It’s All Over Now

A smattering of observations from Saturday’s municipal elections around the capital region

• Voter turnout in municipal elections never ceases to disappoint and the 2008 horse races were no exception. Saanich once again plumbed the depths with 21.01 percent of eligible voters casting a ballot. The lone bright spots, so to speak, were North Saanich with 52.1 percent and the Highlands with a characteristically high turnout of 72.1 percent of eligible voters going to the polls.

• Voters in Victoria promoted two-term city councillor Dean Fortin to the top spot, besting local entrepreneur Rob Reid by 600 votes. It was obvious from the outset Fortin’s campaign was going to be a juggernaut, but the mayor-elect did not return Monday’s calls by press time to respond to rumours that NDP party faithful were imported from Vancouver to help get the vote out.

• In trying to distance himself from the notion he was a two-term member of a do-little council, new mayor-elect Dean Fortin told Monday in a pre-election interview that too often he found himself on the losing end of 6-3 votes, with councillors Sonya Chandler and Pam Madoff rounding out the defeated side.

So what do the folks on the other side of that perceived split think now that they could find themselves in the minority on crucial votes?

“Well, I didn’t see quite the frequency of that particular division that Dean was referring to,” returning councillor Geoff Young told Monday. Young is widely viewed as a fiscal conservative around the table, encouraging other members to consider the implications of their policy decisions.

“Certainly I would say it is true that Dean clearly has a team now, and he would certainly expect to be able to get adopted any plans that he might have, and I would say that it will certainly be the case that if he wants to do something, he can pretty much do it,” he says.

So how does Young see his role on what Fortin’s supporters are referring to as a “progressive majority”?

“If I have a message, or will be having a message, it is, ‘Let’s look at the longer-term impact of some of the things that we’ll be doing,’” says Young.

• A Fortin camp press release Monday received just prior to the election read in part, “[. . .] endorsed Victoria city council candidates Lynn Hunter, Pam Madoff, Philippe Lucas, Sonya Chandler and John Luton, all of whom are running in association with Dean Fortin.”

Monday couldn’t help but wonder what “running in association” meant, especially considering Chandler and Lucas were ostensibly carrying the Green Party banner, while the Dean Team was very much an NDP-backed project.

“Our campaign meetings were often four people,” Lucas told Monday. “I’d love to state that we have a big political machine of seasoned political activists behind us, but that’s just not the case. What we have are some really caring friends and, in many cases, family that helped us out with the campaign, and Sonya and I ran as independently as anyone else that did or did not have a party associated with them.”

Lucas says he and Chandler received no financial backing from the Fortin camp and added the Victoria Greens did not draw any financial support from the provincial or federal levels of their party, with the exception of paying half the cost of their Fort Street campaign headquarters, which they split with the party’s provincial wing.

Asked why the local Greens chose to back Fortin’s mayoralty bid over their fellow party member and mayoral contender Steve Filipovic, Lucas had this to say:

“I find it presumptuous to jump from having zero political experience to the mayor’s chair, whether that’s Steve, or coming from Rob Reid, or coming from other past candidates who tried to make that jump.”

• At least one local voter saw the choice of the Burnside Gorge Community Centre as a municipal polling station a conflict of interest that may have served to benefit Dean Fortin’s campaign.

Monday obtained a copy of e-mail correspondence between citizen Norman Clark and the City’s director of legislative and regulatory services, Rob Woodland, in which Clark contends that allowing the BGCC to serve as a voting place constituted an unfair advantage to Fortin, the longtime executive director of the centre.

“Mr. Fortin has been a fixture in the community for some 20-plus years and was the driving force in creating the building in question. All that is to his credit,” wrote Clark on October 31. “However, the strong established linkage between Mr. Fortin and the BGCC constituents is an influence on local voters entering the premises. The influence is obvious. The use of BGCC as a polling station is unacceptable if the 2008 election is to be fair.”

Clark went on to point out that the city would never have let Rob Reid’s Frontrunners shoe store serve as a polling station, so to allow Fortin’s workplace to serve the purpose was wrong.

Woodland responded, “We are faced with dilemmas in many facilities we choose for voting places. We host voting places in schools while conducting elections for the School Trustees. We hold advance polls at City Hall while conducting elections for mayor and councillor. Likewise, churches and fraternal organizations have candidates who are members. It would be very difficult to eliminate all perceptions of conflict from a voting place given that mayor, councillor and school trustee candidates are all active community members.”

Woodland went on to say that the city would remove any reference to Fortin from the BGCC before the election.

Fortin was quick to declare a conflict when City Hall discussed a planned emergency homeless shelter for the Burnside Gorge neighbourhood, but nary a peep was heard from him on the appropriateness of using the BGCC as a polling station.

• The winds of change failed to blow through Langford on Saturday, as mayor Stew Young, who won another term in office by acclamation, had his wishes fulfilled as his entire slate of yes-councillors were returned to the table, with Roger Wade replacing retiring councillor John Goudy. .

Steven Hurdle, who helped galvanize a slate of candidates to run against the incumbents called the Langford Team, came closest to achieving office, at 400 votes behind the lowest-polling incumbent Matt Sahlstrom.

Hurdle, who was the catalyst for the Inside Langford website that chronicles the strange decision-making that goes on in Langford City Hall, says he will continue to monitor the actions of the city’s policy makers.

“I started going to city council meetings out of personal interest and that personal interest remains as strong as ever,” says Hurdle. “It wasn’t something that I did for any reason other than that I wanted to be there.” M