Election coverage wrap up

Jeff Green | Oct 14, 2010

This edition marks the end of our municipal election cam-paign coverage, with the publication of candidate profiles for South Frontenac, Addington Highlands, South Sherbrooke Ward of Tay Valley Township, and Ward 6 (Elphin-McDonalds Corners) of Lanark Highlands on pages 13-17.

These profiles, in addition to the ones for Central Frontenac that we published last week, and North Frontenac the week before, are all posted at Frontenacnews.ca.There were times when the entire exercise felt like a Si-syphean make work project – 61 candidate profiles in addi-tion to 13 all-candidates’ meetings in three weeks is a large chunk of work.

The idea behind doing all this was to try to give voters who are interested in the election two opportunities to eval-uate the candidates - by seeing them in person and having opportunities to ask them questions, and also by reading short pieces about their backgrounds, their motivations for seeking office, and their perspectives on the local councils and townships.

I wrote all the profiles. They were based on telephone interviews with the candidates and in some cases additional written material supplied by the candidates.

Each candidate was then sent their profile, and given the opportunity to make changes.

Under normal circumstances, the subject of an article may receive a proof of the article to ensure they have been quoted correctly, but that is about all.

In the case of the profiles, however, we allowed the can-didates a full veto over content. This is because the profiles are intended to give the candidates a chance to put their best foot forward, and we did not question either their opinions or assertions.

Evaluating those assertions and opinions is left to the pro-spective voters.

In the same way, I do not ask any questions at the all-can-didates’ meetings, nor do any other members of our staff. All I do is organize and run the meetings, and in some cases act as a quasi-referee.

I also never endorse candidates for municipal office, and I can honestly say that after three weeks of doing this work I would have trouble picking one candidate over another even if I wanted to.

I will make a few observations, however.

First off, every single one of the 61 candidates I interviewed is a serious candidate. Some of them have better chances of winning than others, and some of them are probably out of touch with the issues, but each one of them has a sincere reasoning for running and would do their best if elected. They have also been uniformly gracious both over the phone and at the meetings that have been held thus far.

There may be some hard feelings between candidates, but none of that has spilled over to myself or any one else on our staff.

I have had a few run-ins with members of the public at the meetings, but that’s another story.

While there are certainly some problems with the format of these meetings, and they do get bogged down when there are 8 or 10 candidates answering each question, they do nev-ertheless offer a good opportunity to compare the candidates and they can help undecided voters make an informed vote.

Of the nine meetings that have been held so far, all but one of them drew a pretty large crowd and there have been several that have filled the halls where they were held.

Given the scant permanent resident population in some of the districts where the meetings were held, drawing over 100 people to an election meeting is evidence of a rather engaged public.

We would like to thank the candidates and the public for their co-operation, and remind everyone that if they are hav-ing any trouble voting they should call their township office.

Although the Mail-in ballots (Central and North Frontenac) say they should be mailed by October 15, if it is a local mail-ing they can be sent in as late as the Friday before Election Day (October 22) and they will still arrive I time to be count-ed. Alternatively, they can be dropped off at the township office on election day (October 25).