Local government veteran reflects on five decades of service
Jeff Fielding, whose career in local government lasted more than five decades, is now reflecting on the highs and lows of public service as he transitions into retirement. Photo: Jeff Fielding
After more than 50 years in local government, retired public servant and municipal consultant Jeff Fielding is finally settling into a life without council meetings, crisis calls, or the constant hum of public scrutiny.
Fielding – whose career took him to stops in Kitchener, Winnipeg, Calgary, London, Burlington, and Toronto – officially retired on Dec. 31, 2025. His retirement marked the end of a career that began in 1972 with a job reading water and gas meters in Kitchener.
For the first time in decades, Fielding is learning what it means to live with unstructured time. He and his wife haven’t mapped out a detailed plan yet, but travel is high on the list. Italy – including Sicily – is calling, as are trips to London, England, where his son and grandchildren live.
“It was pretty much time to make a move. I’ll be 72 in March, and my wife also retired at the end of the year, so we’re looking forward to retirement together,” Fielding said. “We’re both settling into a new reality. It’s one of those situations where you ask yourself, what does the new world look like to us?”
From Meter Reader to Municipal Leader
Fielding’s path into public service began at age 18, walking neighbourhoods and talking to residents while reading meters. Those early interactions, he said, shaped his understanding of what people expect from their local government.
“People didn’t have a real good insight into what was happening at city hall,” he said. “They would ask me as a meter man what happened at council last night, because there wasn’t any communication in those days.”
Fielding completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees while working for the City of Kitchener. This combination set him on a trajectory toward senior leadership roles in some of Canada’s largest municipalities.
Over five decades, Fielding watched municipal government transform from part‑time councils with limited media coverage to full‑time political offices operating under the glare of social media and 24-hour news cycles.
“Things have changed a lot since I first entered public service,” he said. “Today, it’s more open, accessible, and people have more opinions about what’s going on at city hall than they used to.”
He worries that constant criticism has made it harder to recruit people into public service.
“Public service was a noble profession when I started,” he said. “Over time, the criticism has kept people away from joining.”
Weight of Public Scrutiny
The rise of social media has added a new layer of complexity to municipal leadership. Fielding says the job now requires a thicker skin and a deeper understanding of how public sentiment forms and spreads.
That said, he recalls moments of intense pressure – major snowstorms and Calgary’s devastating flood, for example – where the stakes were high and the public’s gratitude was immediate. But most achievements, he said, take years or even decades to materialize.
“It takes a little bit of a thicker skin to navigate the world as it is today,” Fielding said. “Sometimes it’s a long time between successes in public service, and the satisfaction isn’t always immediate.”
Necessary Role of the Media
Fielding’s time in London taught him the value of strong local media coverage, even when it was uncomfortable. He believes scrutiny made him a better leader.
“It made me think a lot harder about what I was doing,” he said. “You can get lazy in public service when you don’t have that coverage.”
Fielding worries about the decline of local journalism, particularly in mid-sized cities. Not having that local media coverage means “you lose that sober second thought,” he said, adding municipal staff need to be able to justify what they’re doing because their decisions might end up on the front page or leading the evening news.
When he moved to Toronto, the media landscape expanded dramatically – and so did the challenges.
While social platforms offered a window into public sentiment, they also amplified misinformation and hostility. Fielding said the key is understanding which voices reflect genuine community concerns and which are simply noise.
“Social media tends to be opinionated,” he said. “It was the legitimate media that provided the balance between just opinions and the regular reporting.”
Rise of Complex Urban Challenges
Homelessness, addiction, and declining downtowns – issues once concentrated in major cities – have now spread across municipalities of every size, Fielding said. It is a reality he saw firsthand during his consulting years, working with communities struggling to keep up with rapid change.
“There’s been a migration of some of those issues from larger cities to smaller centers,” he said. “We’re not prepared in the public service to deal with a lot of the things that come our way.”
He points to a fundamental mismatch between the property tax model and the scale of modern social challenges. Municipalities were built to fund roads, water, and waste collection – not housing crises, mental health supports, or population surges.
The property tax base wasn’t designed to handle the range of issues municipalities face today, Fielding said, adding, “It’s a real challenge.”
Fielding said he worries that the speed of information sharing has led cities to mimic each other’s policies rather than innovate. What works in Toronto, he said, won’t necessarily work in Sarnia or Newmarket.
He believes municipal leaders need to resist the pressure to adopt whatever strategy is trending online and instead focus on solutions tailored to their own communities.
“We get into a copying mentality,” Fielding said. “It’s not transferable, and you don’t get breakthrough solutions – you get common solutions.”
Can “Wicked Problems” Be Solved?
Despite the scale of today’s challenges, Fielding remains cautiously optimistic. He argues that Canada’s housing and homelessness crises were exacerbated by federal immigration targets that outpaced municipal capacity – a gap that cities are still trying to close.
“I think we got caught off guard in Canada,” he said. “Our immigration strategy didn’t match the capacity municipalities had to house people coming to the country.”
The result, he said, has been demographic shifts, pressure on mid-sized cities, and rising expectations for services. But Fielding believes the real obstacle is fragmentation – governments at all levels pulling in different directions.
As a result, local governments are “seeing a splintering of interest,” he said, adding that it’s more about what councils can do in their own jurisdictions than how a given municipality fits within a larger whole.
Still, he believes progress is possible.
“Our cities are some of the best in the world to live in,” Fielding said. “Given the right people focused on the right solutions, I think you’re going to make progress.”
Inspiring the Next Generation
Fielding believes the path to rebuilding trust and interest in public service begins long before someone applies for a job or runs for office. It starts, he says, with education – and with reminding people what public service means.
“It starts at the institutions, whether it’s at college or university,” Fielding said. “We’ve forgotten to teach what it means to be a member of society and what government contributes.”
He recalls Calgary’s “city school,” a classroom located right inside city hall where primary students learned how council worked. But beyond formal education, he argues that municipalities need to do a better job of sharing the human stories behind the work.
He remembers one call from a London resident after a major snowstorm. Her family feared they wouldn’t be able to gather to mark her husband’s passing because their street was impassable. A city employee took it upon themselves to plow it.
That gesture wasn’t just a snow‑plowing exercise, Fielding said, but rather it changed those people’s lives.
“We’ve forgotten to tell great stories about what happens,” he said. “When you solve a small problem for somebody, you can change the way their entire day went – and we forget to tell those stories.”
Reflections on What Matters
After more than 50 years in public service, Fielding said stepping away has given him space to reflect on what mattered most – and what he’s relieved to leave behind.
“I do miss the ability to contribute to someone’s success,” he said. “The work you do in public service is all about making other people’s lives better.”
Fielding speaks with pride about the legacy projects he helped to shepherd: community facilities, parks, neighbourhoods, economic development initiatives. Those were the tangible outcomes of years of effort – outcomes he couldn’t claim in the same way during his consulting years.
But he’s also grateful to be free of the relentless pace and constant communication demands that defined his career.
“There’s a lot of pressure in answering every email and every phone call,” Fielding said. “It was important to me, but there was pressure to live up to that commitment.”
Looking back, Fielding says he never imagined where his career would take him when he was an 18‑year‑old meter reader in Kitchener. But those early years, he said, shaped everything that followed.
He credits those interactions with teaching him how to lead: by listening, by asking questions, and by trusting the insights of the people he served.
“If you bring a small group of people together and ask them what they think, you’ll get insights you never could have paid for,” Fielding said. “That helped me be a leader I was proud of.” MW
✯ Municipal World Executive and Essentials Plus Members: You might also be interested in Sean Meyer’s article: Rob Adams: Championing empathy, innovation, and the unsung role of the CAO.
Sean Meyer is digital content editor for Municipal World.
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