Two dashes of spice were added to the municipal election scene Tuesday, one in the form of a potential new question on the ballot and one in the form of a big push to create a new candidate for Victoria mayor.
A campaign on behalf of former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister Ida Chong is expected to begin Thursday that will feature everything short of a formal announcement that she’s in the race for the job Mayor Dean Fortin has held for two terms. A frustrated, agitated business community is counting on the name recognition of the former four-term MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head.
Chong took a time-out from politics after losing the 2013 election to Green MLA Andrew Weaver, but her name has circulated for months as a possible mayoral candidate.
Exploration of that idea will take a big step forward Thursday evening in a downtown pub. A widely circulated email sent to influential business people is headed “Let’s Elect Ida Chong and a New Team to City Council.”
An organizing group has recruited an unidentified council team and retained a campaign manager and some key people to work on the campaign.
Sources say Chong is well down the road to committing to a run, but not yet ready to go public with a full-scale launch. She played it coy Tuesday, telling the Times Colonist’s Lindsay Kines she won’t be announcing anything official.
If she succumbs to the draft movement, Chong would join first-term councillor Lisa Helps in the race, with likely more to come. And the more candidates, the harder it would be to predict an outcome.
Fortin took over the mayoralty after a close 2008 win over business owner Rob Reid and scored a runaway win in 2011 over four other candidates with 60 per cent of the vote. Helps came a strong third out of 20 candidates for the eight council seats in 2011.
If the prospect of a potentially interesting mayoral race doesn’t drag a few more Victorians out to the polls, maybe the idea of radically re-drawing the municipal boundaries will bring everyone flocking.
That’s the concept that was floated a few hours before the will-she, won’t-she Chong story started gathering steam.
Amalgamation Yes spent several thousand dollars on a poll and released results showing a strong preference to explore the idea of amalgamating the 13 local municipalities into a more efficient number. Pollsters have a knack for telling the people who hire them pretty much what they want to hear.
So the findings detailed in Jack Knox’s story on page A1 conform to expectations. But the results could also serve as a stepping stone on the way to a more rigorous exploration of the idea. The group wants a non-binding referendum or plebiscite put on the municipal ballots this November asking if voters want to pursue studying whether amalgamation is in the region’s best interests.
The municipalities could easily do it themselves, but several councils don’t want to go to the effort. And even though it would be non-binding, it would have to be an all-in vote to have any real impact. If a handful opted out, the result would be inconclusive enough to stall the idea.
So the group wants the provincial government to pose the question, based on the poll findings that a large majority of people are interested in exploring the idea. The request will go to Community, Sport and Cultural Development Minister Coralee Oakes, from Cariboo North. One of the considerations in deciding what to do next with this idea is: What’s in it for the government?
The B.C. Liberals have zero representation in the capital, so they have nothing to lose if the idea turns into a loser. But the government has also repeatedly shown massive indifference to local issues. Oakes might also have to factor how local governments around B.C. would react.
Amalgamation is the jurisdictional equivalent of a deer cull — it takes an enormous amount of arguing before you can start cutting the number of mayors and councillors. The province now has to decide if it’s worth all the effort.
