Idris Orughu is nobody’s puppet and he plans to sweep aside the ‘bobbleheads’ inside Brampton City Hall

When Idris Orughu looks at the current local government in Brampton, it’s different from what he has seen before. City Hall has had its issues, but nothing like what he’s witnessed over the last eight years. 

“This current council has not only destroyed democracy, they have relinquished their power to the mayor so they can act like bobbleheads, instead of the elected representatives who have been trusted to govern this city.”

Anyone who has followed Orughu’s community work for years, knows he does not mince words. And he certainly does not back down from a fight.

“It’s not a democracy,” Orughu says, of the current council inside Brampton City Hall. “Democracy requires councillors to be able to defend the interests of the taxpayers of this city, but that’s not the case. While we watch reckless spending, our city projects are mounting.”

Idris Orughu’s website shows what he wants to accomplish as a councillor and elected representative of Wards 1 and 5 in Brampton. 

He vows to end the wasteful spending on things like lavish trips all around the world for Patrick Brown and his council “bobbleheads” including Paul Vicente, the incumbent Orughu hopes to defeat on October 26. Contracts to friends and companies with no track record will end if Orughu has anything to do with it.

Idris Orughu chats with neighbours while out door knocking ahead of the October 26 municipal election. He’s running to be Brampton’s Wards 1 and 5 regional councillor. (Alexis Wright/The Pointer)
 

He questions how Vicente could claim to represent Wards 1 and 5 when he votes exactly how “the mayor wants him to”.

Being a Brampton resident for 15 years has made him uniquely aware of the challenges many of his fellow residents are facing right now, and he hopes to use his background as a project manager to solve them. 

More than a half-decade advocating for reforms inside Peel District School Board helped sharpen Orughu’s strategies to shape public policy and push change inside institutions that belong to the people. 

After watching PDSB leadership fail to respond to Peel’s changing demographics and student needs, with families across the region feeling more and more alienated from the local public education system, he began a yearslong effort that helped sweep in new leadership, forced a provincial intervention and led to a drastic rethinking of how equitable education is delivered in Peel.

Now, he wants to turn that same energy and community passion to City Hall. 

The reckless spending Orughu has witnessed and the promise of projects that never get delivered under Brown, Vicente and the other nine council members frustrate him. The lack of accountability to taxpayers is why he decided to run for council in Wards 1 and 5. 

He describes Patrick Brown’s leadership as a “massive waste of taxpayers’ money”.

He recalls when the newly appointed mayor and 10 councillors unanimously voted to award a volunteer-run local media outlet, Brampton Focus, $150,000 in 2019. Vicente and Rowena Santos were two of the eleven who voted in favour, despite it being learned later that Vicente was the founding director of Brampton Focus and Santos was a board member, raising concerns about conflicts of interest, concerns that were ignored. 

It was an “eye-opener” Orughu says, a “turning point” that shocked him. The abuse of taxpayers and the disdain for the very people paying for their reckless, self-serving spending made him question the ethics of the sitting council. He thought residents would rise and speak up against such blatant entitlement. 

“Most of us ignored that,” he says. “That led to the current mess we’re in.”

He ran for regional councillor in Wards 1 & 5 in 2022, when he placed second with 3,643 votes to Vicente’s 7,832.

An issue Orughu plans to address is the skyrocketing police budget. He wants to know why taxpayers have paid to double the Peel Police budget in eight years while crime rates for vehicle theft and extortion show no signs of slowing down. He also wants to know why the crime solvency rate is getting worse. Initially, he began by posting criticism on social media, and makes it clear that he is supportive of effective policing. But he wants to bring a questioning eye to the role of protecting taxpayers, instead of being another “bobblehead” who passes whatever police leaders demand.

He also wants to take a red pen to underline all the wasteful spending of council members, and eliminate it. He says travel by Vicente and Santos around the world on the taxpayers’ dime has been obscene. Santos has a Filipino background and travelled to the Philippines as a council member, paid for by Brampton taxpayers. Vicente’s family is from Portugal and he travelled there as a councillor, also paid for by Brampton taxpayers.

It remains unclear why they went and there has been no public documentation of any benefit the trips generated for Brampton or its taxpayers. 

Paul Vicente, right, in Taipei City during a trip paid for by Brampton taxpayers. There has never been any explanation of the trip or documentation of any benefit to taxpayers. (National Centre for High-performance computing)

 

Rowena Santos, bottom right, and two Brampton economic development staff took a trip to Tokyo and Manila in 2024 as part of an FDI mission, spending thousands of dollars in expenses. (Invest Brampton)

Even though Vicente has the mayor’s backing behind him and Orughu described running against an incumbent as a “tough ask”, he’s inspired by the challenge, and the need to give his community members proper representation.

Orughu was a vocal opponent of how a proposed 1.5 percent tax hike which was announced in January was being framed. During a council meeting he voiced his criticism of the City’s definition of the increase as one of the “lowest in the region”. It was a “failure in transparency”. 

“When I was a City Hall delegate, I told them clearly, they are being deceitful,” he says. “They are abusing the tax rates of this city.”

The decision to hide the actual total tax increase, almost 4.5 percent for this year, was just the latest example of the lack of honesty and transparency inside City Hall under Brown and his “bobbleheads”, Orughu says. 

He comes back to the current council’s lavish foreign travel, which should tell Brampton voters everything they need to know about the incumbents, he says. They billed Brampton taxpayers thousands of dollars in travel expenses. Freedom of information requests by The Pointer unearthed travel records, receipts and itineraries for Brown, Vicente, other councillors and City staff in 2025. Among the expenses was Vicente’s $3,661 hotel stay in Lisbon. 

The Pointer also reported on a January 2024 trip to Tokyo and Manila by Santos.   

Vicente also took a trip in 2023 to Taiwan. The FOI documents did not explain why he went, and no itinerary or scheduled meeting details were provided. Vicente’s travel expenses included a one-way flight from Taipei to Lisbon costing $3,102.26 without any explanation of why Portugal was part of his journey. 

“Only God knows why he went to Taiwan,” Orughu says. “[It] did not benefit the taxpayers of the city, did not bring any kind of dividends to the taxpayers of the city, and was paid for by the taxpayers of the city.”

Orughu went on a self-funded Foreign Direct Investment mission to Nigeria. A look at the online form shows how many people contributed to the mission and the financial caps on spending. Countries like Nigeria, according to Orughu, are full of resources, but are rarely identified for FDI missions. He believes this self-funded trip to Nigeria is ideal because it cost taxpayers zero dollars. 

“Our image as a city, it’s no longer desirable,” he says. “And this has gotten worse in the last eight years. So why is City Hall spending money travelling all around the world and bringing zero benefit to taxpayers?”

Idris Orughu criticized the Riverwalk project, which saw the destruction of trees in Rosalea Park, with no actual work on a project that has been delayed for a decade. (Alexis Wright/The Pointer)

Orughu is proposing a new system of accountability using a public spending dashboard, showing which vendor gets a city contract, the purpose, and the length of the contract. He is tired of seeing taxpayer money spent on projects that never get delivered. 

He also wants to complete third-party audits, and hire a permanent independent auditor general to track every taxpayer dollar. He would end single-source contracts and procurements after years of scandal under Brown who handed work to his friends. Doing this, he believes, would help bring transparency back to City Hall instead of residents having to rely on FOI requests to glean information on council members and their spending.  

“We can look at the abandoned projects, I think there are tons of them,” he said. “You can look at Brampton Reimagined…You can look at the Riverwalk. We actually don’t have the money to complete the Riverwalk.”

Orughu also questions how Vicente and Brown justify making the Peel Police Chief, Nishan Duraippah, the highest paid police official in Canada. His salary was $611,678 last year. In contrast, Toronto Chief Myron Demkiw was paid about $445,367 to lead a police force more than twice the size. Peel Deputy Chief Nick Millinovich received $499,600 last year, more than the Toronto Chief. 

Orughu says it’s an embarrassment to have a deputy chief in Peel making more than Toronto’s chief of police. 

Peel recorded a 4.2 percent increase on its crime severity index in 2025 compared to the previous year. (Force)

The force’s operating budget rose almost 80 percent in five years, from $462.5 million in 2021 to $837.3 million in 2026, while its ability to solve crime declined.

“I want (officers) to be able to do their job effectively, provide all the necessary support,” Orughu says. “But when you pay a lot of money towards safety, and you still don’t feel safe, and the issues of crime are still rising. When I ran (last time) that was the beginning of the rise of auto theft.”

He wants to direct more funding to “the social issues that are leading to crime” including homelessness, addiction and mental health. He wants to get police officers out of schools and into neighbourhoods. “It’s about refining the system so that the system can deliver better than it’s currently delivering.”

Orughu has worked closely with the Peel District School Board on human rights and equity in one of Canada’s most diverse regions. “The issue with the PDSB wasn’t just centered on race,” he says. “It was a human rights issue. It was centered on opportunity.”

Orughu sees the removal of police officers from schools as a success; he believes officers would be better served in the community. 

Orughu also vows to help get Brampton Transit back on track, after major setbacks under Brown and Vicente. He criticizes their decision to award an untested company named Argo with an $11 million deal to provide on-demand transit to users, without any details to the public. He was shocked when Brown approved roughly $11 million for the private company without a public council process.

He also criticized the continuing delays to get Brampton’s second hospital. The Peel Memorial Phase 2 expansion has not seen any work since its performative groundbreaking in 2025. 

“They settled for a 250-bed (facility) when they knew we needed about an 850-bed space full-service hospital to come close to the provincial average of about 2.3 beds per thousand people,” he says. City council, led by Brown, failed to provide its local share requirement for the project for years, pushing it further behind at Queen’s Park.

“You have to prioritize issues facing residents. You have to be responsible with taxpayers’ money.”

Orughu also plans to deliver affordable housing. 

In 2024, the City reached less than 60 percent of its housing target, and lost roughly $25 million from the province’s Building Faster Fund for 2025. CMHC data show only 744 new purpose-built rental units were built in Brampton over the last decade, bringing the total to 11,457 in a city of more than 800,000 residents, with nearly 250,000 more set to arrive in less than a decade. 

Idris Orughu says he’s connecting with residents who feel shut out from City Hall. (Alexis Wright/The Pointer)

To Orughu, the City is only interested in “building sideways” rather than up. He criticized the residential rental licensing program (RRL) as penalizing compliant landlords while those who violate the RRL, the “slumlords”, continue to make a mockery of the system. 

“This council is going up with the sprawl.” He says continuing to expand sideways makes no sense when the city needs to be more “vertical”.

He’s worried that Brampton's reputation under leaders like Brown and Vicente is negatively affecting the city’s ability to attract new businesses and young professionals. Dirty parks, poor roads, speeding and a by-law system that does not enforce its own rules are the signs of failed leadership, he says.

“We should fight to sanitize our image before we can attract businesses. And policing and bylaws are a critical part of that. People have to feel safe.

“One thing I have promised, I will bring up these issues. You will hear my voice.”

He stresses the importance of the upcoming election, and how it will have consequences for decades. Orughu warns of becoming another Detroit which declared bankruptcy when its leadership ran the city into the ground. 

He urges people to vote. 

“Don’t sit at home. Fight for your city, fight for your future.”

Email: [email protected]

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