Canadian Politics Today

So our incumbent mayor won in a landslide.  Apparently "AAGGHHH why aren't they doing anything about these hobos???" wasn't a compelling reason to vote for the challenger.

And 7 of the 8 incumbent councillors also won re-election.  The eighth did not seek re-election... it is rumored that she has her eye on running for the Conservatives in the next election, and I will not be surprised if she unseats this region's lone Liberal MP.

Is it too easy for incumbents to win re-election? Is name recognition good enough, particularly in these local contests where there's often not much known about the candidates and not much to differentiate them from one another?

I voted for many of the incumbents, including the mayor, but not all of them.  I did vote for a few of the challengers who seemed like promising and earnest individuals.  I declined to vote for a couple of the incumbents who struck me as being not terribly useful.  One of the challengers I voted for did win the vacant seat.  Of the remaining challengers, a few seemed bright and capable... others seemed to have not much at all to recommend them.  One appears to have been a college student with nothing more than a photo and an email address for voters to consider... she still got 2000 votes.  I'm not sure why anybody would vote for a candidate based just on a name, a photo, and an email address. I imagine that for some number of voters they just picked her name at random, or because they liked her photo, or they liked her name, or something like that.

The school board trustee race is even more perplexing. There's a whole slew of names vying for four positions.  I read a local columnist who had glowing comments about two of them, so I cast votes just for those two, based strictly on the recommendation of the columnist. I imagine that for many voters the research process was even less vigorous. "Cool name" or "had more signs" might figure into the process. Pick four names at random?


-k