By James Smith
April 8, 2016
BURLINGTON, ON
Ted McMeekin, Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, has come up with five changes to the Municipal election act:
1 – Shortening the campaign calendar by opening nominations for candidates on May 1 instead of January 1
2 – Creating a framework to regulate third party advertising, including contribution and spending limits
3 – Removing barriers that could affect electors and candidates with disabilities
4 – Making it easier to add or change information on the voters’ list
5 – By far the most significant proposed change is giving municipalities the option of using ranked ballots in future elections, which would allow voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The option to use ranked ballots would begin for the 2018 municipal elections.
To get into the issue let me first cover the motherhood issues.
2- Creating a framework to regulate third party advertising, including contribution and spending limits. Remains to be seen how this will work, but a step in the right direction. Any time we can remove the influence of vested interests from politics, the more reflective and better is our democracy.
3- Making campaigns Barrier Free by requiring city clerks to prepare accessibility plans to identify, remove and prevent barriers that could affect electors and candidates with disabilities, and make the plan available to the public prior to voting day. Welcome change. It will make Ontario’s municipal elections conform more closely to the Province’s AODA (Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act).
4- Making it easier to add or change information on the voters’ list. I can’t argue with this as I have an issue using the voter data bases. These lists are full on extraneous and wrong information. Anything that can be done to get clean information is long overdue.
All steps in the right direction, as is the big issue of ranked ballots and I’ll have more to say about ranked ballots in a future piece. But the first issue of reducing municipal campaigns should be withdrawn as this is a step backwards.
What? you say, shortening the campaign calendar by four months sounds like a good idea! Who wants a politician around for nine or ten months prior to a municipal election? I get not everyone wants to see a politician for that long. But this hands a hugely significant advantage to incumbent municipal councillors and Mayors. With few ratepayer groups or service clubs organizing town halls or debates, there are few, if any events where voters can go and listen to a debate between candidates or ask them questions.
Most sitting municipal politicians have a significant advantage as an incumbent over any challenger in addition to name recognition for several reasons. Take the present Mayor of Burlington for example, he will have leftover signs, voter identification, volunteer and fundraising lists already sitting in storage waiting for the next election. If a newcomer is looking to challenge the Mayor, that person will have four months less time to build these resources. No small task.
Other elections can and do crowd municipal elections off the stage. Take the 2014 Municipal election for example. The 2014 Provincial Election took up a good portion of the spring. Many municipal candidates essentially put their campaigns on hold while the provincial campaign rolled along. The fixed election date hasn’t been altered so there is a very good likelihood the next provincial election will be held at the same time as the next municipal campaign.
In a move that’s frankly more in keeping with Putin’s Russia The city of Burlington forbids any campaigning on city property by mere candidates, what ever happened to speakers corner? If one is an incumbent city councillor or Mayor you may run a so called information meeting on a topic of your choice and citizens pay for this re-election gimmickry. All sitting councillors engage in city run promotions walking around an event like Senior’s Information seminars or Joe Brant Days or Car free Sunday with city issued name tags proclaiming their august position.
In these days of disappearing news outlets, shrinking coverage of municipal politics is a very real problem. For example in the 2014 municipal election, after sending several press releases to the Burlington Post I was finally informed that the Burlington Post had decided not to publish press releases for the 2014 municipal campaign. Speaking as a former candidate, and past manager of political campaigns it’s tough enough to get one’s message out to voters in the past, it’s almost impossible now. The issue in many cities, including Burlington is much of the remaining space that’s left for civic politics in the media that has become the GTHA media is often taken up by Toronto City Hall coverage at the expense of local issues. Unless there is a major scandal, local council races are not being covered.
By reducing the time one has to speak to citizens in the context of a Municipal campaign by limiting election campaigns by four months is frankly anti-democratic move and should be withdrawn.
James Smith has run as a candidate in numerous elections – he has managed numerous elections. He has not yet served the public as an elected official. He was on the driving forces in the rescue of the Freeman Station and has delegated to city council on numerous occasions. He has close to the world’s worst collection of limericks.
