Do your part to take the community to a better future

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on September 27, 2017.

With municipal elections less than three weeks away, the campaign is in full fervour as candidates go out and make their pitches to voters.

Some of these candidates simply bring with them a desire to serve, others see these elections ambitiously as a means to enter the power structure of our city and influence the course of events and its policies. Sometimes that ambition is a naked one, seeking the prestige and privilege which comes from being an elected representative for its own sake. Sometimes that ambition is cloaked in a policy agenda which aims to reconfigure the way business gets done in the city.

In the process of choosing our elected leadership for local school boards and municipal councils, the public vote is the final stage. Behind the scenes, the manoeuvring has been going on for months in hundreds of kitchen table discussions and hallway arguments as candidates with the best chances to win weighed their options, met with supporters and felt out the backroom temperature for their potential runs at political office. With an ear to the ground for whispers, rumours, gossip and half-truths, each winning candidate will have a strong core of supporters who rally around them and work with them toward achieving the goal of being elected.

For no politician comes into public office a free man or woman, they are beholden to their core electorate. Besides this consideration, they also have to carefully navigate the riptides and undertows of public opinion. It’s probably fair to say, for example, no city council candidate expected bus transit to be a top shelf issue in this election campaign. How candidates deal with that hot potato will likely mean the difference between being one of the eight elected to council and placing ninth.

If you are a politician you have a lot to gain, but you also have a lot to lose. There are no Harry Veiners or Ted Grimms around these days in our city to be simply crowned during every election. In this election at the Catholic Board of Education, at SD76, and at city council it will be a race to the finish with every incumbent’s job on the line and every candidate a blank slate to voters. There are no guarantees. With so much on the line for each of these candidates, and the future of the city itself at stake, it is an imperative every voter gets out and makes his or her voice heard.

With this election we are at crossroads in this city unlike any local election in recent history. You can stay home and eat pizza watching YouTube videos on election day Oct. 16, or you can take this opportunity to vote and do something great and important for your hometown: To do your homework and elect and empower a slate of representatives who can take this city toward a better and stronger future.