We had a by-election for council in a Barrie ward the other day. Admittedly it was the middle of winter but you would think that more people would have voted. Out of almost 10,000 potential voters, only 17.5 per cent bothered to vote. It makes you wonder what the heck the city would have done if nobody bothered to vote?
It would not have happened though. Since one of the 12 candidates lived in the ward he would have won by default. He was the only one who could vote for himself.
Babel-on-the-Bay made no prediction on this race. It had to be the candidate with the best ground game. And nobody runs a great ground game in the middle of a Barrie winter. It is like when you put up your signs and the next day there is another dump of 30 centimetres of snow.
But we had an idea about the guy who won. He watched closely when we were running the mayor’s ground game the first time the mayor won. He was a sitting councillor at the time and lost his seat then because he thought he was a shoo-in. We hear now that he had the best ground game of any of the 12 candidates in this by-election. And he admitted what a tough job it was.
Yet he had the worst signs. They were smaller than the rest, had poor visibility and were badly located. The guy with the best signs—that were not obviously Conservative—even had his picture on them. They were impressive. He finished the race out of the money, back with the field.
Second place went to a local sports broadcaster. The guy does a great job on the Barrie Colts hockey games but obviously not enough voters in the ward have cable or are interested in Barrie’s Colts. He should not feel badly, if the ward people do not have cable, they also would not be able to watch the Barrie Council meetings.
Third and fourth place in the by-election went to a Conservative wannabe and a Liberal who has contested a federal nomination in the area.
Also finishing out of the money was one of Patrick Brown’s favourite real estate agents and a Liberal who just completed an appointment on the police services board.
Nobody asked this apparatchik for advice. We cut our political teeth on the frozen ground of municipal winter elections. No advice was asked; none was given
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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