👋 "Wave to Everybody, Joyce": How a Reeve's Daughter Found Her Way to the Ballot

Sundays in Kenyon Township meant visiting. Joyce's dad was the township reeve, and he'd make the rounds from place to place, hearing out whatever was on people's minds. His daughter was the kid who always got dragged along.

"Wave to everybody, Joyce," he'd tell her, "cause you never know if you're going to be in politics."

"Dad," she'd answer, "I'll never be in politics."

Never say never. Joyce MacLeod-Kane has been the Limestone District School Board trustee for Countryside, Kingscourt-Rideau & Williamsville since June, appointed after the death of trustee Jim Neill. The Kingston Mills granny, who also drives for Kingston Access Bus, is now one of three candidates for the seat in the October 26, 2026 municipal election.

We sat down with Joyce to talk about the Glengarry dairy farm she grew up on, the Kingston Mills home she and Paul plan never to leave, the riders she gets to know from behind the wheel, and the families she helps find their way through the system.

Joyce grew up on a dairy farm in Dunvegan, a small village in the former Kenyon Township, now part of North Glengarry. If you know the Maxville Highland Games, you're close: Dunvegan is right next door, about halfway between Ottawa and Montreal off Highway 417.

Farm life meant chores. Joyce birthed calves, fed the pigs and helped bring in the hay every summer. "We ate meat at every meal," she says. (Hold that thought for her shout-outs later in this article.)

When it came time for school, Joyce chose St. Lawrence College in Kingston. For a farm kid from Dunvegan, Kingston was the big city, and that was the point. "And then I met my husband," she says. "That was the end of that story."

It's a small world, too. Allison Shannon, who runs Sun Harvest Greenhouses in Glenburnie with her husband, Greg, is from Joyce's hometown. Joyce used to babysit her.

Joyce's husband, Paul, spent almost 50 years with Metro. He started at 21 in Gananoque, where he grew up, and now that he's retired, he's back at the Gananoque store three days a week. "It's a hometown thing," Joyce says. Kingston shoppers may know him too: "Chances are if you went into the Metro store on Gardiners Road, you would have run into my husband."

Together they raised three kids. One son lives in Squamish, BC, with Joyce's three-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter. Her son Malcolm lives in Napanee, and his two kids are "at my house all the time." Her daughter, Conner, lives in Kingston, and the two of them are flying west soon to visit. It'll be Conner's first time on a plane.

Outside of work, most of Joyce's time goes to those grandkids. A lot of people call her Granny, even at the bus company. "I take no offence," she says. "I'm very honoured to be a granny."

When Joyce and Paul married, she moved into the house he'd bought the year before, at the corner of Highway 15 and Kingston Mills Road. She's been there ever since. "We both intend to leave in a box," she says.

The house sits about halfway between Kingston and Gananoque, though Paul's drive to Gananoque is the quicker one, thanks to all the traffic lights heading into Kingston.

From the May long weekend well into fall, most of their meals happen out back. "Our deck is bigger than most people's backyards in the city," Joyce says.

What she loves most about country living is knowing people. "We know our neighbours, we know their kids," she says. "Whether you go to Glenburnie, Elginburg or Joyceville, everybody sort of knows each other, and it's more of a community."

Joyce took the wheel at Kingston Access Bus as a retirement job, "and it's such a nice job I don't want to give it up," she says. She's kept driving through her months as trustee, and she'll keep at it if she wins on October 26.

Kingston Access Bus is run by Kingston Access Bus Services, a charitable non-profit that provides more than 80,000 trips a year to over 4,000 registered passengers whose disabilities make regular transit hard to use. Joyce's routes take her all over the city and out as far as Amherstview, Seeley's Bay and the edge of Gananoque.

Some passengers want a quiet ride, and they let her know. Others love to talk, and Joyce is happy to oblige. "As you can guess, politicians are chatterboxes," she says. Her favourite thing is asking riders about the work they used to do. "Talking to them about their career and what they did really puts a spark in their eyes."

A lot of her riders once had high-profile careers, and some of them miss feeling needed. Joyce has an answer for that. "You're employing me," she tells them. "If you weren't riding my bus, I wouldn't have a job, so you do have a purpose."

The bus follows her onto the campaign trail, too. When she knocks on doors, she meets people who used to ride with her, or whose parents did, and "they remember me as the bus driver."

She wishes more people knew the service was there. When she noticed friends driving their child to Community Living, she asked why they didn't use the bus. They told her they didn't think they qualified, so she got them an application. "I think there needs to be more publicity about it," she says.

Before the bus, Joyce worked in nursing homes, and she helps families get support for loved ones with disabilities. Parents call her when they're stuck, and her gift is knowing who to call next. "You know the old saying: 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,'" she says. "So I know a lot of people."

Her advice to those parents is direct. "If you don't advocate for your child, don't expect anybody else to," she says. "Don't feel like you're being pushy. If you don't advocate for your child, they're going to get lost in the system."

One tip she loves to pass along is the sunflower lanyard. People with hidden disabilities can wear one, covered in sunflowers, and staff at airports and train stations who recognize it will offer extra help. "Even somebody with Alzheimer's traveling by themselves can get that extra help," she says.

That know-who-to-call instinct came in handy recently in Glenburnie. A family's new address came up as ineligible for a bus to Glenburnie Public School. Joyce got on the phone to Tri-Board Student Transportation Services, which runs school busing in the region, and they found the problem: the house was built after the busing system was set up, so the system didn't know it existed. Roger Richard at the school board corrected it. "It was a glitch in the system," Joyce says.

Her tip for any family worried about a child's walk to school: Tri-Board has a special circumstance form on its website, so families can ask to have their situation reviewed.

Between the bus, the phone calls and her church, Joyce says she doesn't really have hobbies. "People are my hobby."

Jim Neill, the trustee for Countryside, Kingscourt-Rideau & Williamsville, died on April 26, 2026. The Education Act requires a trustee vacancy to be filled within 90 days, so the board turned to the runner-up from the 2022 election: Joyce. She was sworn in at the June 17 board meeting.

"I knew him briefly," she says of Jim. They never served on city council at the same time, but they were friendly.

It wasn't Joyce's first time in local office. She represented Countryside District on Kingston city council from 2006 to 2010.

As for why schools, she put it simply when she spoke with Meghan Balogh of the Whig-Standard in June: "My love for children is what makes me want to be a school trustee."

She sees the job as listening to parents and getting their concerns to the people who can fix them. "I don't believe there are problems," she says. "I believe there are issues that are waiting to be solved."

"I like to shop local," Joyce says, and she has so many favourites "we would be here all night." Her short list:

Yes, that's a lot of meat. Remember that dairy farm? Joyce grew up eating meat at every meal, and she still loves sitting beside a vegetarian at banquets, "because when they get meat on their plate, I get to take it!"

Joyce's dad told her to wave to everybody, and it seems she took it to heart. Between her bus riders, the parents who call her for help and the coworkers who call her Granny, Joyce MacLeod-Kane knows a lot of people, and she makes a habit of helping them. That's the kind of neighbour we love to put in the Spotlight.