Tracy Pepe wants to defeat Patrick Brown’s main attack dog—Rowena Santos: She has ‘zero deliverables’
“The first time I ran, I was angry,” Tracy Pepe says, during her campaign launch event at the Taj Mahal Heritage restaurant on Main Street in Brampton. “I was very frustrated. I don’t recommend doing a campaign that way…”.
Pepe isn’t alone in her frustration with the way Wards 1 & 5 have been handled by incumbent Rowena Santos, who has been at the centre of some of City Hall’s biggest scandals over the past eight years.
The longtime Brampton community advocate and businessperson says her city is ready for change and residents she speaks with everyday want council members like Santos who only work for themselves, replaced.
Santos was first exposed for landing a friend of hers a $100,000 consulting contract, while she aggressively pushed the deal behind the scenes. The man, described by Santos as her “mentor”, began billing Brampton taxpayers for international travel even before the secretive agreement was signed. Hardly any original work was ever produced and the project Santos had been pushing, a new standalone Brampton University, that she trumpeted for years, quietly faded away with no explanation of why it fell apart.
Santos then voted herself to cancel an external forensic investigation into the entire deal, including her alleged conflict of interest involving the friend who received a lucrative payday from Brampton taxpayers. Santos later broke provincial freedom of information laws when she refused to hand over her communications regarding the failed university plan.
Rowena Santos has been Patrick Brown’s loudest ally on council since they both took office in 2018. She has voted with him on every major issue the mayor has pushed, including the cancellation of forensic investigations into City Hall corruption that allegedly involved both of them. (The Pointer files)
Residents were then outraged when Santos threatened a beloved local charity that provides critical support to those struggling with a range of issues. She led a council effort to threaten legal action which forced Regeneration Outreach to leave the area where it had operated for years.
Pepe had seen enough, as reports kept coming out of Santos flying first class around the world on taxpayer-funded trips that brought no benefit to the city, staying in five-star hotels and ignoring any accountability to the residents paying for her lavish travel.
Pepe says she is working around the clock to unseat Santos.
She described her first run for Wards 1 & 5 in Brampton, when she won 14 per cent of the vote in 2022 and Santos only secured 36 percent of the votes, just 5,143 of all ballots cast, by far the worst performance of any incumbent. Santos was only supported by 9 percent of eligible voters in her wards, a signal that residents were tired of her and ready for change.
This time, Pepe says, she is running a much longer, more organized campaign that she frames as grassroots and idea-focused.
Her campaign platform is organized around four words: “Re-think, Restore, Rebuild and Standards.” They cover bike lane redesign, downtown accountability, repurposing vacant city-owned properties, and stronger by-law enforcement.
Pepe identifies herself as a businessperson first, and a politician second.
“I’m not a fan of saying that I’m in the political world, but I’m in the political world,” she said. “I feel better saying I’m an entrepreneur and an innovator because that is where I’m comfortable.”
Tracy Pepe has been a longtime businessperson and successful entrepreneur, and now wants to bring that experience to City Hall. (Tracy Pepe/Facebook)
Indeed, Pepe has a colourful history of entrepreneurship. She has spent three decades in the business of scent; her company, Smelling Pink, develops olfactory training programs used in long-term care homes to support residents with Alzheimer’s, dementia and isolation. She has worked with more than 750 long-term care units across Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, and has also managed the aromatic fragrancing of numerous large corporate spaces around the world.
Pepe says she chose to launch her campaign event at an Indian restaurant on Main Street North because it represents her own political theory. Ward 1 has a large population of residents with European roots and Ward 5 includes a majority of Brampton community members with a South Asian background. The event was meant to showcase the need to build bridges between communities, and promote small businesses like the Taj Mahal Heritage restaurant run by TJay Singh.
“How do we start bridging our community together?” She says, “The best way I know how to do that is food. I have this idea that if it’s my home, I would entertain a certain way.”
Singh concurred. “We’re connecting different communities now, which I’m really glad that we’re part of it.”
As a business owner, Pepe is critical of the current situation for taxpayers in Brampton. She says residents can see and feel that their rapidly increasing taxes and other costs are not coming with any improvements around them, as infrastructure and services decline under the current council leadership.
“Now that we have a cost of living crisis, people are paying all this money in their taxes and they don’t feel they’re being valued,” she says. “When you’re a business owner and you have a customer that doesn’t feel valued, that is a huge problem.”
Brampton’s tax rate has increased in recent years, although Santos and Brown frequently provide misleading claims, while refusing to open up the municipal books to independent auditors. The 2025 increase for Brampton taxpayers overall was 8.4 percent not including an almost double digit increase for utilities under Brown and Santos. In 2026 it was almost 5 percent, or compounded, nearly 15 percent over two years, despite Brown’s repeated claims of freezing budgets.
The city of Brampton initially cancelled, then reinstated a hospital-specific levy. Santos and Brown initially resisted funding Peel Memorial’s $125-million municipal share requirement to get the badly needed healthcare expansion the city needs.
Brown’s 2026 budget quietly cut or delayed dozens of projects, including for the so-called Innovation District that has failed to materialize, cricket field upgrades were cut nearly in half, and a fire communications facility was removed entirely. This was happening while funding for major projects were shifted onto debt after years of budget freezes left a reported $1.2 billion in deferred work with projects that were never started, even though the taxes to pay for them had been collected.
The jaw-dropping mismanagement inside Brampton City Hall would be front page news in any other municipality, Pepe says.
She is also critical of the non-existent construction of the Peel Memorial Phase-2 expansion, which has not moved forward for almost a decade.
“With one hospital and the amount of spending that this government [does], no wonder we don’t have the second hospital,” she says. “No wonder we don’t have shovels in the ground. A lot of promises, a lot of photo ops, but I’m about deliverables.”
Her platform specifically commits to a full audit of Hospital levy funds that have already been collected from taxpayers and a public town hall to review the findings.
Years after Peel Memorial’s Phase-2 expansion was first promised, a construction firm has only been provisionally selected, with the cost, opening date, and even details about the inclusion of an actual emergency department still unconfirmed.
Candidate for Wards 1 & 5 in Brampton, Tracy Pepe, has sharp criticism over the handling of Peel Memorial’s Phase-2 expansion, which has languished for almost a decade. (The Pointer/Alexis Wright)
Pepe is also ready to get downtown Brampton back on track after years of failed leadership by Santos, who helped cancel a massive redevelopment of the city centre approved prior to her arrival on council. Santos then misled downtown business owners and residents about plans to finally get the initiative off the ground.
Pepe would breathe life into Brampton’s Business Improvement Area (BIA), which she says has been taken over by the politically motivated behaviour of Santos.
“We have one, which is ridiculous, because it’s interconnected with our government,” she said. “There’s two board members that sit on the BIA that are city councillors. That’s unheard of. Government should get out of the way of building businesses,” she said. “It’s not the way it works. Downtown cores are developed because of the businesses. Governments, get out of the way.”
She mentions the badly mismanaged construction projects going on in the downtown area that are currently disrupting small businesses.
Pepe expressed frustration over the 2018 Downtown Reimagined Plan which collapsed shortly after Brown and Santos took office and did not want to pay for it. Government inaction, politics and red tape, she says, has held Brampton businesses back.
She saved her sharpest criticism for the Centre for Innovation and the so-called “Innovation District” Santos and Brown routinely claim has been created in the city centre.
“The thing that annoys me the most about the innovation district—it is a joke,” she says. “It is a waste of money. You do not label something an innovation district because you say it is. The people determine if it’s an innovation district.”
The “innovation district” has been the subject of widespread mockery across Brampton, as Brown and Santos point to the boarded up and decaying building, claiming significant innovation investments have been made, throwing out names of grant recipients, “incubators” and start-ups without any visible signs of actual economic development.
Meanwhile, a planned Rogers investment, expansion of Algoma University, a previous deal with Guelph University and Humber College, the once highly anticipated TMU campus and the so-called “Centre for Innovation” itself, have either failed to materialize, been cancelled due to council mismanagement or have floated away quietly into the ether.
Singh echoed Pepe’s frustration over the centre for innovation, and the signs the City has put up with images of what it will look like: “It’s just a picture there showing you that we have spent the (taxpayers’) money.”
Tracy Pepe is critical of the construction in downtown Brampton. If elected, she wants to see clear timelines and accountability. (The Pointer/Alexis Wright)
She is also blunt about the broader state of downtown Brampton. Small businesses, Pepe says, are not coming to downtown anytime soon, as buildings are shuttered, covered with plywood and in various states of decay. Her plan opens not with investment or branding, but with the city’s unhoused population, which she argues has been ignored for too long.
“There is no economic development or revitalization until we start to address this problem,” she insists, describing a plan to create a dedicated social work staff complement to closely cooperate with the Region of Peel on existing supports, and to sit down directly with Brampton’s MPs and MPPs to fast-track access to services.
“We cannot keep turning a blind eye to the homeless and the impoverished and the economic crises that are happening,” she says, framing safety as a prerequisite for any economic revival. Residents won’t return downtown, she argues, no matter what gets built, if all members of the community are not respected and properly cared for.
Her second priority is untangling the construction chaos that drove her out of her own downtown storefront. She wants a task force to establish clear timelines and costs on every project currently underway downtown, arguing the City owes small business owners real answers, rather than uncertainty.
“You cannot establish a business under that kind of economic uncertainty,” she says, describing shop owners who don’t know from day-to-day whether their curb will be finished, their signage approved, or their street even open.
The Pointer reported on one such business whose owner Tarun Devgan reported an 80 percent revenue drop due to construction, with what he described as little communication or support from the City or Region. As of the summer of 2023, a total of 19 downtown businesses had left or shut down since construction began shortly before that, while only $300,000 was allocated citywide under the Business Improvement and Facade Improvement grants.
Pepe also wants Ken Whillans Square redesigned to meet accessibility requirements without relocating the cenotaph, calling the current plan to move the war memorial “ridiculous.” She called for a full audit of the Innovation District, saying eight years and no results, as Brown and Santos continue to sell a fantasy about the project, is enough. “If the project needs to be stopped, it needs to be stopped,” she says.
Another priority is restructuring Brampton’s Business Improvement Association (BIA) model. The City currently funds a single downtown BIA, while she says areas like Kennedy Road have more businesses than downtown and receive a fraction of the support. This is unacceptable, Pepe says, compared to the multiple BIAs in cities like Toronto and Mississauga.
Longtime Brampton advocate and businessperson Tracy Pepe wants to represent Wards 1 & 5 in Brampton, and promises to attract actual investments to improve her community. (Tracy Pepe/Facebook)
Pepe cautions that downtown Brampton won’t be revitalized in a single term without first resolving what she calls “major problems” like homelessness, construction paralysis and the lack of accountability.
She also spoke on the current state of the Stellantis auto manufacturing plant in Brampton, comparing it to the City of Detroit’s 2013 municipal bankruptcy.
“We’ve talked about the similarities of our city to Detroit,” she says. “How Detroit had to go bankrupt before there was an emerging. I feel that we’re at that stage now.”
She says Rowena Santos has done hardly anything since becoming a councillor, other than travelling the world and promoting herself on social media, and her record proves it.
“Eight years in our ward, nothing has been built…there are absolutely zero deliverables.”
Santos, Brown and fellow incumbent Paul Vicente delayed downtown infrastructure work despite business owners’ pleas, Pepe says, throwing a project delayed for decades into fresh turmoil when they were first elected.
Ultimately, Pepe’s message is simple.
“If you’re not investing in people, we’re going to have huge problems.”
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