Today I’m publishing conversations with Andrew Stokley, Josh Coutts-Smith and Honie Chumko, three candidates running for Sarnia City Council.
I chose to interview them because none has served on council before. They don’t have the same name recognition as the incumbents or some of the real estate agents in the race. I think each represents a part of Sarnia that deserves to be taken seriously, and I wanted to give people more of a chance to hear from them.
Familiarity carries a lot of weight in a municipal election. We recognize a name from a lawn sign, a business, or years of seeing someone in the news. That familiarity can get someone elected before we’ve spent much time considering what they would bring to the table. A city has more experience and knowledge in it than the people who are already most visible.
I’m running for council too. These interviews are a chance to get to know people I may end up serving alongside, and to start building relationships before an election tells us who will be in the room.
Sarnia has nine members of council. Each arrives with their own priorities and their own understanding of what the city needs. A good idea still needs people willing to consider it, improve it and support it. Knowing something about the people around that table helps. So does being able to disagree with them and keep talking.
Strong-mayor powers have given the mayor additional authority over budgets, staffing and certain bylaws. That concentration of power makes a council capable of working together especially important. Councillors need relationships with one another if they are going to exercise their own authority effectively and hold the mayor accountable.
Bill Dennis is running one of the most antagonistic mayoral campaigns I’ve seen in Sarnia. At the September 29 Rotary debate, he called the city’s volunteer Climate Action group “despicable” and said he “couldn’t care less” what Aamjiwnaang thought about a new pipeline. These are people and neighbours a mayor will have to work with. The election doesn’t make them disappear.
There’s an audience for that kind of antagonism. Anger gets shared, and every response creates another opportunity to keep the argument going. Council can end up spending its attention on the latest insult while the decisions that affect people’s lives receive much less of it.
Someone waiting for housing needs a decision about housing. People trying to keep a business open need a city that can respond to the problems in front of them. A resident trying to understand where their tax money goes deserves an answer that gets beyond whichever personalities are fighting that week.
In an earlier column, I wrote about the polite management of Sarnia’s decline. Cooperation has to get us somewhere better than that. A pleasant meeting is worth very little if the people around the table keep avoiding the decisions that would make the city more livable.
Those decisions will involve disagreement. Housing, police spending and public space all raise questions about who gets what, who pays, and whose needs matter. Working together means being able to stay with those questions long enough to make a decision, explain it and follow through. Sometimes it means finding agreement with someone who voted against you at the last meeting.
Andrew, Josh and Honie deserve to be heard on their own terms. These conversations give them some room to explain how they see Sarnia and give residents more to consider than a familiar name on a ballot.
Whoever gets elected will be working together for the next four years. Getting to know one another can begin now.
