Saturday was a good day for local democracy in B.C. As one person noted online: “First time in my life I’ve had to wait to vote in a local election. What the hell is going on?”
What was going on was that voters were coming out of the woodwork by the thousands in towns and cities across B.C. It seems that those who skipped 2011 had one thing on their mind this time.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson saw his vote go up by 6,524 over 2011, but the overall number of voters went up by 36,884. Turnout increased in Victoria by 7,416 voters, but despite that, outgoing mayor Dean Fortin saw his support drop by 969 votes from 2011.
So while Saturday was a good day for democracy, it wasn’t such a good night for incumbent mayors. In addition to Fortin, mayors went down to defeat in cities across the province, including Saanich, Nanaimo, New Westminster, Mission, Quesnel, Summerland, Sechelt and Lillooet.
If the mayors of Sechelt and Lillooet are still puzzled over why they were trounced, it might have a little something to do with turning an incredibly deaf ear to local citizen input. New councils: take note.
And there were mayors who astutely put their finger to the wind and decided that greener pastures may lie elsewhere. Prince George, Surrey, Kelowna and Penticton are just four of the cities where incumbents bowed out gracefully before nominations closed.
The day wasn’t without its snafus. Some polling stations in Vancouver ran out of ballots. In Victoria, one polling station briefly handed out the wrong ballot and in Surrey, the ballot for the advanced polls left off the party name of two candidates.
And there was that bizarre ban on social media. Some candidates claim they only learned about it in the days leading up to the election when Elections B.C. told them that using social media was strictly verboten on Saturday, even a message as innocuous as “vote.”
So just to get this straight: Candidates are free to phone voters or knock on their door to get them out to vote, but not tweet them or post to their Facebook page. The powers that be do know it’s 2014, don’t they?
What does luck have to do with some of Saturday’s results? In Vision Vancouver’s case, a lot.
The party ran a far-from-flawless campaign. Whether it was the stick-handling over Robertson’s separation from his wife, the letter from Wall Financial Corporation “encouraging” their employees to vote for Robertson or that lawsuit they filed against the NPA, party activists should be thanking their lucky stars they got out of Saturday with what they did.
The flipside is that Vancouver has a more balanced council, school board and parks board. Monolithic slates weren’t the order of the day in other communities as well. That’s a good thing for local governance.
In the “it’s time to bone up on the privacy-legislation file,” provincial and federal political parties would be well advised to remember that a voters’ list is not a library book. You can’t lend them out to candidates or companies.
Tip of the hat to parties in Vancouver and candidates in Port Moody for disclosing their donor lists before the vote. Everyone else in B.C. gets to find out in three months — on Friday the 13th. And to the City of Coquitlam for putting together an election kit as an inexpensive way for candidates to get their flyers to all 50,000 homes in the city.
Elections also offer councils a chance to turn over a new leaf with citizens. In some communities, that’s not a bad idea.
Here are three ways to start: Drastically cut down on the number of in-camera meetings, dramatically increase the number of freedom-of-information requests you approve and stop suing local citizens for libel if they don’t like you or agree with you.
If Saturday was a good day for democracy, imagine how much better it would be if it was on, say, a Monday in 2018. B.C. is one of only three provinces to hold civic elections on the weekend. The other seven might be on to something.
Dermod Travis is the executive director of IntegrityBC.
B.C. voters send a strong message to mayors
