Voters get a say (of sorts) on Amalgamation
Jack Knox, Columnist
Victoria Times Colonist
November 14, 2014
Jack Knox, Columnist
Victoria Times Colonist
November 14, 2014
This has been one of the weirder stretches of John Vickers’s life.
His role as Victoria’s Mr. Festival — he runs the pumpkin, buskers, chalk art and kite events — was already overlapping with his high-profile amalgamation campaigning when his brother Kevin suddenly burst into prominence as the man who shot Ottawa gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. John Vickers found himself spending a lot of time in the spotlight, for a lot of different reasons.
“I keep using the word ‘surreal’ because I can’t think of anything better,” he says. “I felt like I was colliding with myself.”
The pin-balling between worlds peaks Saturday with two annual general meetings (buskers and chalk art societies) and the civic elections, when most people in Greater Victoria will finally get to vote on some sort of amalgamation question.
You have to say “some sort” because our 13 municipal councils couldn’t bring themselves to pose the single, common, clear question that Vickers and the others behind Amalgamation Yes desired, which boiled down to whether voters want the provincial government to fund an independent study of the pros and cons of merging municipalities.
Instead, only eight of the 13 will have a question on the ballot, ranging from the head-scratching “Do you support council initiating a community-based review of the governance structure and policies within Saanich and our partnerships within the region?” to the cart-before-the-horse “Are you in favour of the District of Oak Bay being amalgamated into a larger regional municipality?” (That last one is like skipping “Do you want to go on a date?” and going straight to “Will you marry me?” — a proposal designed for rejection.)
This is the challenge for Amalgamation Yes. The gatekeepers to the ballot box, the ones who craft the questions, or who decide if there will be a question at all, are those politicians whose municipalities could eventually be voted out of existence were their citizens allowed to make the choice. And those politicians tend to oppose amalgamation — not out of self-interest, but out of a genuine belief in their own municipalities as distinct communities; if you sit on View Royal council, it’s because you believe in View Royal.
With that as the background, Vickers is happy that most people in Greater Victoria will get the chance to answer some sort of question at all. “Eighty-six per cent of area residents have the opportunity to begin a path toward a new dynamic region with less government this Saturday by voting ‘yes’ for a provincially funded study on amalgamation,” he says.
Note the distinction: A vote on a study to see whether reducing the number of municipalities from 13 to one, or two, or three, or four, makes sense. A vote on actual amalgamation wouldn’t come until the next civic elections in 2018.
Some figure they already have all the information they need. At last week’s all-candidates meeting in Sooke, incumbent councillor Rick Kasper, a former New Democrat MLA, argued that after fighting to incorporate Sooke to get it out of the clutches of the far-off CRD, he wasn’t interested in surrendering local control to a “monolithic” city of 360,000. Fair enough.
It’s also fair to point out that merging systems — marrying union and non-union staff, distributing debt, even deciding how many backyard chickens you can keep — would be easier said than done.
But it’s also fair to note that in place of a regional transportation plan, we have 13 individual road maps. Oak Bay’s Peter Lee killings and the Lower Mainland’s Robert Pickton murders are both used as evidence of the pitfalls of disjointed policing. Does it make sense that when your house is on fire the response comes not from the closest fire hall, but the one in your municipality? Or that five municipalities don’t contribute to regional arts funding? Or that with so many inward-looking fiefdoms, no one speaks for Greater Victoria as a whole? Or that our inability to agree on sewage treatment could cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and provincial funding? (Esquimalt is either the best argument for amalgamation, or against, depending on your perspective.)
But that’s getting ahead of the game. This isn’t about declaring amalgamation to be right or wrong, but about gathering enough information to make a reasoned decision, Vickers says. “Our intent is to move this beyond the land of verbal innuendo.”
His role as Victoria’s Mr. Festival — he runs the pumpkin, buskers, chalk art and kite events — was already overlapping with his high-profile amalgamation campaigning when his brother Kevin suddenly burst into prominence as the man who shot Ottawa gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. John Vickers found himself spending a lot of time in the spotlight, for a lot of different reasons.
“I keep using the word ‘surreal’ because I can’t think of anything better,” he says. “I felt like I was colliding with myself.”
The pin-balling between worlds peaks Saturday with two annual general meetings (buskers and chalk art societies) and the civic elections, when most people in Greater Victoria will finally get to vote on some sort of amalgamation question.
You have to say “some sort” because our 13 municipal councils couldn’t bring themselves to pose the single, common, clear question that Vickers and the others behind Amalgamation Yes desired, which boiled down to whether voters want the provincial government to fund an independent study of the pros and cons of merging municipalities.
Instead, only eight of the 13 will have a question on the ballot, ranging from the head-scratching “Do you support council initiating a community-based review of the governance structure and policies within Saanich and our partnerships within the region?” to the cart-before-the-horse “Are you in favour of the District of Oak Bay being amalgamated into a larger regional municipality?” (That last one is like skipping “Do you want to go on a date?” and going straight to “Will you marry me?” — a proposal designed for rejection.)
This is the challenge for Amalgamation Yes. The gatekeepers to the ballot box, the ones who craft the questions, or who decide if there will be a question at all, are those politicians whose municipalities could eventually be voted out of existence were their citizens allowed to make the choice. And those politicians tend to oppose amalgamation — not out of self-interest, but out of a genuine belief in their own municipalities as distinct communities; if you sit on View Royal council, it’s because you believe in View Royal.
With that as the background, Vickers is happy that most people in Greater Victoria will get the chance to answer some sort of question at all. “Eighty-six per cent of area residents have the opportunity to begin a path toward a new dynamic region with less government this Saturday by voting ‘yes’ for a provincially funded study on amalgamation,” he says.
Note the distinction: A vote on a study to see whether reducing the number of municipalities from 13 to one, or two, or three, or four, makes sense. A vote on actual amalgamation wouldn’t come until the next civic elections in 2018.
Some figure they already have all the information they need. At last week’s all-candidates meeting in Sooke, incumbent councillor Rick Kasper, a former New Democrat MLA, argued that after fighting to incorporate Sooke to get it out of the clutches of the far-off CRD, he wasn’t interested in surrendering local control to a “monolithic” city of 360,000. Fair enough.
It’s also fair to point out that merging systems — marrying union and non-union staff, distributing debt, even deciding how many backyard chickens you can keep — would be easier said than done.
But it’s also fair to note that in place of a regional transportation plan, we have 13 individual road maps. Oak Bay’s Peter Lee killings and the Lower Mainland’s Robert Pickton murders are both used as evidence of the pitfalls of disjointed policing. Does it make sense that when your house is on fire the response comes not from the closest fire hall, but the one in your municipality? Or that five municipalities don’t contribute to regional arts funding? Or that with so many inward-looking fiefdoms, no one speaks for Greater Victoria as a whole? Or that our inability to agree on sewage treatment could cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and provincial funding? (Esquimalt is either the best argument for amalgamation, or against, depending on your perspective.)
But that’s getting ahead of the game. This isn’t about declaring amalgamation to be right or wrong, but about gathering enough information to make a reasoned decision, Vickers says. “Our intent is to move this beyond the land of verbal innuendo.”