Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(March 04) - The Olympics are over. The Guelph election campaign is underway. International Women’s Day is next Monday. There’s a connection between the three.

Women dominated the Canadian medal count. Women dominate Guelph electoral politics. Of the 15 people elected to three levels of government, 10 are women and five are men.

Anyone who wants to know what it would be like if women ran the world could come to Guelph to get a taste of it. They’d find it’s not much different from men running things.

Saying this doesn’t pop any feminist balloons. It recognizes that there is absolutely no justification for the glass ceilings that have traditionally kept women on the lower floors of most organizations. There’s nothing they can do that can’t be done.

Three of the sitting members of Guelph city council have already filed nomination papers for the coming election. A fourth says she will. A woman is challenging for a seat in Ward 1. Karen Farbridge, Vicki Beard and June Hofland have all filed. Maggie Laidlaw says she will run again. All have given us good and thoughtful governance over the years.

There’s a newcomer in the picture. Linda Murphy is running in Ward 1. She told me there isn’t any single issue pushing her into the election. She just wants more fiscal responsibility, accountability and transparency down on Carden Street.

If federal and provincial elections are sprints, municipal campaigns are marathons. Nominations open in January, close in September and we vote on Oct. 25. It is good to see some of the women get off to an early and enthusiastic start.

The four men on council will make up their minds in their own time. The one with the toughest decision is Bob Bell. He has been selected as the Green Party candidate in the next federal election.

There is no good reason why a sitting councillor can’t be a candidate provincially or federally. In fact, there is a lot of precedent for doing so. Harry Worton was our mayor when he ran provincially for the Liberals in 1955. Henry Hosking and Alf Hales were both sitting councillors when they were elected federally in 1949 and 1957, as was Rick Ferraro when he became our MPP in 1985. Carl Hamilton, Linda Lennon and Gloria Kovach all made unsuccessful attempts to jump from the horseshoe to higher office. Until recently, no one thought twice about it.

If they can do it, so can Bell. His enemy is the calendar. The chances of a spring vote recede further with every poor polling result for Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. There’s a reasonable chance of a late summer or early fall election, putting it in synch with the municipal. Bell would have trouble running two campaigns at the same time. The odds of him beating Frank Valeriote range from slim to none. It would be a shame to see him lose his council seat in the attempt.

And what about those Olympics? Two hundred and six Canadian athletes in Vancouver and Whistler. Ninety-one were women. Of the 26 medals won by Canadians, 14 were won by women, 11 by men. One gold went to the ice dancing pair. Forty-four per cent of the team won 56 per cent of the medals. It might have been more if they’d been allowed on the ski jumping slope.

The Olympics is a double-edged sword. On one side it is commercialism run amok. On another it is mesmerizing. The athletes grab our attention while the sponsors get away with our money. We need to sharpen the sporting blade while blunting the spending one.

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 7:30 PM