About The Milton Record

Milton is one of the fastest-growing towns in Canada, and most of what shapes it is already public. A notice goes up on a fence. A staff report is tabled. A budget line moves. A councillor moves a motion at a Tuesday meeting. None of it is hidden — it is simply scattered across dozens of PDFs, agendas and pages that are hard to hold in your head at once.

This site puts those things in one place and keeps them there. It watches for changes, says in plain English what changed, and keeps the older version so you can see what a proposal looked like before. If you have ever stood in front of one of those signs wondering what it actually means and what happens next, that is the question this was built to answer.

No advertising. There are no ads and no sponsors. Nothing on this site is for sale, and there is no version of it where a page is placed higher because someone paid for it.

One thing that does track you, named plainly. This site uses Google Analytics, so I can see which pages people actually use and put the effort there. It records the pages visited, which links get clicked and where on the page they sit, what people type into the search box, roughly where in the world the visit came from, and what kind of device — and it sets a cookie to tell repeat visits apart. Nothing you type is stored beyond a search term, no account is created, it is not used for advertising, nothing is sold or shared with anyone, and no attempt is made to work out who you are. If you would rather not be counted, any tracker blocker stops it and the site works exactly the same without it.

No endorsements, no ratings, no rankings. Councillors and candidates are listed alphabetically. There is no score, no grade and no league table, because no honest one exists — and building one would mean deciding on your behalf what good representation looks like.

No opinion presented as fact. Every figure and quotation traces back to a published document, and the link is on the page. Where something could not be verified, it is left out and marked as left out rather than filled in with a good guess.

Not for sale, and not steerable. This is independent of the Town of Milton, of Halton Region, of every candidate and campaign, and of any business with an interest in what gets built here. Nobody funds it and nobody has a say in what it says. If you have a correction, the way to change this site is to show that something on it is wrong — which works, and is the only thing that does.

An unanswered question is visibly unanswered. A wrong answer is invisible.

That single idea decides most of the design. It is why a budget total that does not reconcile against the document’s own stated total is labelled unverified wherever it is shown, why a quotation that cannot be found on the page it is attributed to is dropped, and why a councillor’s figures are never shown without stating how many meetings they were drawn from. Being incomplete in public is recoverable. Being confidently wrong about a real person, or about public money, is not.

My name is Mike Shoss. I live in Milton, I built this, and I run it. It is one person’s project, not an organisation, and putting my name on it is deliberate: a site that publishes the record of named people should say who is doing the publishing.

It started with the public notice signs. I kept driving past them, wondering what was actually being proposed and what had changed since the last one, and there was no single place to look. So I built the place to look.

What I do for a living is relevant to how this is built. I am a Staff Product Manager at Clio, working on AI for legal work, and before that I was Principal Product Manager for Ecosystem AI at Caseware, where I built and shipped a document-intelligence agent that reads audit files. My work is in fields where being wrong is expensive — audit, then legal — and the whole job is building systems that know what they know, show their work, and fail visibly rather than quietly.

That is the same discipline this site runs on, and it is why the rules here are what they are: a figure this site cannot check against its source is labelled unchecked on its own page rather than presented as verified, a quotation that cannot be found on the page it is attributed to is dropped, and no count about a named person appears without the coverage it was drawn from. At Caseware I also stood up an ISO/IEC 42001-aligned AI management system — governance, risk assessment and review built into the release pipeline rather than written in a policy afterwards. The methodology page is the same idea applied to a civic record.

Outside that I run Epilogue, an AI consulting and product studio; I am an Expert-in-Residence at the DMZ and a lead mentor at The Forge at McMaster, advising early-stage founders; and I invest in early-stage Canadian technology companies. I am named on several patents. None of that has anything to do with Milton, and it is listed only so you can see who is behind this and judge the work accordingly.

What does have something to do with Milton: I have spent years on the startup and innovation side of this town, including work on building a startup ecosystem in Milton and Halton and the founding of the Milton Innovation Community. I care about how this place grows because I live here and intend to keep living here.

What I am not. I hold no municipal office and am not running for one. I am not a member of, donor to, or adviser to any campaign in this election. I have no financial interest in development in Milton — no land, no applications, no client that has business before this Council. Nobody funds this site and nobody has any say in what it publishes. If that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it changes anything else.

Corrections, questions, or something the site has got wrong: themiltonrecord@gmail.com. Corrections are acted on within 48 hours, and that applies to everyone on this site equally — sitting members, candidates and staff alike.

Public Notices feed
The digital twin of the signs posted on site. The Town serves only the newest 20, so older notices survive here because a snapshot captured them.

Ward development-application pages
Status, description and every supporting study the Town has published for an application.

ArcGIS open data
The development layer and the capital works layer, refreshed by the Town daily.

eSCRIBE council agendas and minutes
Resolutions, who moved and seconded them, the outcome, and any declared conflict of interest.

Capital financial statements
Approved budget, adjustments, spend to date and variance, tabled at Council as agenda attachments.

Everything here is published by the Town of Milton or Halton Region. Nothing is obtained privately, and nothing is scraped from anywhere a resident could not read themselves.

For how the parsing, verification and coverage rules actually work, see the methodology page.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Town of Milton, and not a substitute for the official record — if you are acting on something you read here, check it against the Town’s own documents, which are linked throughout. It also does not cover water, wastewater or the regional roads — Tremaine, Derry and Regional Road 25 — which are Halton Region’s responsibility rather than the Town’s.

Everything here is assembled automatically from records the Town publishes: PDFs, meeting minutes, mapping layers and web pages, written by different departments in different formats for different purposes. That is a lot of moving parts, and it means some of it will be wrong. Not because the effort is not made — there are 119 automated checks run against every build, and every error found so far is published on the corrections page — but because no automatic reading of that many documents is perfect.

If you are a resident: treat this as a way in, not as proof. Anything that matters to a decision you are making should be checked against the Town’s own document, which is linked from the page you are reading. If something looks wrong, telling us helps everybody.

If you are named here — a member of Council, a candidate, an applicant or developer, or Town staff named in a capital project — and something about you is wrong, write to [email protected]. It is fixed within 48 hours. You do not need to explain why it matters and there is no process to go through.

One ask. If you can, send the correct information along with the correction, or point at the document that has it. “This figure is wrong” takes days to run down; “this figure is wrong, the right one is on page 14 of the September statement” is fixed the same morning. It also means the replacement is right, rather than being our second guess.

Corrections are published in full on the corrections page, naming what was wrong, what caused it and what changed, and repeated at the foot of every page that carried the error. Nothing is fixed quietly. That is the whole point: a record that cannot be wrong in public is not a record.