I take it as a given that cities need healthy economies if they are to thrive as vibrant, creative places. And I wonder what’s wrong with the established business interests in Victoria, whether in traditional commerce, or in our growing high tech sector, or even in tourism.

Here’s the problem: we have a municipal election coming up on November 15.  With the sh*tstorm of issues facing us (homelessness on a big scale, drug abuse and addiction, financial turmoil,  credit crunches, possible stagnation, crumbling infrastructure, and provincially mandated sewage treatment to the tune of $1.2b), you’d think that everyone must have their eyes on the candidates — because whoever gets in for this next round is going to have a hard row to hoe, and we want to make sure we don’t elect NOOPs.

And guess what?  Many people are paying attention.  Witness the all-candidates meetings held around the city at various venues.

But here’s the rub: these events are almost all hosted by various community associations and community groups, and none of these have the broader economic health of the whole city on their agenda.  Instead, these are issue-driven venues with issue-driven agendas that cater to important, but nonetheless specialized, interests: whether it’s a community association (often with a NIMBY agenda) that wants to grill candidates on their stance around development and affordable housing, or poverty activists that want to grill candidates on what they propose to do about the growing problem of homelessness, none of these sponsors of all-candidates meetings have a balanced, holistic view of the entire city or its economic well-being.

Let’s face it: if you get enough people together in a room and agitate them with issues that are already in their faces, it won’t take much to have normally intelligent people reduce issues of great complexity to black-and-white caricature, and you’ll find that people readily sort themselves into rigid interest groups that brook little dialogue.  One of first complexities to go by the board is economics.  Whether or not our government is doing anything (beyond raising or lowering our property or business tax rates) to facilitate a climate of economic health is uninteresting in those contexts, because their focus is on what’s perceived as the immediate crisis to hand.

The typically agenda-driven community-organized meeting is about focusing on all the problems that bedevil us, and often on demanding our “rights” to better services.  Take affordable housing, a truly complex issue.  At your typical community association-sponsored all-candidates meeting, the issue invariably devolves to this: someone from the audience asks the candidates whether they will “stand up to” the developers of new buildings and “make them” include “affordable” housing.  And if they’re not able to “stand up to” those evil rich bloodsuckers, will they shut down development so that “our” city won’t be “given over” to the rich and the poor won’t be squeezed out?  That’s how easy many people think it should be. If we can’t get what we want, shut the whole damn thing down.  Stop everything.

Complexity?  Com-schmexity.  Rhetoric and posturing is all that matters.  The candidates are forced to respond and react within this framework, and the result is ridiculous.

Further, we have 7 people running for mayor, of which at most 2 are actually qualified in any real sense of the word.  And we have 35 people running for 8 council seats, and here again there’s a majority that’s simply unelectable because they have a single agenda or fringe idee fixe that speaks volumes about their inability to govern anything as complex as a city.

Yet the community-sponsored all-candidates meetings bring out the “best” (i.e., the worst) in these candidates, because inevitably the more fringe-y ones can turn things into a circus with help from the audience.  Of the 3 meetings so far, 2 degenerated quickly into out-and-out gong shows.  The venue and the audience / question period encourages this: insofar as audiences here typically already feel aggrieved, rational candidates cannot, in the 2 minutes allotted to them, convey a nuanced sense of what their platform is, and instead the decidedly more manic candidates act out and use the stage to perform what can only be described as a spectacle of narcissistic self-display that serves to whip up audience fervor.

Gong show.  Truly.

I am not suggesting that we get rid of the community association or community agenda-sponsored meetings.  But here’s my question: why are they the only ones who host open, free-to-all meetings?

Where, for example, is the business community and why isn’t it sponsoring all-candidates meetings?  In a private exchange I asked:

Where is the “business community,” anyway? UDI Victoria is hosting a mayoral candidates event at the Ambrosia Centre on 11/3 (which will probably involve charging admission), but where are the all-candidates meetings that aren’t being driven by the agendas of the poverty-industry advocates and/ or community associations?

Those groups look only at the negative stuff — they don’t talk about what’s positive, what’s worth continuing.

Where are the groups that could and should host meetings that don’t devolve down to 150% negativity? The business groups? VIATEC/ the technology community? Higher learning?

They seem to be allowing Victoria to flounder, flail, and drown.

Giant fail.

Well, it turns out the Chamber of Commerce is hosting a mayoral candidates meeting (albeit not an all-candidates meeting), but what a dog’s-breakfast they’ve made of it.

In a nutshell, it exemplifies what’s wrong with our municipal democracy: on the one hand, community-agenda driven meetings that seem blind to business issues, and on the other a Chamber of Commerce, which, by hosting a meeting that for all intents and purposes may as well take place in a different galaxy for all the relevance it’ll have, thumbs its nose at the larger community.

Here’s the format for the Chamber’s meeting:

City of Victoria Mayoral Candidate Forum

Join the Chamber and hear what your candidates have to say about issues that affect your business.
The Mayoral Candidate Forum will be moderated by Bruce Carter and questions will be encouraged from the audience.

Candidates participating in this forum are:

Dean Fortin
Rob Reid
Steve Filipovic

November 12th, 2008

Delta Victoria – Ocean Pointe Resort & Spa
7:15 a.m. – Registration
7:30 a.m. – Event Start
Continental Buffet Breakfast Provided

The page continues, but a note first.  There are 7 mayoral candidates, and by excluding 4, the Chamber is engaging in some heavy-duty editing.  But most interesting is that they chose to include Steve Filipovic, who doesn’t stand a chance to be elected.  He’s the token candidate; the Chamber would have been better off to directly state that Dean Fortin and Rob Reid are the only two viable candidates, with Fortin an incumbent councilor with lots of experience, and Reid the newcomer who wants to shake things up a bit.  (Although I’m not impressed by Reid’s strategy of aligning himself with several NIMBYist community association leaders, who will surely bring the city to a halt if elected.  My impression now is that Reid doesn’t know what he’s doing.)

Ok, here’s my point as to why the Chamber’s efforts are a dog’s breakfast.  First, the venue is the Ocean Pointe, which just screams “exclusive” and “riff-raff keep out.”  Second, here’s the price of admission:

Nov 12, 2008
07:30 am – 09:00 am
Members: $30.00 +GST
Future Members: $45.00 +GST

The cute “Future Members” notwithstanding, I found that $45 price tag maddening.

So we have a “no riff-raff” venue and an admission price that seals the deal that this meeting is for the “let them eat cake” crowd.

But these are stupid cake eaters, to boot.  For here’s the final straw.  After exhorting us (in bold) to Register Today!, we read:

Note: Our online registration system is not compatible with Mozilla Firefox or Mac computers and only accepts Visa & MasterCard. [emphasis added]

That really takes the cake — alas, it doesn’t take the cake away, but it takes it.

If that’s our representative business chamber, obviously reliant on proprietary Microsoft software and unable to deal with either Macs or Firefox (because they use Internet Exploder), then how can we expect any innovation or creative thinking from this sector?

And how can the voters in this city expect innovation or creativity from potential leaders who are forced to flail about between the horrible Scylla and Charybdis of crisis-focused community groups on the one hand and fossilized business thinking on the other?

What a mess.

(Additional blog post on this topic from 10/26 here.)

Posted: 10|25|08 at 12:27 am. Filed under: community_associations, leadership, politics, victoria.
Tags: municipal_election_08
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