Jane Lesslie

Picton Ward One

Growing up in a Canadian Navy family that was often on the move, Jane Lesslie first came to the County for a summer when she was 5 years old. With fond memories of many childhood summers here, she moved to the County when she retired four years ago after a career in the financial sector. “I love the calm and the friendliness of my community here in Picton,” she said.

A chartered financial analyst, Lesslie spent 24 years of her career studying all levels of government finances around the world. “The last few years prior to retirement I focused on screening governments for environmental social and governance (ESG) risks,” she said. “Essentially, I found that you can have two governments that had similar finances at a particular moment, but those who scored better on those ESG factors would end up on a much more sustainable path.” Lesslie added she is impressed with the work being done by The County Foundation and the THRIVE Prince Edward County initiative. During the pandemic, she worked as a volunteer at the County Food Depot. Her interest in environmental risk led her to the County’s Environmental Advisory Committee, which she has chaired for the past two and a half years.

Lesslie would like to see council abandon a process of going through the annual budget line by line in favour of creating a small finance subcommittee to make sure tax money is well spent with an eye on the future. She would also like to see more action on climate change and the diversification of the County’s business community.

On the issue of affordable housing, she supports the work being done by the Prince Edward County Affordable Housing Corporation, particularly the recent secondary suites pilot project. But she would like to see more rental units for singles and couples being created with “gentle density” initiatives that would include smaller projects of four to 10 units and conversions of old homes into triplexes.

Lesslie feels tourism management is in flux while trying to determine what is normal after the chaos of the pandemic years. While the Sandbanks beaches reservation system has been effective, she said it should be more flexible with half-day reservations and free access after 4 p.m. “Frankly we don’t need more summer tourism promotion at all,” she added. “I would like to see any tourism promotion confined to shoulder seasons to help improve the income of tourism sector employees and our businesses reliant on the sector.”

One solution to the costly water rates. Lesslie said, would be to resurrect the wastewater and water rates “ad hoc” committee that disappeared in 2016. “Countless volunteer hours and costly consultants were employed to produce a draft report that was never finalized,” she said. “What a waste of taxpayer money and community support. This is particularly critical given the planned water infrastructure spend in Wellington.” She pointed out that a key aspect of that report was a plan for helping low-income people in the County with their water bills.

Not enough attention is being given to heritage, environmental sustainability, stewardship and protection in the County, she said, adding: “We declared a climate emergency in 2019, but little was done. We have a tree policy [that] should become a tree bylaw with some teeth to enforce it. We establish environmental requirements for developments, but neither the County nor Quinte Conservation has any resources to verify that promised protections are actually completed. This is a pantomime of protection.”

When asked about the size of council, Lesslie said there are more important issues to deal with. “I feel there is some room for modest reduction, but I’m reluctant to say revisit again when we went through the time and cost to do this once before and then couldn’t get enough turnout to ratify a decision,” she said. “[It is] more important that councillors take the job seriously and don’t treat it as ‘charity work’ that they do when they have a few spare hours. The issues we face are serious. Being a councillor will be my full-time job.”