VOTESVote To EliminateSelf-Serving Politicians: The Growing Sentiment Against Change to the General Vote

VOTES chooses Political Campaign Theme

Oshawa VOTES political party has declared its intention to run a slate of candidates to contest the next municipal election. We have declared
"WE PROMISE" as our campaign theme. Our website will be www.WePromise.ca

While the party will have a wide-ranging platform, it's first order of business will be in returning ward voting to Oshawa.

Another major goal will be in defeating Mayor Gray and Councillors Pidwerbecki, Parkes, Marimpietri, Henry, Kolodzie, and Sholdra all of whom voted to rob you of your local ward representatives by replacing ward voting with the less accountable and less democratic
"General Vote". They wanted a "self-serving" electoral system that served them rather than the people of Oshawa.

In addition to a platform of "positives" our team will develop, we will be reminding the public of the growing collection of "negatives" identified below under the item--Oshawa City Council
"Hall of Shame". The Oshawa public, however, is invited to contact us to suggest additional isses you think we should consider.

Fortunately the general vote will make the task easier for the VOTES party as our team will be able to concentrate on one city-wide campaign rather than on seven ward campaigns.

This site is now accessible from www.wepromise, www.timetoupgrade.ca, www.oshawavotes.ca , www.oshawaspeaks.ca, www.oshawavotes.com, and www.oshawaspeaks.com

TOP TEN QUOTES BY CITY POLITICIANS

1. "The city had no responsibility to inform the public about the referendum question"--Mayor John Gray (City Council Mtg., April 10, 2007)

2. "I've never heard of a government informing people about a plebiscite question."--Councillor Joe Kolodzie (City Council Mtg., April 10, 2007)

3. "Our half million dollar loss at the GM Center actually puts us $700,000 above the $1.2 million loss at the Civic."--Mayor John Gray's "spin" on first year taxpayer losses of new GM Place (December 07 interview with CHEX TV's Dan Carter's "First Take LIVE) overlooking borrowing costs for GM Center which didn't exist for the Civic.

4. FULL LIST UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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MEDIA COVERAGE OF WARD/GENERAL VOTE ISSUE

Friday, March 2, 2007

The Growing Sentiment Against Change to the General Vote

Here is a series of communications I have received from an Oshawa resident that is typical of the sentiment surrounding Council’s attempts to return to the dark days of the General Vote in Oshawa. I have not as yet met this writer but know that I can count on the support of her, her family, and friends.

The sentiment against the change runs deep in Oshawa. We hope that everyone is working as hard as Josie is to insure the council is not able to implement the “self-serving” general vote that will give politicians a seat until their death or resignation…not the way to bring fresh ideas to Oshawa leadership.

We need politicians that are accountable to their ward voters in solving their neighbourhood problems and able to represent the ideas of their community strongly on city council. We don’t need politicians that will be able to “retire” under the general vote but continue to collect the handsome benefits of their council seat.

The communications following are reprinted in the order in which they occurred and are reprinted with the permission of the author.

From: pjpascoe
To: bill_longworth@hotmail.com
Subject: Meeting Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 14:33:10 -0500

Mr. Longworth

I was wondering if you know when the public meeting was going to be. I have been checking our lowly Oshawa This Week carefully but have not seen anything as yet. We will probably be as well informed about it as we were regarding the referendum question being included on our recent ballots. If more information was given about the Ward System question I'm sure there would have been more than 25% voter turnout. (A 60% yes vote of 25% of the citizens is not a clear statement)

This meeting seems useless anyway if we will only be discussing keeping the Wards as they are but still having a general vote. Doesn't make sense to a lot of people I have talked to.

I see now a lot of candidates who didn't make the cut in our latest election have thrown their hat into the ring for the one School Board Trustee position. They just have to get in there so their name will be seen in time for our next election without the Ward system. That's pretty pathetic, I'm sure they have a real concern for the education system.

A more important issue for our Council is to have a Steven Colbert Day in Oshawa. Its pretty embarrassing to live in a city where a comedian, not even from here, gets a day named after him.

What a great city we have here on the lake, NO marina, NO daily newspaper and now NO Ward system. The councillors made a wise choice in the new logo for us "Prepare to be amazed" , we certainly have been and we never cease to be amazed.

Why would a city of our size go backwards in time instead of going forward. It is Amazing!!

I hope I didn't miss that meeting as I do support all you efforts.

Josie Pascoe (& Phil Pascoe)

Quoting Bill Longworth bill_longworth@hotmail.com

Hi Josie...you haven't missed the meeting. the council will send a flyer via canada post to all residences announcing the time, date, purpose, location...but no background information.

I think the meeting will be an exercise in futility but still would encourage you to attend if possible to express your ideas. I will be there getting people to sign petitions and hopefully a lot of help will be there for that purpose.

I will also be publicizing the date of the meeting on oshawaspeaks.ca but i think the council members have already made up their mind on the issue.

I still expect to be able to appeal to the OMB because there are 2 other avenues of appeal that the city has not considered that I will use as grounds of appeal once they have approved the bylaw. No appeal is possible until then. I am keeping the oshawa appeal routes close to my chest at the moment because i do not want council to block them with any action prior to the passage of the bylaw.

I am confident that we will have an appeal and I am confident of winning and I am confident that the people of Oshawa will punish the pushers of the general vote at the next election.

We do intend to keep our blog active throughout this term of council and are confident that it will grow to be the dominant news source for commenting on council business.

Would I have permission to publish your letter with some remarks of my own as a posting on oshawaspeaks.ca?

Thank you for your support on this important issue. Hopefully you have been able to forward our website to all of the contacts in your email address book.

Bill Longworth,
Founder & Chair of VOTES (Vote to Eliminate Self Serving Politicians)
www.oshawaspeaks.ca
159 Spirea Court,
Oshawa, Ontario
L1G6S8

905 579 3971

Message received on March 1, 2007

Hi Bill

I talk to everyone I know about this issue and so does my 85 year old mother and we urge them to speak out. You may use my letter to help the cause and I will be out to the meeting to support you. I cannot uderstand what has gotten into our council these past few years. I honestly think it has to be senility.

Many thanks again for your hard work.

Josie Pascoe

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MANDATE OF OSHAWA SPEAKS

The basic mandate of this site is to retain ward voting for Oshawa.

Oshawa City Council has voted to return to the “city-wide" or general vote for the election of members of Oshawa City Council which will make the City of Oshawa the largest city in the "free world" to use this electoral system without the use of civic political parties which are at present prohibited by Ontario's "Municipal Elections Act."

Oshawa incumbent politicians are the biggest beneficiaries of the change yet recent changes to Ontario Municipal Law (Bill 130) prevents their “self-serving” decision from being appealed to any higher government or independent tribunal. This sets a very dangerous precedent for all other potentially undemocratic and self-serving councils in the Province to emulate.

The General Vote will produce a local government that is less accountable, less inclusive, less representative, less responsive, less diverse, and less democratic and because of these problems is not being used in any large center anywhere in the country. If it was a better system, wouldn’t it be widely used?

Under the general vote, the ballot will contain the names of upwards of 80 to 90 candidates for "city-wide" election to the various offices presenting an impossible task for informed voting. To make the "General Vote" workable, civic political parties are required to simplify voter choices and to retain political accountability.

In a democracy, political accountability is directly related to voter’s ability to defeat politicians but Oshawa's history with the general vote prior to ward voting introduced in 1985 was that out of 109 contested positions in the preceding 7 general vote councils, not one politician was defeated by the vote. All change took place through the death or resignation of members.

The General Vote cloistered all voting power in a few of the wealthier areas of Oshawa with more than half of the members residing in North Oshawa (the old ward 6) and three residing in one polling subdivision of about 100 houses at the east end of Regent Drive.The General Vote left huge areas of the city disenfranchised, unrepresented, unserviced, and forgotten on City Council.

This lack of attention to vast areas of the city led to a reputation as an “unprogressive” and “undesirable” place which depressed housing prices and caused the exodus of quality home builders. We do not want to regress to those days.

The General Vote will give politicians constituency sizes twice the size of those of our Federal and Provincial Government Representatives thus taking our local government members further from the people. Their vastly inflated constituencies will give rise to calls for increased salary, increased staff, increased office space, increased budgets, etc. all leading to escalating costs of our local government.

The biggest argument advanced by proponents of the General Vote is that it makes every city politician responsible to the whole city. Think about that. Apply it to your work. If everyone in your work was responsible for everything, who would be responsible for anything? The General Vote will produce rudderless political leadership for Oshawa.

Politicians will do what the system demands for re-election. The General Vote makes all politicians competitors for the same city-wide vote and success depends upon high name recognition. In order to promote their name, council members will backbite, bitch, bicker, and grandstand to grab the press all at the expense of real productivity. Ward Voting depends upon service to the people in the community that politicians represent. If the politician provides unsatisfactory representation, he/she will be replaced so the motivation is to serve the people. Which system would serve you best?

In acquiring the campaign funds and votes to get elected in a General Vote, politicians will become less accountable to the citizens and more accountable to political donors like developers as well as large organizations like trade unions, churches, the golf club, etc. which have the potential to influence their city-wide membership to vote for favored politicians. In addition they may be less wary about supporting the desires of their donors if the election system makes them less accountable to voters. Where does that place the needs and the problems of the ratepayer and homeowner whose neighborhood problem will produce few votes of the 25,000 or so needed for election?

Thus the general vote takes away voting power from ordinary citizens, takes away local community representation, reduces political responsibility and accountability for representing the interests of individual citizens and their specific neighborhood concerns and gives this political power to large organizations and political donors. How is that serving the interests of Oshawa residents and ratepayers?

But the real problem…while governments everywhere in the free world are interested in communicating important information to their electorate, Oshawa City Council took planned and deliberate action to keep the plebiscite issue from the people as the Mayor argued it wasn’t city hall’s responsibility to communicate any of this information to their public! Information is the basic pillar of democracy…and yet the mayor says City Council had no responsibility to inform. Amazing! Perhaps this is the first sign of the lack of accountability accruing from the general vote. Politicians can do anything to the people if they can't be defeated!

So the Mandate of this site?

1) Inform Oshawa voters of City Council’s irresponsible and undemocratic actions and work to retain ward voting for Oshawa.

2) Run a Slate of Candidates in the next municipal elections to replace Mayor Gray, Councillors Pidwerbecki, Kolodzie, Parkes, Henry, Sholdra, and Marimpietri all of whom voted for the “self-serving” General Vote.

3) The Oshawa Votes Slate of strong results oriented individuals will pledge to return ward voting to Oshawa as its first order of business as well to re-organize city committee structures to bring real change and progress to Oshawa. These "results-oriented" changes will be announced as part of the VOTES Election Platform.

4) Before the next election, work for legislative change to allow for Municipal Political Parties if Oshawa’s General Vote Bylaw is allowed to stand.

5) To be a “watchdog” over all actions of this council because of their proven irresponsibility and self-serving actions.

VOTES chooses Political Campaign Theme

FAVORITE LINKS

BLOG ARCHIVES

TOP TEN QUOTES BY CITY POLITICIANS

OSHAWA CITY COUNCIL "HALL OF SHAME"--UNDER CONSTRUCTION

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

CONTACT THE POLITICIANS

WRITE MEDIA LETTERS

MEDIA COVERAGE OF WARD/GENERAL VOTE ISSUE

OSHAWA & AREA POLITICAL BLOGS

OSHAWA CITY COUNCIL AGENDAS/MINUTES

OSHAWA INFORMATION

About the Author---Bill Longworth

Friday, March 2, 2007

The Growing Sentiment Against Change to the General Vote

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MANDATE OF OSHAWA SPEAKS