A very wise person once remarked that the most powerful word in politics is "we."
But there are some folks who think there are too many first-person-plural pronouns floating around our municipal halls these days, in the forms of slates.
We don't have any official municipal parties on the North Shore, but we do have a few slates of one kind or another.
In West Vancouver, they don't come from the candidates themselves so much as from external endorsements. OK, one external endorsement: West Vancouver Citizens for Good Government.
I have never been a fan of the WVCGG process, which to me seems at best unnecessary and at worst downright anti-democratic. If you really drill down into their stated positions, they don't make any sense at all. According to its website, they are "non-partisan and neutral on specific issues." If that's actually true, an endorsement doesn't give me any useful information about where Candidate X stands. The waterfront community cabal provides "all residents eligible to vote in West Vancouver with the opportunity to participate in the electoral process." Well, that's mighty gracious of them, but I'm pretty sure the Election Act beat them to it.
Lastly, charging fully $900 for their blessing is simply unforgivable. I don't buy that it just pays for some ads and room rentals. What it does is make sure only the well heeled tread the floor of council chambers.
A quick glance around the region finds slates aplenty. Diane Watts' Surrey First slate swept city council and took five of seven school board seats. King Corrigan's Burnaby Citizens' Association won every seat at every table. (Whatever you may think about Corrigan, I for one was very pleased to see his slate's crushing school board victory over the homophobic bigotry of "Parents' Voice.") The most high-profile result, of course, was Vision Vancouver's comfortable win over the hapless NPA. If they hadn't left some seats for COPE to try for, Vision probably would have won it all as well.
Which brings me back to North Vancouver. Anyone paying attention in the city knows full well that there is now an obvious slate system centred on Mayor Darrell Mussatto. It doesn't have a name, but you only have to glance at their campaign materials or voting records to see it.
This is a problem for newly re-elected Coun. Rod Clark, who's been blogging and emailing around his critique of the "Mussattoization of our city," whatever that means. Clark has always disliked slates, so naturally his solution is . . . to form a slate.
"Independent thinkers need to band together," he writes. I think we're getting well into oxymoronic territory here, as banding together by definition means surrendering some measure of independence.
Clark is already the most vocal member of a loose "opposition" bloc, with Couns. Guy Heywood and Pam Bookham often, but by no means always, voting with him. As I previously wrote, the tiebreaking seventh vote used to belong to Bob Fearnley, and has now fallen to Don Bell.
What puzzles me about Clark's complaint is that in neither of its last two outings has Team Mussatto won a majority on council, let alone a Corriganesque chokehold. So exactly what harm this slate has done escapes me. In a stinging reply to Clark's mass email, council watcher and former civic engagement task forcer John Jensen essentially told the veteran councillor to quit his whining and go win some votes.
Do slates undermine democracy? When they create an irresistible financial and organizational advantage, they do. But no advantage remains irresistible forever. Before Watts, many would have sworn Doug McCallum was mayor of Surrey for life, and before Larry Campbell came along the NPA nomination process was the only suspense in Vancouver's elections.
The other complaint with slates is that people end up voting for a brand rather than a person, ideally an "independent thinker." While I would love to think that everyone who cast a ballot actually combed through the North Shore News' coverage, attended debates and grilled the hopefuls on their doorstep, the truth is that many don't. Slates provide a way for casual voters to at least know the platform they're voting for, even if they don't know the people they're voting for. Not the most idealistic view of our great democracy perhaps, but hey, I'm a pragmatist. It beats picking names at random.
There is another hazard though, and that comes after the election. One of the great sources of cynicism and apathy in Canada, I believe, is the rigid party discipline we see in Parliament and the legislatures. Shortly after being sworn in, intelligent, articulate people are magically reduced to hand-raising drones, apparently incapable of saying anything that strays from the party line. A part of it is a genuine desire to help their party get into or hold onto government, but another part is the fear of being cast out into the lonely poverty of the independents. We love to cheer for plucky outsiders and out-spoken rebels, but the truth is they never get a damn thing done for their constituents and they rarely survive more than one election.
But that isn't much of a threat in North Vancouver, where name recognition and sheer door-knocking tenacity can offset a lack of campaign dollars. Stella Jo Dean was reelected over and over again on a famously shoestring budget because, well, she's Stella Jo Dean.
It remains to be seen if Clark was just thinking out loud or if he means to follow through on forming Team Independents. It will be interesting to watch though.
In closing - and I'll let go of this election soon, I promise - can someone explain to me why candidates have until March 19 to file their financial disclosure documents? Four months! In my view, come 2014, voters should be able to view at least weekly online updates on fundraising activity, not have to wait 16 weeks before they find out who paid the piper.
