Stew Young’s
Record as Mayor
Attendance · 2008–2022

Community tally records 95 council-meeting absences

A community compilation records Stew Young absent from 95 of 309 counted council meetings across four terms: nearly one in three. We recomputed the workbook’s totals and checked sampled minutes, but have not independently verified every attendance entry. The compilation records attendance at barely more than half of its counted meetings in 2008–2011.

Updated September 30, 2026

The numbers, term by term

A Langford resident published a meeting-by-meeting spreadsheet in August 2026, linking a collection of council minutes. We downloaded the workbook and recomputed its attendance totals from the individual rows. This checks the arithmetic, rather than independently confirming every classification of attendance or absence. Open the source spreadsheet1.

Community compilation of Stew Young’s council attendance, December 2008–September 2022
Council termAttendedCounted meetingsAttendance
2008–2011376755.2%
2011–2014436764.2%
2014–2018668875.0%
2018–2022688778.2%
Total21430969.3%

That leaves 95 meetings marked absent. The 2008–2011 term has 30 absences out of 67 counted meetings. Attendance improved in each subsequent term, but even the final term in this dataset records 19 absences out of 87.

A concrete example in the minutes

The November 19, 2012 minutes3 list Mayor S. Young as absent and Lillian Szpak as acting mayor. The meeting included a public hearing and zoning decisions. The community compilation records 95 absences across four terms; this sample confirms one of those entries.

Showing up for council is a basic part of the mayor’s job. The compilation’s 69.3% attendance rate, if its entries are accurate, is a poor record.

Only part of his 29 years in office

These 95 absences come from a limited window into Young’s mayoralty. The source workbook covers counted council meetings from December 2008 to September 2022, with sampled minutes checked. It does not cover his first 15 years as mayor or provide a complete count of every council, committee and regional meeting across his career. This is a partial community compilation, not a full-career total or an independently verified count. It marks him absent from nearly one in three meetings included. The figures alone do not explain the reasons for absences or measure his attendance at other mayoral duties.

Sources

  1. Langford Council Meetings 2008–2026.xlsxCommunity compilation; individual attendance rows and notes used for the calculation above.
  2. Supporting council minutes collectionCopies of the council records linked by the spreadsheet’s author.
  3. Council minutes, November 19, 2012Sample reviewed: Young listed absent; Szpak presiding.
  4. Original LangfordBC attendance discussionAugust 2026 post that surfaced the analysis.