A Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter/publisher Doug Draper
Posted October 2nd, 2026 on Niagara At Large
If you are still a reader of Niagara’s daily newspapers, you may have notice the headshots of five individuals featured on the front page of this Friday’s October 2nd edition of The St. Catharines Standard, if not on the pages ofthe Niagara Falls Review and Welland Tribune.
According to a story in the newspaper, those five individuals have been interviewed by Ontario’s Ford government for possible appointment by Ford and friends to the position of Niagara Regional Chair for the next four-year term of what little is left of Niagara’s regional council.
The names of the five individuals are Gary Zalepa, outgoing Lord Mayor of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s town council, Rob Foster, an outgoing Regional Councillor for the Town of Lincoln, Frank Campion, outgoing Mayor for the City of Welland, Peter Secord, a former St. Catharines city councillor and Wayne Olson, a retired chartered accountant and former Town of Pelham councillor.
In my view, as a journalist who has spent decades covering news in the Niagara area, including municipal politics, I can’t imagine any one of these individuals winning the Regional Chair’s job under the old system where Regional Councillors, elected by voters across Niagara, then elected who would service as Chair.
But thanks to Doug Ford, those days when a Chair was elected by their peers on council are gone and I know I am far for the only one in Niagara who can’t help but believe that whoever the province now appoints to the position (with the passing last year of long-time political icon Jim Bradley) will serve as a tool for the Ford government, going anything it wants them to do to advance its agenda.
That Niagara Regional Chair, by the way, will also have “superpowers” bestowed on them by the Ford government to override any decisions made at the regional level of gvernment that they want. (Who needs Donald Trump here,)
Further to that, the Ford government has gutted the number of seats on Niagara Regional Council from 31 plus the Chair to 12 plus the Chair, those 12 being the mayors of Niagara’s 12 local municipalities whose votes with be “weighted” on the Regional Council based on the populations of the municipalities they serve.
What that means is that if two or three of the mayors serving Niagara’s largest municipalities are supporters of Ford,which that happen to be now given their endorsements for him in the last provincial election, mayors of the other nine municipalities will have little or no clout on what little is left of the Regional Council at all.
The whole thing, regardless of the hundreds of millions of tax dollars that we are forced each year to pour into it, will be nothing more than an agent for Doug Ford.
That is why I am no longer going to waste my time having anything to do with regional government other than call for its abolishment and why I am encouraging all of you to focus as much time and energy as possible to elected the best people as possible to our local councils this Fall where, hopefully, democracy will prevail when it comes to making our communities better places to live in for now and for future generations.
P..S – If I may hazard a guess, I think that if April Jeffs (a former Doug Ford canadidate for MPP) is elected Mayor of Welland, outgoing Welland Mayor Frank Campion, who endorsed Ford in the last provincial elecition, has a pretty strong shot for the Niagara Regional Chair’s job. Between Campion in the Chair’s seat and April Jeffs sitting on what’s left of the Regional Council with St. Catharines Mayor Mat Siscoe and Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati, who also endorsed Ford in the last provincial election andwho have a prettygood chance of being re-elected to another term as mayor, Ford might as well come down here and sit in the Chair’s seat himself.
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Doug Draper- Niagara At Large
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