The good thing about this fuss over the all-candidates meeting? It gives Victorians a bit of a clearer idea of who’s who on the ballot.
Because, jeez, as a voter, all you really want to know is who believes in what — not an easy task with eight people running for mayor and 37 others for eight council seats. Think of trying to tell apart all the penguins on the ice.
Of course, the penguins don’t always like the way they’re characterized by the other birds.
This week, five self-described independent progressive council candidates — Susan Kim, Jeremy Caradonna, Matt Dell, Dave Thompson and Krista Loughton — announced they would boycott a Tuesday forum being staged by Candidates For Change, a group it linked to Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada and We Unify Canada, an organization involved in the trucker convoys and protests against vaccine mandates.
The five tied both groups to the Vancouver Island Voters Association (which is running seven council candidates in Victoria and six for the school board) and a broader “far-right push to sway governance at a municipal level.”
The gist of the announcement was that the five did not want to legitimize with their presence an event advanced by people who were hiding their roots in an attempt to appear more politically palatable to the electorate.
VIVA Victoria founder Randal Phipps bridled at that, at the way it depicted those involved and their intentions. Anybody to the right of woke gets branded as some sort of Nazi, he fumed. (Now, those who describe themselves as progressives might, in turn, bridle at being labelled woke.)
Phipps said he launched VIVA at the beginning of the year as an organization that would be based on principles over partisanship. It is independent of other groups and welcomes a range of views, he said. He said Bernier didn’t even know about the new group until Phipps, who ran for the PPC in last fall’s federal election, told him about it this summer.
Still, whether the groups are independent or not, there’s an overlap between many of the people in VIVA, Candidates For Change and We Unify. Supportive of one another is the way Candidates For Change’s David Stott described relations between the groups Tuesday.
It’s not as though the connections are hard to find. Tuesday’s forum was at the Oaklands Bible Chapel, the same church that defied a provincial health order and continued to hold in-person services during the pandemic.
It will also be the site of a weekend event at which Bernier and former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford, an opponent of vaccine mandates and defender of the convoy protests, will speak.
As the 100 or so audience members filed in to Tuesday’s event, they passed a table at which VIVA representatives made campaign literature available.
When the candidates in attendance were asked how the provincial government could have responded better to the pandemic (a curious question for a municipal election event), the loudest applause came when council candidate Jeremy Maddock declared “our freedoms suffered” and fellow VIVA hopeful Emmanuel Parenteau said the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been thrown in the garbage.
By contrast, the crowd response was polite, but much more muted, to those who said Dr. Bonnie Henry et al had done a good job.
As it turned out, just 10 of Victoria’s 37 councillor candidates, including four of the seven on the VIVA slate, took part in the meeting. So did three — Brendan Marshall, Lyall Atkinson and David Johnston — of the eight running for mayor.
The remaining names on the ballot weren’t necessarily boycotting the forum. There was a conflict with another all-candidates meeting, this one focused on issues related to mental health, going on downtown at the same time. The latter event drew 15 would-be city councillors, including two from the VIVA roster.
Meanwhile, there’s just over a week left for the voters to figure out which penguins are which, what they believe in, and what the city would look like if they were running the iceberg.
jknox@timescolonist.com
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