Is there wisdom in experience, or is it time to clean house?
Monday Magazine, November 5th, 2008
Something of a theme has emerged this municipal- election season in Victoria and that theme, insofar as Monday hears it through telephone calls and letters to the editor, goes something like this: “Throw the bums out.”
On December 6, 2005, Mayor Alan Lowe, fresh off his third election win, appropriated the soaring language of civil-rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. when delivering his inaugural address. “Today I think we can say that we all have a dream,” Lowe crowed. “We have a dream to make Victoria the most livable city in Canada. So what does that mean? It means a city that is safe and vibrant, a city that is economically strong, a city that looks after its most vulnerable citizens, a city that is green and sustainable, a city that supports its arts and cultural communities and a city that offers an enviable quality of life.”
More bike lanes and legalizing secondary suites aside—and recognizing the impact of regional and global trends on our city’s fortunes—Lowe’s high-flying 2005 dreams have crash-landed in a tangled heap of popular sentiment that ranges from malaise to despair.
Some council members who were there firsthand recognize that the table came up shy of sterling in representing citizens’ interests on issues of governance, planning and vision for the future.
“I don’t think this council, as a council, has done much well in its term,” one-term incumbent councillor Sonya Chandler told Monday. “I don’t think we’ve had the opportunity to work together as a team—partly because of style. There’s been a variety of styles, and a variety of values and a real mixed bag of priorities. There’s never been a time when the mayor, or anybody else, sat us down and said, ‘What are some common values, what is a common vision that we share, or what are some common priorities over the next three years and how are we going to get there?’”
Chandler, looking to retain her seat at the council table on November 15, offers this suggestion for improvement:
“My messaging around that is, let’s not do that again,” she says. “Let’s elect a council that can work together, that has teamwork and leadership and direction and commitment and a principle-based direction that they want to move in, because otherwise I think we’ll just continue tripping ourselves with the best of intentions.”
Sitting councillor Geoff Young counters that electing a council that moves in a unified direction may not serve the disparate interests of a diverse electorate.
“In one way you could say that we’re all over the map, but another way to say it is that we’re each our own independent centres on a lot of the issues, and that is a strong point for the way our council works,” says Young. “I don’t think it is a particularly good thing when you have one group of five, say, that always votes together even if they may not personally agree, but who said they would always go together.”
Victoria mayoral candidate Steve Filipovic says that apart from occasional good works by Pam Madoff, Charlayne Thornton-Joe and Chandler, the current crop hasn’t inspired his confidence.
“I think this city has been led down the wrong path for quite some time. And we need to have some new blood there to re-invigorate the city in a new direction,” says Filipovic. “I think that with that new resurgence, there might be a bit of a learning curve—there always is, but if we stick to people who do things the way they’ve been done in the past, we can’t really expect a different outcome.”
Local running-shoe guru and mayoral contender Rob Reid has done the math.
“I would be happy to see at least five new faces around that table,” says Reid. “I think that would be healthy for our city and for decision-making to happen in a more proactive and clearer fashion. So that’s the number I’m throwing out—five new people at council.”
Council hopeful Simon Nattrass has also crunched the numbers to determine who gets his vote.
“I’ll be voting for three, and they’re the three that should have been there anyways and the three that will be able to provide the most useful experience and ability and guidance for other councillors.”
In the interest of maintaining cordial relations with whoever winds up around the table, Nattrass declined to name his picks.
“I wouldn’t recommend voting for any of the current council,” mayoral candidate Kristen Woodruff told Monday, citing the fact that the current crop lacks the courage to resist the backroom forces at work in the city that block progressive change.
Geoff Young stayed mum when asked how many of his co-councillors he’d want to rub elbows with if he is returned to Pandora’s box on November 15.
“I will cast my vote based on my long experience with my colleagues, and recognizing that I don’t agree with any of them all the time, or all them any of the time, and I’ll be looking at some of the new candidates coming forward who have good qualifications as well. In other words, I’m weasling out of that question.”
If, in fact, voter discontent is so great that citizens would be willing to scrap the whole lot in favour of new blood and new ideas, they may come up against a hard numerical reality.
Because the field of candidates has grown so large—35 running for council, 8 for mayor—identifying who is a viable candidate to defeat the incumbents will prove something akin to anticipating the current trajectory of the stock market.
Incumbent councillors will doubtless bring their own cadre of supporters to the polls, and their names alone might pique the recollection of uninformed voters pondering the ballot. The rest of the votes, however, will be split among the remaining 30 candidates. That’s a wide spread for division.
The comforting flipside of this equation, for those without the benefit of incumbency on their side, is that with votes split across a wide field of candidates, the number of votes required to get a seat are consequently reduced.
Two-term councillor and current Victoria NDP MP Denise Savoie offers these thoughts on the interplay between experience and fresh faces.
“I think it has to be both,” she says. “I think that there is value in having some experience, but I think you can push that to an extreme where some politicians seem to stay on and on and on, and I think it’s good to leave the room for new people at some point. More importantly, I think it is important to have a clear understanding of what the role of local government is, and what you are there for as a politician, which is protecting the public interest.”
Philippe Lucas, running under the Green Party banner alongside Sonya Chandler, offers this kernel of wisdom as would-be voters try to navigate their way through the fog of current and would-be politicians:
“The thing I’m encouraging people to do in terms of trying to differentiate between the candidates is vote for the people who are currently working on the problems that matter most to you—not the people that are expressing what they would do if they got elected, and not what they might do when they got into office,” says Lucas. “I think this city deserves people who are already engaged in their community, who are putting their time and energy into making Victoria a better place each and every day already. M
