So What’s Next?

Councilor Sholdra asked me, “So what are you going to do now Bill?” as a question following my presentation to Oshawa City Council on April 30, 2007...

A good question! So here is my analysis of what actions will be taken by both city council and by the VOTES group as a result of Oshawa City Council adopting a move to the general vote at their April 30th meeting.


Actions by Oshawa City Council

1) In short order Oshawa politicians will claim that their workload has increased now that they are responsible for the entire city under the general vote and will demand a significant salary increase more in line with the pay and perks of our provincial and federal politicians.

2) Because of their claims of increased workload, they will demand more staff to handle the demands of their city hall political office.

3) City Hall has been revamped in recent years to provide palatial office space for city council members. They will demand more space now to house their increased staff and office space and furnishings more in line with their new “executive” responsibilities.

4) City politicians will demand more in the way of “communication” budgets to keep citizens informed city-wide. These communications will help ward politicians raise their city-wide profiles at taxpayer expense to insure their election under the general vote system.

5) In short order, politicians will recognize that they are all competitors for the same city-wide vote and thus council will become very fractious and unproductive.

6) Oshawa municipal politicians will be quite unresponsive to community concerns devoting their efforts to the needs of large groups and organizations in the city that have the capacity to deliver bloc votes city-wide and of course developers who will fund their campaigns.

The result? Higher costs to the taxpayer...less productivity on the part of politicians...and real estate loses to all homeowners as a "do-nothing" council makes Oshawa a "less desirable place to live. As a less desireable community, developers of high level development will avoid Oshawa like the plague, thus compounding the problems. The resultant stagnated real estate market will result in market losses to all homeowners!



Actions by the VOTES Group

1) We will continue to look at the possibility of court challenges to Oshawa City Council’s irresponsible and undemocratic plebiscite strategy in minimizing information to voters before the question was asked.

2) We will immediately start recruiting candidates to represent the VOTES party in the next municipal election. Those recruited will have campaign responsibility starting immediately. Anyone who feels strongly that the ward system must be retained in Oshawa and wants to volunteer time to our efforts is encouraged to contact Bill Longworth using the email contact link on the right sidebar.

3) We shall continue to monitor the actions of council and to communicate our findings to the electorate via the site www.oshawaspeaks.ca.

4) We shall promote www.oshawaspeaks.ca through the distribution of business cards in the local plazas.

5) We shall prepare information flyers for door-to-door distribution. These communications will bring voter’s attention to the loss of their local council representation and name those members of council who have supported the change.

6) We shall work to undermine the voter support for Mayor Gray and Councilors Pidwerbecki, Kolodzie, Henry, Parkes, Sholdra, and Marimpietri for their self-serving votes to implement the general vote. Our flyer distribution will target the constituencies of these politicians.

7) We shall communicate Oshawa politicians’ irresponsible actions in an information letter to the mayor and council of all member municipalities of the Canada Association of Municipal Politicians to which Oshawa belongs with the intent of embarrassing them as anti-democratic in the plebiscite process they followed. In this letter, we shall include a link to our video “We Got Da Smarter Council Dan You Got!”

8) We shall continue to pressure council to provide funds to the VOTES group to communicate details of the electoral change to Oshawa citizens. Up to this point, the politicians named in item 6 above have shown their disrespect and despise for Oshawa voters by continually voting to refuse to provide information. These politicians must be defeated in the next election. You must incessantly continue to communicate to them your displeasure with their actions in regard to the general vote and tell them they have lost your support and that you will communicate this information to everyone you know in Oshawa.

9) We shall forward a copy of this letter to all donors to the political campaigns of those politicians who have voted to reject ward voting in favour of the self-serving general vote. Click here to see a listing of the campaign donors for the various candidates.


The result? With increasing voter disenchantment with the self-serving and expensive actions of council coupled with VOTES determined actions to return ward voting and local community representation to Oshawa ratepayers, Mayor Gray, and councillors Pidwerbecki, Kolodzie, Parkes, Henry, Sholdra, and Marimpietri who all supported taking away local political representation from Oshawa taxpayers will be turfed out of office in favour of representatives of the VOTES group who will return ward voting as the first piece of business.

You Can Fool All of the People!!

Old Abe Lincoln pronounced, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time…but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

This is an axiom that the Oshawa City Council should think about.



They may have fooled the majority of the voters who, many mistakenly, voted to return to the general vote. This is quite understandable as few people had heard of the question or considered its significant before entering the voting booth. Council in its strategy to fool the people refused to provide information about the issue to the public. Two doctors I talked to did not understand the concept of the general vote and if they didn’t understand it, I presume there were many others also who did not understand it.

I doubt that the 16,000 Oshawa voters who ended up voting for the general vote would want to lose their ward representation or would want all of the council members to reside in a few of the richer areas of Oshawa leaving most of Oshawa without representation on Council. I doubt that they would support a system that makes politicians less accountable to the people. I doubt they would want a system that guarantees incumbent’s re-election until death or retirement no matter the value of their leadership to Oshawa. I doubt that they would want a system that will produce a stale and aging council devoid of new ideas. I doubt that people would want council members unresponsive to neighbourhood concerns that might arise. I doubt that they want politicians elected based on name recognition only rather than their service to Oshawa voters. As old Abe would have observed, “You can fool some of the people some of the time,” and council did fool a significant number of the 16000 voters who voted for the change but they did not fool the 9000 who voted to retain ward voting.

Old Abe would have surmised that some of the 16000 voting to adopt the general vote would have voted that way no matter what the effects to Oshawa would have been because he said, “Some of the people can be fooled all of the time.” We have seen some of these people’s letters to the editor who insist that the plebiscite result be implemented come hell or high water no matter how the vote was achieved, no matter how much council gerrymandered the question to get the result they did, and no matter the level of devastation the general vote would cause to Oshawa’s long term health. One would have to be a fool to want Oshawa of perhaps 180,000-200,000 population when the next vote is held in 4 years to move to a system used only in the smallest municipalities of 10,000 or so.

Interestingly, these letter writers supporting a change to the general vote only spout the necessity of upholding the plebiscite result. None have given any rationale beyond that in their letters and none have presented any benefits to be achieved to Oshawa from the change. That is understandable, of course, since there are no benefits to be achieved. If there were, wouldn’t other municipalities use the general vote? The

If we do get the general vote with its impossible ballot of upwards of 70 names, I predict that Abe’s pronouncement, “You can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” will prove to be true.

Abe knew that you could not take the voters as fools…something the Oshawa Council has yet to discover. You can trick voters once but not twice. The unmanageable general vote ballot itself will easily focus voter attention on the folly being mitigated on the Oshawa people. It will be easy for the VOTES group to focus this anger on turfing out the self serving members of council.

We shall run the VOTES leader against the Mayor as this will be the only race to get any media attention and exposure. All of the VOTES Mayoralty efforts in the campaign will be focused on harnessing the public resentment toward the change and the politicians responsible. We will constantly and incessantly name names and encourage the people to hold the politicians accountable for their vote. All VOTES advertising and brochures will name “self-serving” incumbents also holding them accountable for their votes. We are confident of bringing the VOTES party to power in Oshawa with a city council dedicated to returning ward voting to Oshawa as its first order of business.

We do not need city council members who mistake the people as fools to be toyed with and want to use the electoral system for their own benefit. We will harness public sentiment to turf these self-serving politicians from office.

The election system must serve the people, not the politicians.

Our election planning and election strategy is already under way. Prepare to be amazed Oshawa!