The free platform template — written, costed, dated

Any candidate can go from nothing to a readable platform in a weekend. This page is the fill-in-the-blank version of that weekend: the bar a platform has to clear, worked examples by issue, and the four steps to publish it — free, and identical for every candidate running anywhere in Ontario’s 2026 municipal and school board elections.

Part of the free starter kit — published August 2026. This page does not care what you believe, only whether a voter can read it. We never judge direction, only whether there is something on the page to check.

The bar, stated plainly

A platform is not a list of values or a paragraph of good intentions. A platform is planks a voter can check. One plank is one sentence that does three things at once:

One pledged action — a specific thing you will do, not a general posture toward an issue.
One number or named mechanism — a dollar figure, a count, a percentage, or the specific tool/report/process the action runs through.
One date — when it happens, or by when it’s done.

Miss any one of the three and a voter has nothing to hold you to later — which is the whole point of a platform existing at all. Two kinds of language quietly fail this bar even though they sound like commitments:

Hedges — “explore,” “consider,” “look into,” “work toward.” These describe a mental state, not an action with a deadline.
Job-defaults — “review the budget,” “listen to residents,” “advocate for the community.” These are things the office already requires of whoever holds it, elected on this platform or not. They cost the candidate nothing to promise.

A worked example plank. Take a plain municipal problem — a backlog of cracked and unsafe sidewalks — and write it three ways:

Fails the bar (no number, no date): “I will make sidewalk repair a priority.”
Fails the bar (a date, but no number or mechanism): “I will fix our sidewalks this term.”
Clears the bar: “I will clear the municipality’s own tracked sidewalk-repair backlog to zero by the end of 2028, reported every year against the public works department’s own backlog count.”

The last version names the action (clear the backlog), the mechanism (the public works department’s own published count — you’re not inventing a new metric), and the date (end of 2028). Anyone can check it, including you, including us.

One more before/after, side by side

Vague (doesn’t count)	Checkable (clears the bar)
“I will review the budget process to make city spending more transparent.”	“I will publish a plain-language, one-page summary of the annual budget within 30 days of council’s budget approval, every year of my term, posted on my own council webpage.”

Same underlying concern — budget transparency — but only the second version gives a voter a date to watch for and a place to go check it.

Build it, one domain at a time

Below is a fill-in-the-blank template and one worked example for a handful of issue domains — not all of them. We picked a working subset rather than pretend to have equally good examples for every domain a council, mayor, or trustee touches; the domains we skipped are named honestly at the end of each section, and the same three-part bar applies to every one of them exactly as it does to the ones below. Use whichever domains match your own race, in whatever order matters to you.

For council and mayor candidates

Housing

Template: “I will [zoning / permit / incentive action], measured by [a named housing count or report], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will direct planning staff to pre-approve four standard secondary-suite designs so a homeowner can apply without hiring a custom architect, cutting the average permit-review time from 90 days to 30 days by the end of 2027 — measured against the municipality’s own permit-timeline report.”

Transit and roads

Template: “I will [a specific infrastructure or service change], funded from [a named budget line], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will add a protected bike lane on the two-kilometre stretch between the community centre and the high school, funded from the existing active-transportation capital line, with construction complete before the 2028 school year starts.”

Taxes and budget

Template: “I will [a specific budget commitment or process change], expressed as [a number or named report], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will cap my own office’s discretionary spending at 2% below the outgoing council’s five-year average, reported in the year-end financial statement every year of my term.”

Safety

Template: “I will [a specific safety investment or program], measured by [a named count], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will fund four additional streetlights along the walking route between the transit stop and the community centre, installed before the clocks fall back in November 2027.”

Parks and recreation

Template: “I will [a specific facility or program commitment], tied to [a named list or budget line], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will resurface the cracked basketball court at the ward’s main park, using the parks department’s own capital-priority list, by summer 2028.”

Climate and environment

Template: “I will [a specific action], tracked against [a named mechanism], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will plant 500 native trees on municipally owned boulevards, tracked against the urban forestry department’s own planting log, by the end of my term in 2030.”

Domains we didn’t template above, honestly: development/planning, economy/jobs, health/social, governance/transparency, rural/agriculture, arts/culture. The same bar applies — one action, one number or named mechanism, one date — whatever the topic.

For school board trustee candidates

Student achievement

Template: “I will [a specific policy or program push], reviewed against [a named board metric], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will push for a board-wide tutoring block added to the timetable for students below grade-level reading benchmarks, reviewed against the board’s own EQAO results, starting the 2027–28 school year.”

Special education

Template: “I will [a specific resourcing or process commitment], measured by [a named count], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will push to reduce the board’s special-education-assessment wait list — already tracked in the board’s own annual report — by 25% within two years of taking office.”

Budget and finance

Template: “I will [a specific commitment], expressed in [a named report], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will publish a plain-language, one-page summary of the board’s annual budget within 30 days of trustee approval, every year of my term.”

Safety and wellbeing

Template: “I will [a specific commitment], tracked against [a named metric], by [date].”

Worked example: “I will push for a mental-health support worker assigned to every school in my ward by September 2028, tracked against the board’s own staffing report.”

Domains we didn’t template above, honestly: infrastructure, parent engagement, governance, equity/programs. Same bar, same three parts, whatever the topic.

Publish it — four steps

Put it at a stable URL. Any free page builder works — see the tools & tech page for the free/DIY options, Google Sites or Carrd being the fastest for a one-page platform.
Date it. The day you first published, and the day you last updated it — both, visibly, on the page itself.
Link it from your registered listing — wherever your name already appears as a filed candidate, so a voter searching for you actually finds it.
Tell us via /corrections.html. We re-measure gladly, and the field numbers move — a candidate who publishes a platform after we measure the field gets counted, not frozen out of an old snapshot.

Whatever you write, and whatever you decide to run on: we don’t judge the direction, only whether there’s something on the page a voter can check. That’s the entire standard, and it’s the same one for every candidate who reads this.

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