Originally published by the Chronicle Herald:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1079160.htmlBy MARILLA STEPHENSONTuesday, September 16, 2008
LANDSLIDE PETE looks like he’s ready to do it again.
Halifax’s Mayor Kelly seems poised to win a third term in the Oct. 18 municipal election, with just over a month to go until voting day.
This has more to do with the lack of a strong contender to unseat Kelly, than with raving satisfaction with his performance as mayor.
A Corporate Research Associates poll released last week puts Kelly at 70 per cent of support among decided respondents, while Coun. Sheila Fougere, his only credible challenger, is well behind at 30 per cent. Of the 401 voters canvassed, 35 per cent were undecided.
David Boyd, who last week called for a paintball competition among the candidates, is also running for mayor.
The poll has a relatively large margin of error of 4.9 percentage points. Still, there seems to be little momentum moving toward Fougere, who has been strangely quiet over the past few months.
Since her campaign launch in early May, there have been very few announcements or events of any kind staged by her team. The list on her website of events attended over the past few months is thin, and hardly a credible substitute for concrete policy proposals, statements of future plans or even attacks on her competition — that would be Kelly.
While it’s true that summer is not a great time for campaigning, the councillor from peninsular Halifax knew she had her work cut out for her to build support across the region. Fougere needed to shake things up and make a lot of noise in order to give Kelly a run for his money.
If she’s planning to start now, she’s too late. Ken Ozmon, a highly credible candidate who ran in the 2000 mayoral election, made a similar mistake. He was well known in the old city, but not so well beyond.
When Fougere announced last October that she would be running, I credited her for not repeating Ozmon’s mistake. But since her launch in May, her visibility has been much too low. Beating an incumbent takes more than waving in a parade.
Fougere has some great ideas, like a smaller council. But does anybody know about them?
This week I received an e-mail notice of events planned for Fougere this week. Two days of it include a Federation of Canadian Municipalities meeting in Ottawa. The meeting is for the Green Municipal Fund council, which is a great initiative. But if I were Fougere, I would not be bringing attention to out-of-town trips at this point in the campaign. There aren’t too many votes to be had in Ottawa.
Meanwhile, Kelly’s political comfort level has been going up. His campaign slogan is Proven Leadership and Vision, which has prompted more than a few snickers among the downtown business crowd that would love to see him gone.
Give Kelly credit for one thing, though — caution. At his launch last week, he had the political savvy to say he would not back the Bedford fast ferry — his pet project — if it were not affordable.
Don’t be fooled; he’s a stubborn as a bulldog about getting his own way. But in the face of stiff questions over the past few weeks about the affordability of the project for commuters, Kelly knew enough to back off, at least for now.
The mayor has been busy taking credit for various council decisions, including balanced budgets (here’s a little secret: they’re required by law to be balanced; municipalities aren’t allowed to run deficits), the harbour cleanup (he fought to stall the project for months on end) and progress on public safety (even though his own task force was painfully slow to come up with recommendations).
There is little doubt, though, that Kelly has failed at one very important priority: uniting the regional council through leadership and reducing divisions among the communities that make up the Halifax region. It is hard to conclude that taxpayers are getting value for their money from council when one watches the painfully low level of debate around the table down at city hall.
A true leader would find ways to bring the people around that table together to better serve the people they represent, while moving the city ahead. Instead, this council has been mired in minutia, while larger issues stew on bureaucratic back-burners.
Still, it seems that Kelly will be around for a while yet. That’s what happens when you keep your head down, never stick your neck out and never let people know what you believe in. But don’t call it vision, and don’t call it leadership.