Some notes from Saturday’s local elections:
• For the first time ever, women predominate on most of the capital region’s municipal councils — seven of the 13 — including all of those in the Greater Victoria core.
Females form the majority on councils in Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt and Oak Bay. Ditto for Sooke, Metchosin and Highlands.
Overall, women — including incumbent mayors Lisa Helps of Victoria, Barb Desjardins of Esquimalt and Maja Tait of Sooke — were elected to fill 40 of the region’s 91 council spots.
That compares with 41 in 2014, when voters inched nearer to closing the gender gap in local politics.
Judy Brownoff, who was first elected to Saanich council in 1993, says she has urged more women to run, but many are put off by the attendant nastiness. (Note the number of Lower Mainland politicians who bowed out this year rather than put up with vicious attacks on social media.) “Women just want to get things done,” Brownoff says.
• A series of earthquakes were recorded off the west coast of Vancouver Island on Sunday. No truth to the rumour that they were aftershocks to what happened in Port Alberni, where 30-year-old Sharie Minions toppled incumbent mayor Mike Ruttan, who finished third in a field of six.
Minions isn’t the youngest mayor ever elected in B.C. (Burns Lake’s Luke Strimbold, who is facing 29 sex-related charges, was 21 when he won in 2011) but she appears to be the youngest on Vancouver Island.
A Wikipedia roster of Canada’s youngest-ever mayors lists just 25 under age 35. Among them is Ryan Windsor, who was 34 when elected to lead Central Saanich in 2014.
Before Saturday’s election, Windsor joked with Minions about her taking his Island title. But he also says a mayor’s age isn’t that big a deal. “At the end of the day, it’s about the competence of the person to do the job.”
Minions might be the youngest mayor, but she’s not the only 30-something Minions in Vancouver Island politics. Sister-in-law Nicole Minions, 34, says it was Sharie who inspired her to run in Comox, where Nicole was among a trio of young women elected.
• Minions and Windsor are pull-your-pants-around-your-armpits-and-complain-about-kids creaky in comparison to a pair of whippersnappers elected in Saanich. Zac de Vries is 23. Ned Taylor is 19 — or eight months younger than Vancouver Canucks prize rookie Elias Pettersson.
Finally, a generation of councillors who know how to use their smartphones.
• At the other end of the scale, the Trumpians who think you can never have enough aging white guys in government will be thrilled to hear that 62-year-old Joe Keithley — a.k.a. Joey Shithead of the seminal Vancouver punk band D.O.A. — was elected to Burnaby city council under the Green banner.
• B.C.’s first experience with four-year terms for local elected officials wasn’t a raging success.
The criticism all along was that the extended terms might be great for professional politicians, but posed a dauntingly long commitment for people juggling council duties with day jobs.
Sure enough, some smaller communities struggled to find enough candidates this year. In the capital region, all the councillors in Highlands and North Saanich got in by acclamation, while Langford, pop. 35,000, had just seven candidates for six seats. Four mayors — Windsor, View Royal’s David Screech, Highlands’ Ken Williams and Metchosin’s John Ranns — ran unopposed.
By contrast, when voters did get a choice, they often chose someone new. Of the eight local mayors who faced opponents, four lost: Saanich’s Richard Atwell, Oak Bay’s Nils Jensen, Colwood’s Carol Hamilton and Sidney’s Steve Price. In local politics, that’s a lot, perhaps reflecting a pent-up appetite for change. Certainly, there was a throw-the-bums-out quality to the results in Nanaimo and Vancouver.
• In Nanaimo, where city hall meetings sometimes resemble a mash-up of Jersey Shore and House of Cards, mayor-elect Leonard Krog promises the incoming council won’t embarrass the city’s residents. He must feel like the coach hired to take over a last-place NHL team, knowing the only direction the team can go is up.
• Coun. Al Siebring, who nipped incumbent mayor John Lefebure by 10 votes in North Cowichan, laughed when the Times Colonist’s Carla Wilson called him “Landslide Al” Sunday.
That evokes the story of the original holder of that name, northern B.C. MLA Landslide Al Passeral, who won a one-vote victory in 1975 after the incumbent and the incumbent’s wife neglected to vote.
No, Lefebure is not asking for a recount, as the electronic-voting machines leave no room for error.
