Want a Greater Disconnect With Your Politicians?

Every authority on Municipal Government would state that a basic and prime characteristic of Local Government is that it is the system that is closest to the people.

This level of government should be representative of the demographics of municipality in every way…ethnic, socio-economic, etc., and should be inclusive of each of these communities and reflective of the community in every sense. Ward voting provides this naturally.

The ward is small enough that the representative becomes widely known in the community, knows many of the people by name, interacts informally with them in his daily life, and is expert on the finest details of the community. He learns about the community by being in it every day. He is close to his constituents. He knows first hand the needs and aspirations of those he represents. He has first hand knowledge of the community he/she represents. He's a regular guy in the neighbourhood. He's the guy you may see walking his dog past your house every morning.

Its where he shops, walks, plays, and parties. He knows the community and its people.

Because ward residents vote for him/her as their representative, he is accountable to them. If he fails to satisfy them, he loses office. Because he is a common fixture in the community, residents have an intimate knowledge of his worth as their representative.

No one would feel that the Provincial or Federal Member of Parliament is as close as this. He spends most of his time outside of the community only dealing with it in the abstract, if he deals with it at all!

This is the what will happen to Oshawa Politicians under the general vote. They will have a constituency almost twice the size of the Federal or Provincial members and will become as remote. It wouldn't be long before we would be hearing salary demands matching the Provincial or Federal Members with arguments of constituency size. With the salary demands will also be staffing and office demands to cope with the large constituency workload. Because of the size of the constituency, he is a representative you may never see.

The Political Party System makes sense of voting in Provincial and Federal Elections because voters vote for a party platform and leader with the local candidate being of lesser importance...so unimportant I'm told, that they are responsible for only 4% of the local party vote. The candidates knowledge of the community is irrelevant to getting elected. That's why candidates can often "parachute" into the riding from afar. People vote along party lines and the candidate can be faceless.

So a big price Oshawa people will pay if we do get the general vote is a growing disconnect with our local politicians.

Under the general vote, your local council member is not likely the guy who lives around the corner but one of the many who live in a few sections of the city...expert in the needs of their local neighbourhood and not knowing yours exists.

What service will your community get if no one lives among you. What service will your community get if they all live around you. Human nature provides the answer to this!

Let's not widen the divide between city residents and the members of our local council.

Oshawa's Totalitarian Junta

The vote in the western world is synonymous with our freedoms. It dictates that ordinary people can choose their political leaders. It dictates that voters can remove politicians who no longer have the confidence of the people. It dictates that the people have control over their destiny. It dictates that politicians are the "servants of the people". It dictates that politicians not serving the public will can be removed from office by ordinary people.

In Oshawa we will lose these basic principles of freedom if the city politicians are successful in replacing ward voting with the general or "at large" vote.

Our "Right" to cast a "meaningful" vote goes to the very heart of our way of life. Revolutions have been and are currently being fought in many sections of the world to allow ordinary people to get this right that we are about to lose. A vote without the power to change the political landscape is not a vote at all...it is simply an exercise in futility.

Many dictatorial regimes, and you can name many of these as well as I, offer the people a vote...but the voting exercise is just a sham that has not one iota of influence in changing the governments or its players. There is either only one name or party on the ballot or the count is "fixed" so that the "same old" to no one's surprise always emerges victorious.

This will be the result in Oshawa if we get the general vote. The "same old" will continue to be elected until they die or retire...and further we will have a council where all of the members eventually will come from a few of the richer areas of Oshawa leaving large sections of the city disenfranchised and unrepresented.

Under the seven general vote elections leading up to Oshawa winning ward elections in 1985, 109 total council positions were contested. Not one of those 109 seats was won by any citizen residing south of King Street. Eight of Fifteen Council Members came from one ward and an additional three members came from one polling subdivision of about 100 houses at the end of Regent Drive in the then Ward Three. This was a council that was not all all representative of the people of Oshawa.

Those general vote councils did little to provide any leadership for Oshawa. No member was interested in solving neighbourhood problems worth 10 or 12 votes because this was insignificant when a total of 20,000 to 25,000 votes were required for election. Therefore there was no one you could call to work on your community problem. Promoting their name was the only thing important to politicians so that they would argue, backbite, bitch, bicker and grandstand fighting for press. They were reluctant to support good ideas of fellow council members because they were all competitors for city-wide votes and so no politician wanted to give another member any press. The result, stagnation in Oshawa. Because council members were well-known, they were always victorious and so only one member lost lost his seat at the polls when the perpetually top polling local councillor, Cy Elsey, ran Regionally and defeated perpetually lowest polling regional councillor, John McLaughlin. All other change took place through death or resignation of members.

Experience is that the general vote produces a "permanent ruling class" where the public vote doesn't count...sounds almost like a absolute totalitarian junta of despots in some third world country, doesn't it?

We are about to lose what many in the world give their life to preserve.

Don't let it happen here, Oshawa!