So, last night we had the first of our local municipal candidates come around to introduce himself and do the hand-shaking thing. This is something of an open letter to all our candidates (sadly it looks like 4 of them are some flavour of Conservative and one seems to be a Liberal but well get to that. I should first say, this isnt a call to get your butts to my doorstep to talk to me, but rather about your webpages. So five candidates. All but one have webpages, most have Facebook pages and Twitter handles. Thats nice. One of you has a page that is not mobile browser friendly, like not at all. I dont know who you are, what you represent, or why I should spend any amount of time trying to find a PC to log into and read anything about you. That is to say, thanks for coming out and trying, better luck next time. The rest of you very obviously have professionally developed webpages - most use some variation on a Wordpress blog format. One thing about this - POLICE THY COMMENTS (or better yet, turn them off). Each of you have 200-600 replies to your hi Im your candidate for X ward (and for all of you this is the only post you have up - not a great sign, although it seems many are more active on Twitter). 99.99% of these replies are spam bots and have been there, undeleted, for forever. Like not having a site I can read on a tablet or smartphone, this is not a source of confidence. You wouldn;t let just anyone set up a discount Louis Vutton outlet store in your physical campaign office, please treat your web presence the same way. Now we move on to more personal/political things. If all you can say on your bio page is how you have never left the ward ever (born here, married here, went to school here, likely to die here), then what this tells me is you are woefully underequipped to handle representing the ward that must interact with the larger municipal council as well as how that works with the province and federal levels of government. Never setting foot outside the community may be a good thing for some people but it tells me you have never had the curiosity to look beyond your community to see how things work, or didnt want your precious ideas of how things work to be challenged in any way. Needless to say - not a winning bit of criteria. Show me you actually went somewhere, learned something. It doesnt even have to be something I agree with - show that at one point you had some inkling that there is a larger world outside your community and had an interest in how other people do stuff (better, worse, or simply differently). Next and related - dont use your campaign to go around beating up other wards, their representatives, or levels of government. Its tacky. I know it works, but calling someone a cocksucker and then needing to go (as a Councillor) to ask them for funding for your local schools/transit/economic plans is... awkward. Dont be that guy. In general show me why I should vote FOR you. I dont live in the neighbouring ward - Im not eligible to vote for that Councillor, why waste precious time talking to me about them? Next, please build your campaign platforms as if the person reading them isnt an utter idiot. Weve had Larry OBrien - duplicating his or Rob Fords cut all the taxes fire all the staff! increase all the services! platform isnt going to work because I still retain the skills developed in Grade 3 Math class, and I still remember the episode where Homer got elected garbage collector. This is where Mr. Liberal (judging from the slight use of reds in your webpage and the lack of photos of your handshaking every Conservative worth mentioning) falls down. Also - stop trying to play god-king with your promises. You will be a Councillor, part of a team. Promises that would require consensus or a majority vote around the table, if not also the approval of the Mayor and/or higher levels of government should at least acknowledge those additional requirements. Leave the unilateral declarations for playing SimCity after a hard day at the office. This extends to things like the folks who work at City Hall - those bums you are clearly positioning for a couple of minutes of Orwellian hate are your residents as well - they pay taxes, they go to schools and buy stuff or hire services from local businesses and they vote. If elected you will also need their help - researching information for your proposals to council, servicing your residents, approving your development plans, etc. No one wants to work for someone who calls them subhuman all the time. And just because they chose to work for the public sector rather than the private one doesnt make them inferior. After all, you are running to work in the public sector. If you hate it so much I am sure there is a private company somewhere happy to employ you so you can pay your mortgage and put ice skates on your kids. One last bit and it is a personal one. Look, I know many of you are so far to the right of the political spectrum that Im unlikely to even ping on the radar, but try to at least remember that, if elected, you are supposed to represent me too (at least thats how it is supposed to work in theory). This goes back to the trying to look beyond your nose and stop beating up the strawmen points made above. Explaining how you will gleefully take it to those X (lefties, righties, Lie-berals, CONservatards, hippies, rednecks, etc) doesnt build communities - unless you see post-partition Bosnia as a goal to strive for.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 19:11:47 +0000
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