‘Be all you Gan be’: Gananoque mayoral candidate Clifford Feltham says town needs ‘breath of fresh air’

Editor’s note: To help voters to be better informed, Brockvilleist has sent invitations to profile all of Gananoque’s mayoral candidates in advance of the municipal election, which will be held on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026. We will publish the profiles as we receive responses. Below is our profile of candidate Clifford Feltham. You can view a full roundup of all our Gananoque municipal coverage here.

If you’ve ever attended Maverick’s Pub for trivia night on Wednesday evening, you may be familiar with host Clifford Feltham.

He’s a local entrepreneur and philanthropist whose pub nights have generated more than $100,000 for local charitable causes throughout the Thousand Islands, including $10,000 to the pediatric oncology unit in Kingston to help raise funds for experimental drugs for a three-year-old girl battling brain cancer.

Now, the Orleans native, who has lived in Gananoque for 11 years, says he’s bringing his instinct to give back to his adoptive community to the next stage: running to be the mayor.

After witnessing firsthand through charitable work the financial barriers some people are faced with, Feltham, who was named citizen of the year last year, wants to make fiscal responsibility a core tenet of his mayoralty.

He says he would commission studies to identify the town’s core infrastructure needs and how to achieve them in the most cost-effective way possible, citing prohibitively expensive water costs.

“I will study and understand the problem before I can pretend I can fix it,” Feltham told Brockvilleist. “Looking at what can be done to ensure that the cost of the infrastructure is improved over time.

“Will those costs come down and how do we bring those costs down? Because certainly the trajectory right now is not costs going down, it is costs going up. And that’s a big concern for the residents of Gananoque.”

Feltham believes the current council and mayor have been doing the bare minimum to fulfill their duties and solve problems, while letting petty squabbling define the last four years of council.

“We’ve had four years of non-government, really,” said Feltham.

“They’re maintaining the status quo, doing what you need to do to keep the town running but certainly there has not been a big spirit of cooperation amongst the current council. And that that’s a big driver for me.”

Feltham wants to draw on his experience building successful startups to “bring a breath of fresh air” by modelling a spirit of co-operation that he feels needs to be present in the town’s government.

“It’s teamwork and working in conjunction with not only councillors, but town admin, local government and [expanding] into the TLTI and to look at what programs we can build together,” he said.

Those programs could include more recreational and social programs for youth, whom Feltham sees as having been particularly hard hit by COVID-19.

“COVID did a number on kids who were at certain points in their adolescent life and that may have short-circuited things for them,” said Feltham.

“There needs to be programs for kids to get out and be able to thrive in this community. We’ve got a BMX bike track that was built at great cost and basically was just let to rot.”

He would also like to see more transportation options for seniors and would look into improving the existing shuttle service for to hospitals in Brockville and Kingston.

Perhaps in an expression of his entrepreneurial spirit, the idea that had Feltham the most enthusiastic was a desire to extend Gananoque’s tourism season past the summer months.

“We live in one of the most beautiful places in the world here, never mind Canada,” said Feltham. “I see no reason why our hotels have to close during winter.”

Feltham explained that if he became mayor, he would work closely with private-sector partners and different levels of government to make the town a year-round destination.

“My platform is think outside of the box, figure out what can be done, what things can be brought to our town in the winter months, [such as] carnivals…that can become big and grow and increase the viability of tourism in Gananoque for more than the four months that it is,” he said.

He’s even come up with a motto that he says represents his aspirational vision for the town’s tourism economy: “Be all you Gan be again.”

But ultimately, what drives Feltham’s desire to be mayor is a feeling that too many lack access to opportunity.

“You know, there’s an underbelly, as every town has an underbelly,” he noted.

“I know some of the underbelly of this town and they’re not underbelly because they’re bad people, they’re the underbelly because potentially they’re economically restrained.”

Feltham wants to pull that underbelly into the fold.

He says that because of his charitable track record and genuine connection to the community, people feel comfortable coming to him with their problems.

“From day one, I’ve made myself available to everybody to speak with me and that’s where I want to be,” he said.

“I want to be your mayor. Every neighbourhood, every income, every corner of this town.”

But even if he becomes mayor, Feltham says he still intends to host his weekly charity trivia nights at Maverick’s.

“It’s in my blood,” he said.

“I’ll probably do that until I drop.”