Mayor Meed Ward referred to her predecessors as guides that will light her path.

By Pepper Parr

December 4th, 2018

BURLINGTON, ON

How do elections get won?

One vote at a time and the only things that matters is that the votes actually get cast.

How you get re-elected is by telling the public what you are going to do and then doing it.

During the Inauguration of Marianne Meed Ward and the 2018 – 2022 city council the Mayor explained how the election worked for her. She spoke of the Collins family and how a Mother and two children went to the polling station.

The daughter, Summer, asked her Mother: “Can we vote for the girl?”

The Mother replied: “We vote for people with the best ideas.”

The son, Kennedy added that we elect those who “don’t kick people.”

Former Mayor – Mayor Lawson; a model for Meed Ward.

Meed Ward spoke of the contribution former Mayor Mary Munro made to the evolution of her thinking and the role the late John Boich played in her first election in 2010.

John Boich 1933-2011

The was some revisionist history being spouted but to the victor go the spoils.

Burlington got to hear what their new Mayor had in mind. She didn’t mince her words.

She spoke of part of her childhood when her father was a Forest Park Ranger and the friends she had then were black bears and grizzlies who Meed Ward said probably helped her for her role as a politician.

Meed Ward used Winston Churchill, Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright brothers as bearings she would use for the way she reads her compass. She told a close to rapt audience that it is not the critics who count or those who point out the stumbles of others; the credit belongs to the ones in the arena.

“Failure” said Meed Ward “is part of doing great things”.

She referred to a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley, the man who spent years building heavier than air aircraft models and gliders and proved that aircraft needed thrust to overcome drag from forward speed.
Langley attempted to make a working piloted heavier-than-air aircraft. His models flew, but his two attempts at piloted flight were not successful.

His first success came on May 6, 1896 when an unpiloted model weighing 25 pounds made two flights of 2,300 feet and 3,300 feet after a catapult launch from a boat.

All this was done before petrol was available.

Langley did much of the necessary early work that recorded many failures along with small success. It was these successes that made it possible for the Wright Brothers to get a plane aloft in 1902.

Meed Ward’s message was that you just never give up.  Expect her to live up to that message.

The microphone didn’t get shared.

Five of the seven Councillors elected have no experience in public office.  They have no experience talking to the citizens at large either – and they didn’t get a chance to say two words other than when they read their Declarations of Office during the inauguration ceremony.

In introducing the new city council Meed Ward did say what she expected of them.  Her comments weren’t exactly mandate letters.

They are admittedly new but they did deserve a chance to say a few words.