Civic candidates have some homework to do

One of the common threads among civic election all-candidates’ forums is how little light they shed on what people will actually do when they get into office. This derives from the fact that the municipal government system, so tied into the provincial government, is complex and confusing.

Looking from the outside in, it’s difficult to get a good grasp of what it is that City councils do. People who put their names up for election to council are just like the rest of us, so sometimes they propose things that just can’t be done. And, they sometimes don’t have the history or familiarity with issues that comes with time.

There’s nothing wrong with that, because the alternative is to have no ideas at all.

Incumbents don’t always have the full picture either. Tina Lange, for example, told the audience at the North Shore forum Monday night that it makes no difference how your house is assessed because taxes are adjusted accordingly. That’s true only if your house is assessed within the average. If it’s assessed higher than the average, you’re gonna feel the pinch.

Second-time candidate Nancy Bepple spoke about the City having a priority list for sidewalks andher desire to build sidewalks in the area around North Hills mall. For the most part, in actuality, sidewalk construction in residential areas is subject to a cost-sharing formula between home owners and the city. That formula was adjusted some years ago to bring down the home owner share.

Kim Jensen, asked about a performing arts centre, supported the idea, but missed a bet to talk about a plan that was formulated several years ago to construct just such a facility on the site of the Henry Grube centre.

Tim Larose was asked about dredging the river system. He opposed it, but the fact is it has been tried to a limited degree and doesn’t work anyway because the river bottom shifts so dramatically from year to year.

Joyce Blair talked of making “surplus” City lands on the North Shore available for development but there’s little such land available anywhere in the city.

Bill McQuarrie proposed that an ice-wine industry be developed in North Kamloops. If we’re going to develop a wine industry, ice wine is a good way to go because there aren’t any wine grapes that can take our climate (there’s a micro climate near Tranquille that is said to be capable of growing grapes but, so far, it hasn’t been developed). Not to mention that the Community Charter makes no mention of vineyards being within the jurisdiction of City councils. (Sorry if I’m sounding like a smart apple, Bill — at least you’re thinking outside the box.)

Several candidates supported beautification of the Tranquille corridor, without stopping to think about the cost, and how to pay for it. I’ll go into that a little more deeply in my next column in The Daily News.

One of the most significant omissions of the night was committed by mayoral candidate Brian Alexander. When one attends a forum in the North Shore, about the North Shore, one would think you’d take a look at the North Shore community plan beforehand. But, when asked what he thought the key points about the plan were, he had to admit he hadn’t read it.

And, on a radio show the following morning, Peter Sharp was asked what he’d do about parking at RIH. Sharp, a former chair of the regional hospital board, knows well that RIH parking is not a municipal responsibility, and explained what the actually plans are for the hospital, but it was an example of how some people think City council has more power than it actually does. When candidates are asked questions, they have to be careful to first consider whether the answer is within the realm of civic politics.

All of this is not to take potshots at candidates, nor at voters, because they can’t be expected to get fully up to speed within a few short weeks of the campaign. But when listening to candidates’ answers, it’s important to try to sort out what’s real and what’s wishful thinking.

Bob Dylan concert a colossal disappointment

When I was 20 years old, I spent the summer working at my parents’ fishing camp at Tranquille Lake. I cleaned cabins, filled pot holes, and helped my dad build a road through the bush to nearby Saul Lake.

One of our guests that year was a 15-year-old girl from the U.S. who stayed for a couple of weeks with her parents. She had a guitar, which she didn’t play all that well, but she did a reasonable rendition of Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’.

Dylan was at his greatest back then. His music and lyrics were all about change. Listening to that music, you believed it. There was a feeling of excitement and uncertainty that came over you when you heard him, and when I think back to those times and those songs, I can almost recreate it.

I wish he’d taken us back, just a little, in his concert Saturday night at the Interior Savings Centre. Every aging artist likes to try new things, to prove he’s still got the creative spirit that took him to the top. But would it have killed him to give us a few of the oldies that did get him there? I mean, at least, in a recognizable way?

Instead, he and his band rocked away for two hours as if they were all by themselves, jamming in a garage. There was no connection with the audience, none. There was virtually no acknowledgement we existed; he and the band stood like chess pieces throughout.

Every song was a duplicate of the last. Dylan is famous as a poet, but I couldn’t make out a single word, not a syllable, for 120 minutes. The arena acoustics were crummy, but the instrumentals were so ear-damagingly loud it didn’t matter.

I’ve talked to a few people who enjoyed it. Somebody claimed to have recognized Just Like A Woman in there somewhere, but I’m skeptical. Supposedly, there were a few other familiar songs, too. I sure didn’t hear them — maybe it was the Kleenex stuffed in my ears. Not until the encore did I vaguely recognize Like A Rollin’ Stone.

I suppose it was great stuff for some people, but I’m betting a lot will agree with Daily News entertainment reporter Mike Youds’ assessment in today’s newspaper: “Acoustics were lousy, the stage was dimly lit, and most of his singing was unintelligible. . . .”

Fun with Chad and Murphy on the campaign trail

Published in The Daily News, Saturday, Oct. 25, 2008

The idea of creating a ward system for Kamloops elections has been broached during this campaign, and I’m hear to advise against any such notion.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but let’s first touch on the train wreck that overcame mayoral candidate Murphy Kennedy’s campaign this week.

The split between Kennedy and his campaign manager, Chad Moats, shouldn’t be all that surprising. The two teamed up via the Internet, which seems like a strange way for a candidate and his campaign manager to get together.

It’s absolutely key that the candidate and campaign manager are on the same wave length, and to do that they need to have had some experience with one another. Even when they’re the best of friends, things don’t always work out.

For example, when Terry Lake ran John O’Fee’s attempt at federal politics as a Liberal a few years ago, they didn’t always see eye to eye on how the campaign should be run. Lake wanted O’Fee to be in certain places at certain times; O’Fee sometimes figured his time was better spent elsewhere.

And they were good friends. You can imagine the potential for disagreement between a candidate and manager who barely knew each other. As it turned out, time management was at the root of the political divorce between Kennedy and Moats.

But it may have just been the last straw. Moats seems to have had very strong ideas about how Kennedy should go about running for mayor, and did a lot of writing on Kennedy’s policies. In fact, a lot of the policies came straight from Moats rather than Kennedy.

Reporters covering Kennedy say Moats had a tendency to do half the talking when the candidate was one on one with reporters, as though the roles were reversed.

What finally did it was Moats’ decision to insist that reporters wanting to talk to Kennedy make appointments through Moats.

The campaign chief fired off an e-mail to media on Monday informing them Kennedy “will not be available to the media, immediately. . . . We thank you for your cooperation and respect for Murphy’s need to campaign before commenting to the media.”

The media did not thank Moats, nor did they feel much like cooperating. I spoke to Moats about it on the phone, and let him know that putting himself between his candidate and the media was not a good idea. We talked about it for a few minutes, and I concluded by saying, “I understand. I disagree, but I understand.”

I figure, if a candidate or his campaign manager is going to do something stupid, that’s up to them and there’s no point getting all bent out of shape about it. I’m certain Moats did it with the best of intentions for his candidate.

Sandy Heimlich-Hall of TV7 took another approach. In an exchange of emails with Moats, she candidly told him what she thought.

“We aren’t dealing with the Prime Minister here,” she told him. “We are dealing with a Mayoralty candidate. . . . I tell you, it’s a huge mistake to shun the media.”

“I don’t understand why you have take (sic) such an aggressive manner in dealing with this situation,” replied Moats.

“You aren’t getting it,” Heimlich-Hall wrote back, pointing out that an attempt to contact Kennedy through Moats had already failed. Further, she said, her newsroom was not prepared to go along.

“This request not to contact Mr. Kennedy except through a representative is an extremely bad sign. It makes one wonder what kind of Mayor he might make.”

After which Moats threw in the towel and announced Wednesday he was no longer Kennedy’s manager. “Sandy Hall at CFJC reacted like a spoiled child,” he said.

And, a hint that Moats and Kennedy were at odds over the access-to-media strategy: “Murphy decided that his time was better spent dealing with the processes of the campaign and not campaigning.” To this he added a parting shot on his blog, in much the same vein.

That left Kennedy to make the best of it, telling the media he was used to dealing with them and had not intended to cut them off.

In the interests of informative debate and a good campaign, let us hope Kennedy can get things back on track and provide us with a good comparison between him and the other two candidates.

Now then, about the ward system, an issue that, yes, Chad Moats raised a few weeks ago. The supposed strength of the ward system is that it provides residents with a more direct voice at City Hall. A side benefit is that it would increase voter turnout.

Ward systems can work well. Ten years ago, a report from Simon Fraser University’s institute of governance studies recommended that the largest B.C. cities be forced to adopt ward systems.

There was nothing wrong with the report, but it didn’t deal with smaller cities like Kamloops, where wards would create more problems than they would solve.

In a city like ours, the much smaller population base of a ward would dilute the choice of candidates in some cases. Some wards would have high participation, some would be very weak.

Indeed, Kamloops once had a ward system following amalgamation in the early seventies, and it was scrapped in favour of the at-large system we have today.

All councillors should work on behalf of all parts of the city, and we should be able to vote for all members of council, not just one.

Access isn’t an issue — people have no trouble getting hold of a City councillor when they want one. Nor the mayor, for that matter.

The ward system is a concept, like the Single Transferable Vote, that looks good on paper but isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. At least not for Kamloops.

Behind Closed Doors — Life At City Hall, Chapter 5

This is the fifth in a series on my experiences as the mayor of Kamloops from 1999 to 2005. I offer it for the interest of anyone who cares about civic politics and our community, and who might be wondering — as we approach a civic election Nov. 15 — what really goes on in City Hall. The series is archived under the City Hall category.

 

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS — LIFE AT CITY HALL

Chapter 5 — ‘To the Hustings’

“In touch with people; knows city; knows needs; well-informed; believes in himself, has own opinions and sticks with them.”

— Public opinion survey comments, June 1999

 

Those comments might seem a little self-serving, since they were made about me, but they were very important in June of 1999 because they told the Mel For Mayor campaign that Kamloops voters were comfortable with the prospect of having me as their mayor.

I have a lot of faith in good public opinion polls. Note the word “good.”

A bad poll, one with an inadequate or poorly chosen sample, or with poorly worded questions that can bias the outcome, is useless.

When the Mel for Mayor campaign got underway, I badly wanted to find out where I stood with voters. It wasn’t just that I was running; I have a natural curiosity that doesn’t like to wait for an election to get a sense of where things are heading. Whether it’s a local, provincial or federal election, taking stock of what voters are thinking is part of the excitement.

I hate surprises, and don’t understand how some candidates can go through an entire campaign without ever taking a poll to find out how they’re doing.

One of the interesting things about that 1999 campaign is that several different polls yielded very similar results — and I was nervous about every one of them.

I was lucky to have a great public-opinion researcher working on my campaign. Doug Balson had owned Intermediary Research in Kamloops for several years, in partnership with Brent Baker, and had built an excellent reputation in his field. I’d even had him as a guest lecturer at a Journalism course I’d taught at University College of the Cariboo.

Although he’d moved to the Coast, he still wanted to help out in the campaign.

Doug knew how to write a good poll, and how to get a good sample. Polls have a reputation of being very expensive, but if you have the right questions and know how to choose the sample, the main part is done.

With Doug’s poll ready to go, we hired a group of students to do the phoning, set up shop in the offices of Joel Groves’ law firm, and went after a sample of 200 eligible voters. It was a smaller sample than normal for such a poll, but it was intended only to get us a general indication of how acceptable I was as a candidate, and confirm some of the issues.

At that point, it wasn’t known who all the candidates for mayor would be. Pat Kaatz and Ron Kask were declared, and Arnie Kidner was thinking about it. We added a fifth name, Shirley Culver, since we saw her as a possible candidate.

The results were exciting. They showed I was the first choice for mayor of 47.9 per cent of the decided voters surveyed. Kask was second at 19.8 per cent, Culver third with 17.7 per cent, Kaatz fourth with 14.6 per cent, and Kidner trailed with only two per cent.

While some of the names and placings of other candidates would change during the election, my numbers would remain very stable. Of those who said they were very familiar with me, or slightly familiar, the “comfort” level was also very high.

Asked why they were or weren’t comfortable with the prospect of having me as mayor, respondents seemed very positive. Comments such as “thinks before he acts, honest, clear opinions,” “knows the area” and “ability to communicate” were exactly what we wanted to hear.

One voter offered the opinion that  “he is a bigot,” which baffled the hell out of me (especially since it was someone who claimed to be a supporter), but it goes to show you some people see you a lot differently than you expect.

That first poll also confirmed that people were unhappy with council secrecy, and that they wanted the city to go in a new direction on issues touching on the general well-being and prosperity of Kamloops. Clean water was high on the list of concerns.

The poll was helpful in giving us a sense of priorities, and the results were consistent with the campaign strategy we had developed.

Barb Duggan, my campaign manager, was busy with all kinds of ways of getting out the message. Her approach was multifaceted. I was out of the gate early with a pretty good TV commercial shot on Victoria Street. We varied the location later on.

There were radio commercials, some parallel newspaper ad campaigns, a couple of different brochures, buttons and business cards.

Barb came up with the “High Five” campaign, in which we asked supporters to contribute five bucks to the cause. It highlighted the grassroots nature of our message, and raised some money to boot.

We had two types of signs: lawn signs and larger, 4 ft. by 4 ft. signs that included my picture. Our strategy there was to gradually accelerate the number of signs leading right up to election day.

Of course, there was a Mel4Mayor website, which I kept updated as much as possible.

Barb had organized our committee into sub-committees, or teams, each with specific responsibilities. My brother Bernie was volunteer coordinator, Dale Mortimer was the team captain in charge of business liaison, Ray Abate did fund development, Brent Humphrey was media liaison, Lal Sharma handled canvassing and community liaison with ethnic groups, seniors and teachers, Rod Duncan liaised with community associations, and Shirley Rhodes gave headquarters support. Frank Quinn came on board later as the main fund raiser.

Doug Balson, of course, handled polling along with his partner Brent Baker.

Our campaign office was a busy place. We had a core group of about 30 volunteers that kept it open throughout the day. Barb McKay, Mary Bezanson and several others spent many hours there.

At a candidates’ forum at the Farmers’ Market on Oct. 16, I welcome everyone to come into the campaign office (a former pizza restaurant on Victoria Street), and added a special twist: A group of a dozen plus students from St. Ann’s Academy, organized by campaign committee member Barb McKay into the youth branch of our campaign, would be there giving the storefront a fresh coat of paint right after the forum.

(A little later, a group of seniors formed the Mel For Mayor Dancers, led by my longtime friend, Gloria Fraser.)

The campaign office volunteers invited people to fill out questions for me and drop them in a box, and we got lots of them. My job was to get back to them with answers.

I added another touch of my own to the office, inviting all the other candidates to use it for their meetings and to display their campaign materials. None of the mayoral candidates took me up on it, but quite a few of those running for council did.

Several of the candidates would sometimes come for coffee in the morning and we’d sit around and discuss civic issues. They seemed to genuinely appreciate the opportunity.

These efforts at inclusiveness gave the campaign a nice feel, but the campaign itself wasn’t always filled with goodwill.

NEXT: ‘A Dog’s Bite is Much Worse Than Its Bark’

It’s not Cathy Who anymore, it’s Cathy McLeod, that’s who

Column published in The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008

I have high hopes for Cathy McLeod.

I say that as a constituent, and as a newspaper editor, and I mean it sincerely.

My hope is that she’ll abandon her “I have a lot to learn” approach and knuckle down to being a student of the job. And I hope the rest of us can now put to rest the “Cathy Who?” putdown — she’s Cathy McLeod, that’s who, and she’s our MP.

I hope that, as she gains more confidence, she’ll come out of her shell when it comes to answering questions about current issues.

I’ve only met her a couple of times, and exchanged only a few words, but I’ve certainly watched her. My impression is that she is a nice person, not arrogant, not defensive, a bit awkward, but one who will take genuine interest in the issues brought to her by constituents.

I confess, one big reason I want her to succeed is that I’d rather not spend the next several years engaged in confrontation with our MP, which is the way it was, unfortunately, with Betty Hinton.

Not that I was the only one who didn’t get along with Hinton. The list would start with the current mayors of Kamloops and Cache Creek, quite a few councillors, most local media, and constituents who had the temerity to challenge her government’s record, and go from there.

Since Hinton once accused me of not getting along with her because she’s a woman, I’m a little sensitive about criticizing female politicians, and doubly want McLeod to be the kind of MP who is forthright, accessible, and non-judgmental.

I’m hoping she will not reply to letters from students with lectures about their grammar, who will not dress down local politicians for supposedly not knowing how to fill out application forms, who will take credit only for funding she actually obtains, and who will answer phone calls from reporters rather than sending emails about how busy she is.

I hope, too, she’s not just another MP who views the world as being divided into two types of people — those who are members of her party/government, and those who are always wrong.

I hope, and expect, she’ll continue to demonstrate grace, which is something both Hinton and NDP candidate Michael Crawford fell a little short of on election night.

Hinton just never could resist taking a shot, though she tried to disguise it. Her “I’ve been a lady for the last eight years” preamble to grousing about Crawford’s frequent criticism of her was just a little odd.

As for Crawford, he made the obligatory trip to McLeod’s party to congratulate her after the writing was on the wall, but when he shook her hand he just had to give a mini-campaign speech about her obligation to work for the hard-done-by in society.

For heaven sakes, there are times when you should park the partisan politics, let bygones be bygones, and just have the good manners to congratulate your competition on a job well done.

McLeod responded to Crawford that she intended to be the MP for all the people of Kamloops Thompson Cariboo, not just those who voted for her. It was the right answer, in a similar vein to the way she answered combative comments about her by other candidates at pre-election forums.

For those who say party policies are more important than the individual, I suggest the manner in which a politician empathizes with people is just as important as the policy book.

In that regard, I read an interesting comment this week about the U.S. presidential campaign.

“A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia,” Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair wrote. “But he or she cannot change the fact — if it happens to be a fact — that he or she is a pathological liar, a dimwit or a proud ignoramus.”

Most anyone can learn to be a savvy politician, but we’re all prisoners of our psychological makeup, and we can’t just set aside ego and the other baggage we were born with when we enter politics. At this early juncture, it looks very much as though McLeod will handle herself just fine.

So fine, in fact, that the seeming ineptness of the local Conservative constituency association in failing to hold a nomination meeting despite months of warning now takes on the appearance of brilliance. After all, who can argue with success?

Meanwhile, the Liberals are trying to pick themselves up off the sidewalk. Ken Sommerfeld’s plummet to the near-bottom of the vote was par for the course for Liberals in this election. Tuesday wasn’t a good night for Liberals, and a couple of good friends of Kamloops were lost to us.

London West MP Sue Barnes, who acted for several years as the shadow MP for Kamloops, lost to her Conservative opponent by 1,700 votes.

Barnes was a huge help in making contacts in Ottawa as Kamloops went after federal funding for various projects. In appreciation, I once presented her with a framed print of a Kamloops cityscape by local artist Steve Mennie, which she hung in her constituency office.

Don Bell was defeated in North Vancouver. He and I met on a sponsored trip to Beijing several years ago, shortly after he was first elected. One memorable night there, I attended a Chinese-style wedding ceremony in which he and his wife renewed their vows.

Bell later became chair of the B.C. Liberal caucus in Ottawa, and proved helpful in dealing with Kamloops issues.

On the other hand, Hedy Fry, supposedly always at risk of being defeated, won again in Vancouver Centre. Fry flew into Kamloops in the midst of the 2003 wildfire season to take the lead in offering federal assistance to the area.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

TRU’s new president a different sort of leader

I attended the breakfast for the TRU Foundation’s fundraising kickoff this morning in the Grand Hall. The vision for a new hall of learning building is spectacular in concept and in architecture and will certainly become a landmark not only for TRU but for the city.

Dr. Kathleen Scherf, the new university president, spoke, and I’ve got to say she is definitely a different sort of speaker. I think “defiant” might be a word that would apply in her speaking style. She kind of challenges you to shape up.

I’m guessing the university community is in a mild state of shock right now because her style is so much different from the scholarly Roger Barnsley who guided the institution toward university status.

By the way, Scherf sent me a very nice email a week or two ago saying she found the whole “posing nude on the Internet’ conversation and subsequent column very amusing (refer to Columns category for background). Obviously, she has a nice sense of humour and was not offended — so there.

But back to the Foundation brekkie, all other speakers paled beside the compelling address given by TRU student Jade Johnson, who described growing up with an abusive, heroin-addicted father and unemployed mother who also succumbed to the temptation of drugs. Through it all, she maintained straight-A marks and is now a top student at TRU, thanks to the Foundation’s financial support.

A few people in the room may have twigged to the fact she is the sister of Nina Johnson, the Kamloops 14-year-old who underwent a heart transplant but did not survive. Nina’s situation was covered extensively in The Daily News, including revelations about her mother’s checkered activities while Nina was fighting her battle to live.

Today’s speech at TRU was testimonial to the strength of character of someone who is excelling against all odds.

Words and pictures tell an election story

Sometimes we are accused, as all media are, of favouring one political candidate over another in the way we write a story or headline, or take a picture. The fact is, we try very hard to be fair. Sometimes we fail, but we try.

A little after 11 last night (Tuesday), as we were heading toward wrapping up our election coverage (our press deadline was 1 a.m.), news editor Mike Cornell came into my office and asked to look at the election-night pictures in the photo “browser.” When I saw the picture of winning Conservative candidate Cathy McLeod, my reaction was the same as Mike’s: “Let’s find a different picture.”

The photographers had proposed the picture because it showed her hugging a friend and they felt it captured the emotion of the election victory. But when Mike and I looked at it, we found it a little bland. Worse, it was not a flattering picture of McLeod. We’ve all had pictures taken that don’t show us looking our best. On McLeod’s night of victory, she deserved a front-page picture of herself looking happy and pleasant.

The picture we settled on, I think, depicts McLeod in the appropriate way.

It was about midnight when “the desk” (which designs our news pages) printed a first proof of the front page. Earlier in the evening, I’d approved a headline that read, “Here We Go Again!” It was a simple statement about the fact we were going to have yet another minority government — the third in a row — in Ottawa.

But page one was then designed with the headline overlain on McLeod’s picture. Alarm bells went off. It seemed to me the headline, when placed on top of the picture, could be interpreted as negative. It could even be seen to be a slight against both McLeod and retiring MP Betty Hinton, as in, “Oh, great, we’re getting more of the same in Ottawa.”

(Incidentally, a picture we published on the front page of Tuesday’s edition was the subject of much discussion in the newsroom. The picture showed a small sea of election signs, but Liberal candidate Ken Sommerfeld’s was not among them. Several of us saw it the moment we picked up the paper Tuesday morning. It turned out that a better picture, one with Sommerfeld’s sign in it, had been passed over for the other. An easy error and certainly unintentional, but important if you’re a Liberal supporter. That’s what I mean when I say we sometimes fail.)

Pooling our creative genius, we mulled over a few alternatives for the election headline. The most clever and popular was “Deja Blue,” a reference to Tory Blue returning for another term in government. But, my paranoid mind surmised that the “blue” reference could be interpreted by some (who might not get the play on words) as a suggestion the country should be depressed about the Conservative victory.

I thought about “Cathy McLeod, That’s Who,” which captured the whole issue around her lack of name recognition (the “Cathy Who?” label) going into the campaign, and that she would now be a household name.

But, we went with “Another Tory Minority,” not clever, not a grabber, but safe, and descriptive. It might have had something to do with the fact that our 12:30 deadline was fast approaching, and that it was time to button everything up and send it down to the press room. Sometimes, facing a deadline, you have to compromise and just get it done. We made our deadline with a minute to spare, and the pressroom made theirs by the same margin, firing up the press at 12:59 a.m.

If politics is a game of compromise, so is reporting on politics.

The joy of victory, the agony of defeat

I’m sitting here, waiting for the final results to come in, and I’m torn between thinking there’s something seriously wrong with the way we elect Members of Parliament, and thinking everything is just as it should be.

On the one hand, I’m thinking our next MP is a complete greenhorn, whose only previous political achievement appears to be championing a footbridge in Pemberton. We have decided to send to Ottawa someone who knows little about the policies of the government she will now represent, who knows nothing about how to get things done in Ottawa.

On the other hand, what’s so wrong with that? Do we always have to elect old crocks who have been around forever? Why not someone who will approach the job, in the beginning, like a deer in headlights, a little frightened, perhaps, but anxious to please and willing to work, burdened by none of the baggage one inevitably accumulates the longer one has been in politics.

I heard someone say the other day that the best thing about Cathy McLeod is that she isn’t Betty Hinton. OK, so that isn’t kind, but in politically practical terms, there’s something to be said for the theory that Kamloops really wanted to stay Conservative all along, and that, in the last week of the campaign, decided we were more willing to live with a new Conservative MP than with either an NDP or Liberal one.

That certainly would seem to be consistent with the Daily News-TV7 poll of a week ago, which showed Michael Crawford and McLeod in a dead heat. Crawford held on to the support he had then, but McLeod soared more than 10 points, while Ken Sommerfeld plunged by about the same number — for awhile, the real race seemed to be between Sommerfeld and Donovan Cavers of the Greens for third place.

But then, I think any country that re-elects a candidate like Colin Mayes — as was the case in Okanagan-Shuswap — must have some problems. And I think of the many good candidates who will take their places in the House, and figure things aren’t all bad.

I feel for Crawford and Sommerfeld. When you work hard for something, do everything you can, but fail anyway, it takes some time to get over it. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s no greater feeling of excitement and wonder than McLeod is experiencing right now.

Tomorrow, she’ll still be shaking her head to make sure it’s not all a dream. Then she’ll get down to work and find out what politics is really all about.

On days like today, I’m proud to be a Canadian

Driving to the polling station this morning, I asked my son Jacob to check the address on the Elections Canada card that had come in the mail.

He read off the address and asked, “Where’s that?”

“It’s at one of our neighbours’,” I said.

“Like, in a house?” he replied, surprised.

In his 18th year, this was his very first chance to vote, and he thought we’d have to drive into Westsyde to a hall or a gym. Even when we lived in the outskirts of Barnhartvale, we usually voted in the school gymnasium. But in Black Pines, there’s no school, no community hall — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it’s own place to cast your ballot.

The sign on the front door of the house, beside the official Elections Canada poster, said, “Come on in, we’re downstairs!”

I knocked a couple of times on the door and opened it. “Come on down!” a voice cheerily greeted us, and we went down the stairs into the basement.

There, the neighbours running the polling station had set up a table with a ballot box and voters’ list; a few steps away was the voting booth.

“Sorry,” they joked, “We’ll need so see some ID to prove who you are.”

Of course, they knew exactly who we were. Jacob, though, had come prepared with his ID, since he had to register.

“How’s the house coming?” asked one of the neighbours/polling clerks when it was Jacob’s turn in the voting booth, and we chatted for a minute or two.

As Jacob and I left, I felt a certain pride in living in a country where you are not only allowed to vote, but encouraged to vote, and where polling stations are set up in people’s houses to make sure you have every opportunity to vote.

“So who’d you vote for?” I asked Jacob as we drove toward town.

“Nice try,” he said. “One of the great things about living in Canada is that you don’t have to tell anyone who you voted for. That’s why they call it a secret ballot.”

Both our local elections will be decided in Ottawa

From a column published in the Kamloops Daily News on Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008

What a shame that both our local elections will be decided in Ottawa.

It may seem absurd to say voting in Kamloops Thompson Cariboo will be determined by what’s happening on the other side of the country, and even sillier to suggest our civic election will be, too.

But consider the evidence.

Nominations closed yesterday for the civic election Nov. 15. Twenty-nine candidates for mayor and council in Kamloops is a goodly number, though not anywhere near a record — there have been years when three dozen people sought council seats, and a half dozen wanted the mayor’s chair.

But the credentials of those running vary. There are some very good candidates, to be sure, and even a few with modest name recognition.

Ken McClelland is known in the business community, Bill McQuarrie gets around pretty well in his role as CEO for the Interior Science Innovation Council.

Peter Sharp is a former councillor, Nancy Bepple has campaigned hard to up her name recognition. Tim Larose is known for his work with the New Life Mission, Wayne Vollrath is a respected former senior administrator at City Hall, and Denis Walsh is an activist on a variety of issues.

And then, of course, we have all the incumbents, a couple of whom have spotty records. Add to all of the above a number of candidates who will struggle to get their names to the public, or who have little or no experience with civic matters.

The mayoral race has attracted a trio of hopefuls: a well-known incumbent councillor, a little-known but combative challenger, and a man who specializies in obscenities and has been banned from City Hall.

You might be saying right now, well, that’s par for the course. But there’s something wrong here. There are so many people whose names are not on that list, people who could add significantly to the well-being of Kamloops if they had felt inclined to run. The real movers and shakers, the ones who truly make this city go, are thinly represented.

The fact is, people seem supremely disinterested in politics right now, and I blame it on Ottawa. The federal election has been such a nasty event, fought by leaders who garner little of our respect, that we are turned off.

The federal campaign has been just enough of a distraction that we aren’t thinking much about what goes on just down the street from us at City Hall. Council candidates chose either to announce their intentions but not campaign, due to the federal election, or wait until the last minute.

We will have a very short opportunity to get to know the candidates, and that’s a recipe for apathy and a low turnout.

Never can I recall another civic election that has been so influenced by what goes on in another jurisdiction.

But while the effect on our civic election is felt in general terms, Ottawa will actually determine who our next MP will be.  Here’s why.

As a Daily News-CFJC-TV poll showed this week, Michael Crawford of the NDP and Cathy McLeod of the Conservatives are tied in a dead heat in this riding.

McLeod has demonstrated a lack of knowledge of party policy, and her grasp of local issues is untested. 

This is not a putdown of Cathy McLeod. Only the constituency association knows why it left it to the prime minister’s office to pick a local candidate, and why a total unknown got the nod.

Fact is, this total unknown is on the brink of being our next MP. Is this not a great country when everyone has a chance to grow up to be MP?

Crawford, on the other hand, is in his second campaign, has done everything he can to become a household name, and if voters don’t know him or like him by now they never will.

He’s not everybody’s cup of tea but one view is that Crawford should, all things equal, pull ahead and win the day. People aren’t feeling the love from Prime Minister Harper right now over the economic crisis.

By far the biggest factor between now and Tuesday will be the party leaders. If Stephane Dion and Jack Layton don’t totally mess it up, they should deny Harper a majority. Will people in our riding vote strategically to assist in that, or to keep Jack Layton from a B.C. breakthrough?

Crawford and McLeod each needs the slightest tip in undecided votes to come out ahead. At this point, that boost will come not from anything they do, but from what voters are thinking about the leaders as they go into voting booths Tuesday.