Sounds like the lead up to a bad joke doesn’t it? But, the answer is budgeting practices.
Specifically, artificially inflating the villages budget revenue with 100,000 dollars in fictitious land sales. 1 This seems to have been common practice since as early as 2020. In a 2026 budget meeting when I raised issues with this practice Mr. Bishop dismissed it by saying
We do it this way to avoid calling special meetings for budget adjustments
But what does that have to do with Türkiye ?
The best a mayor could do was to manipulate–to cajole–other agencies into investing in the city, and use the municipality’s own meager resources to keep the most clamorous voters and creditors at bay in a flexible, hand-to-mouth style. The Turkish municipal budget is a typical legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. It includes unrealistic expenditure estimates which avoid open choices between councillors’ pet projects; it is then balanced by inflating the revenue estimates, usually with a fictitious figure for sales of land. But real decisions on which expenditure to undertake are made from day to day by the Mayor on the basis of actual cash availability. It is a process designed to meet legal requirements and avoid open conflict. It is a rational response to the realities of municipal management in the 1960s and 1970s, but a far cry from the concept of the municipality as the guiding hand of the city’s long-term development.
— Kenneth Davey - June 1989 2
The World Bank - Strengthening Municipal Government
The major difference is under the Canadian system, spending power does not rest with the mayor, rather it rests with the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO).
Budgeting this way ensures the villages CAO has complete control of the villages budget with little to no oversight from council, which I believe to be a massive issue as we have now given up our most effective tool to implement policy and we significantly reduced our ability to provide financial oversight.
Unfortunately, this is another area where my fellow councillors disagree and see no issue with how we currently budget.