The funniest candidate in British Columbia’s municipal elections, arguably in all of Canada, won. In Kelowna, 33-year-old Brady Rogers campaigned on lawn signs reading “I barely want to do this,” “Just trying to pay my rent” and “How hard could it be?” With more than 12,600 votes, he finished fourth in a field of 37 candidates. Humour wasn’t his only platform; beneath the jokes lay a serious platform on housing, transit, taxation, and homelessness. Thankfully, the voters were paying attention.
It makes one wonder: what does it say about a city’s politics when a candidate can win on a promise of reluctance? What are voters starving for when candour about not wanting the job reads as the most honest campaign on offer?
More importantly, is this a question worth asking now, when the lawn signs have come down and a city’s ‘all-politics for six months stance’ is starting to return to whatever it does in a non-election season? I’d say yes. Municipal politics runs on an undeservedly short memory: all attention during the campaign, near silence after it, until a wheel comes off somewhere, loudly and visibly.
A whole breadth of a continent away from Kelowna, in New York, last November, 2.2 million New Yorkers voted, 41.6 percent of registered voters and a fifty-year high; youth turnout roughly tripled. Four years earlier, in what was considered a foregone race, turnout was a mere 23.3 percent, lower than Kamloops’s sleepy 29 percent. For context, Kamloops’ registered voter population is approximately 85,000, compared with New York’s 5,318,000.
Ten months in, New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a record worth examining closely. Much of what he has accomplished had been declared near impossible for decades. The rent freeze: through a rent guidelines board he moved to appoint. Despite loud and standing objections that the mayor does not set this policy, roughly one million rent-stabilised apartments had their rents frozen. Some of the traditional “grind” files show positive momentum: twice the bus lanes, murders down 20 per cent. What he could not deliver — free buses and city-run grocery stores — he continues to name in public and negotiate with the State for.
None of this is New York exceptionalism; the pattern is everywhere. When decision makers are motivated, cities find solutions no political strategist could have proposed on the campaign trail. In Bogotá, Colombia, facing a water shortage, Mayor Antanas Mockus showed residents how to conserve on television by showering with the tap off; water use fell 40 per cent over his tenure. Facing dangerous driving, he sent mimes to shame offenders at intersections. Reykjavík, Iceland, mimics our Kelowna case more directly: in 2010, amid their own crisis, voters elected a comedian, Jón Gnarr, who served a full term, left office more popular than his vote share, and left behind a Better Reykjavík, where residents propose and vote on city-funded projects. I am not suggesting these cities’ stories were all glitter and sprinkles; plenty must have gone wrong too. But there is enough promise to show the ones trying the honest-candidate experiment. It is survivable.
Kamloops is not New York. It is not Reykjavík or Bogotá either. That is precisely the point. These cities range from about 140,000 to eight million people. And each one operates within constraints that will sound familiar in Kamloops: the governments above them hold the money and the mandates. It takes an incredible amount of lobbying to get them even to look our way. But this conversation is more about what a council decides to build within its locus of control. Each of the cities mentioned above treated a limited mandate as a floor to build on, and its residents are better off for it. The same floor is available to any council willing to stand on it. If a mayor in Bogotá could move water-wastage numbers with a quick TV infomercial, then the “province decides” comment eventually starts to lose its sheen.
On October 17, Kamloops’ voter turnout rose to roughly 35.5 per cent; advance voting jumped by more than half. Still not ideal, but it is a testament to something real. Five of eight seats went to first-timers, led by first-timer Rob Bertrand, who topped the poll. A mere 71 votes decided the last seat on the horseshoe. That’s how much each vote matters. The city’s grievances had been specific and pointed: policing and fire consuming roughly half the property tax bill; roads and sidewalks; the bridge; downtown safety; homelessness. Small wonder, then, that residents told reporters the city had become an embarrassment; the numbers back them up. Statistics Canada’s most recent release ranks Kamloops second among the country’s metropolitan areas for crime severity, behind only Chilliwack.
The newcomers’ platforms matched the grievances. Kamloops voted for the premise without naming it: work within the constraints every council faces, educate the electorate about where the constraints lie, and show real change, no matter how small, within those frameworks.
One last element of this process remains unnamed. This is where I must remind the readers that the best time to discuss politics is right after the elections. And then the next day, and the next, and then every day after that, until the next election.
The six-month runway to the elections is the easy part: the forums, the panels, the signs, the promises. They may also be the least effective, given the sheer volume of the noise. The three years after a new team has been inducted are when the real work happens. And that’s where the electorates often lag. That silence implicates all of us, the voters who go home, the readers who stop reading, the columnists who find other things to write about. While some of that is to be expected, a conversation channel that goes dark for the next three years will be rusty and spotty when we need it in the next election cycle. An electorate that treats the race as consequential should keep an eye on it past the election cycle, and a council should publish its progress and obstacles in a way that enables the public to measure and weigh in.
Two humble suggestions to keep that process well-oiled. First: a public work plan within the new council’s first hundred days, with named owners and dates, updated at regular intervals, so the promises from the candidate forums have somewhere to live and breathe. Second: compile and publish every promise made on the campaign trail, and revisit it in public dialogue at set intervals throughout the four-year term, so voters can see what is moving, what is stuck, and why. Both are the kind of thing a council that campaigned on discipline should be proud to publish.
The rest is our job: the electorate’s. To stay tuned, and not just line up to vote in the next four years.