Sarah Good
Tonight, Cornwall Councillor Sarah Good announced she’s not running for mayor. She won’t be seeking re-election as a Councillor either.
Last month, she had publicly declared her intention to challenge Justin Towndale. That’s gone now. And the reason comes down to this: the online attacks wore her down to the point where her health was suffering, and she decided enough was enough.
I was in the comment sections of that declaration. I watched it. And what I saw wasn’t political disagreement or even aggressive accountability. It was the specific kind of cruelty that gets directed at women in public life. The kind that isn’t really about what they’ve done or how they’ve voted. It’s about the fact that they showed up at all. Whether we like it or not, it is still a reality. Yes. Today. In 2026.
What hurts the most is this: It wasn’t just men shredding Sarah to pieces in the comments. Women were in there too. Giving it just as hard. Sometimes harder. And that is deeply disappointing. There’s something particularly corrosive about watching women participate in pushing another woman out of public life. Like we’ve all absorbed the same message about how much space women are allowed to take up, and some are just out there enforcing it regardless of their own gender.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a cultural problem wearing a local face.
I’ll say something here that I haven’t said publicly before. This is part of why I won’t run. Not because I don’t care about this community, I do, deeply. But I watched those comments so many times. Why would I subject myself and my family to that? You can disagree with someone’s views. You can challenge their voting record. You can think they made the wrong call on a file and say so plainly. That’s fair, that’s healthy, that’s what democracy is supposed to look like. But that’s not what was happening in those comments. It was just publicly assassinating a person’s character. And I’m not interested in being on the receiving end of that.
I can’t be the only one doing that math tonight, after seeing Ms. Good’s post.
Think about what’s actually left on the bench in Cornwall. Carilyne Hébert has spent the better part of this entire term being dragged through integrity complaints. First in 2024, when she was found to have breached the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act in connection with her role at the Social Development Council and faced a recommended 90-day pay suspension, which council ultimately rejected 10-1. Then again just this past January, when a second integrity complaint stemming from a Glen Stor Dun Lodge committee meeting landed her a formal reprimand recommendation for allegedly disrespecting council decisions and failing to respect neutrality.
What makes that second complaint worth sitting with is what Hébert herself wrote in her response. “Women in politics are routinely judged not by what we say but by how we say it. When men speak firmly, they are seen as decisive. When women speak with conviction, we are too often labelled disrespectful, emotional, or difficult.” She called it an intimidation tactic designed to keep her in line. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But compare that to male Councillor Maurice Dupelle, who in 2025 faced his own integrity investigation for allegedly soliciting personal cash loans from residents and city staff, including one exchange of a cash-filled envelope inside City Hall itself, missing nine of twelve council meetings while collecting his full salary, and failing to complete mandatory training. Look at his reprimand, then tell me with a straight face that the scrutiny lands equally.
I would genuinely be shocked if Hébert puts her name forward again. And I wouldn’t blame her for one second. That leaves Elaine MacDonald. That’s basically it. God I hope some brave souls still decide to run.
Statistics dating to 2023 show that women represented 31 percent of all municipal elected representatives in Canada, and only about one in five mayors. Councillors and mayors combined, we’re barely a third of the people making decisions at the most local, most immediate level of government. The level that sets your tax rate, decides where the shelter goes, determines whether your street gets plowed. We’re not exactly swimming in representation to spare.
And tonight, any woman who was quietly considering running just got a very loud and very clear warning about what to expect.
Good said she wants to reclaim the joyful optimism she started with four years ago. That line is doing a lot of work. Because that optimism didn’t evaporate on its own. It got picked apart, by people, including women, who decided she didn’t deserve to have it.
The community gets smaller every time this happens. The table gets less representative. And the bullies who spent time doing this will move on to the next target without a second thought.
Cornwall keeps wondering why it can’t attract better people into public life. Tonight is a pretty good case study in exactly why.
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