roles, and collaborate with the commissioner of finance to establish a stable, predictable four-year budget trajectory. 

Riel believes that just as everyday families must meticulously budget to keep a roof over their heads, city hall must provide predictable financial forecasting so residents aren't driven out of their homes by sudden tax spikes. By combining his rigorous business acumen, real-world labour experience, and an unyielding commitment to open governance, Riel aims to restore accountability, clean up the downtown core with an increased police presence, champion the arts as an economic driver, and deliver a transparent, common-sense local government that produces far less political noise and far more tangible results.