Peter Goldring, our MP up here in the near northeast, represents one of the poorest ridings in western Canada, but he has found it necessary to focus on crusades against gay marriage and for annexing the Turks and Caicos Islands. Fighting poverty just can’t compete with important campaigns like those.
Our MLA, Dan Backs, started out as a Liberal but didn’t play well with others. Opposition leader Kevin Taft punted him last year and Backs soon began "presenting" like a cat in heat to the government side, announcing his Tory nomination aspirations.
We had one good city councilor in Ward 3, Janice Melnychuk, but she has stepped down. This leaves us with Ed Gibbons, which makes me feel like an orphan trapped with an indifferent stepparent.
I’ve been unimpressed with Gibbons since the 2004 campaign, when he whined about some crazed constituent uttering threats. Threats are part of the territory when you’re a politician or even just work for one. Almost none of them amount to anything, and if you can’t handle crackpots and anger management dropouts, you have no business running anything more challenging than a bachelor party.
Gibbons is a shoo-in, for no reason other than name recognition, a function of the absurdly large size of our archaic two-member wards. His record is meagre, and his priorities for the new term don’t speak to the majority of the people who live in our ward. For example, the "initiatives/projects" section on his website mentions zip about public transit. Developers and road junkies should love it, however.
He certainly didn’t light any fires at last week’s Ward 3 candidates’ forum. He was less coherent and organized than some of the newbies, with a lack of ideas and substance astonishing for a veteran of both municipal and provincial politics. He was good at listing our community’s problems but very poor at suggesting solutions. And he spoke without vision about the "2,400 acres of prime farmland" in Horse Hills, which he appears to see only in terms of its potential for real estate development. His one redeeming feature is his refusal to join any tax reduction bandwagon.
The vacant council seat will likely be taken by either Tony Caterina or Harvey Voogd, who have both run for office before, albeit unsuccessfully. The conservative Caterina has had signs up since well before the campaign and has the edge in a race where name recognition means almost everything.
His ideological nemesis, Voogd, has a strong community track record, and a lot of people know who he is, but he’d better have a chat with his sign crew. He should also tone down his love affair with himself–his bragging is overt and tiresome. I admit to favouring him because of his positions and his record, but jeez, Harvey, you and your ego need to get a room.
Chris Martin is the candidate who impresses me the most. He’s the laidback artsy guy who was the only one at the forum talking about sustainability and Edmonton’s cultural viability, and the only one to directly challenge the road construction junkies. I hope he sticks around for next time, when he might have a real chance.
The other candidates manifest various combinations of contradictory impulses and policies. Some want more services, but lower taxes. Others preach the gospel of more affordable housing but oppose densification. Tony Caterina, the business sector’s favourite, made me gasp when he proposed replacing private contractors with an in-house staff for services like garbage and snow removal and road repair.
As for the also-rans, it’s tempting to laugh at challenger Tom Tomilson, what with his preoccupation with Klondike Kate and the "Exile Mandel" sign on his truck. The guy can clearly hold a grudge but can’t manage to utter a sentence with only one subject. Seeing him in action, I can see how nascent candidacies begin–"Hell, if that guy can do it, so can I." At least the remaining three candidates–Balombin, Mak and Roehrs–appear to be running for the right reason–i.e., making our community a better place to live.
It’s unfortunate that civic politics in Edmonton tend to attract a lot of candidates but little voter interest. It’s the level of government that has the most direct daily impact on our lives, yet it lacks the sex appeal of its partisan provincial and federal counterparts (not that turnout at those levels is great either).
I hope, likely in vain, that come election day, enough voters will have armed themselves with sufficient information to cast ballots reflecting the kind of city in which they would like to live, and not just which signs they saw on the way to the ballot box.
