Who to believe?

Hi, neighbours! If you were among the crowd at the standing-room-only all candidates meeting on Tuesday night, you will have noticed something:

Every candidate has figured out that the way to get elected in North Saanich is to talk a big game about agriculture and "preserving rural character".

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, they say. We're blushing over here.

But behind the ag-washing, we suspect some of these folks are comfortable with a whole lot more housing than they were letting on. So, who to believe?

Later today, we'll fire off a questionnaire to council candidates on the topics of housing and agriculture. As soon as we can, we'll post them for you all to read, along with a few thoughts on who we think is most likely to save North Saanich.

But what if we want to vote in the advance polls?

If you are voting in the advance polls today, we have a few early suggestions. But first, a reminder of what we're all about here at SNS:

The only thing we care about is preserving the rural-agricultural nature of this beautiful place.

Primarily, we do this by opposing density, because densification spells the end of rural communities.

Introducing pockets of density into a rural municipality does more than change the character of those particular neighbourhoods. Why, you ask? Because with density comes urban-minded voters, craving urban amenities and wondering where all the streetlights and sidewalks and Walmarts are in this silly, backwards place. And guess what? There are a whole lot more votes in five acres of four-plexes than there are on five acres of farmland. As a result, even relatively contained areas of urban density can easily influence land use decisions throughout an entire municipality. And all it takes is one election.

So that's our jam: yes to open spaces, no to density.

That's it. That's the whole shtick.

Anything else is frosting on the cake. Flawless governance? Clear communications? Sunny disposition? Organ donor? These are all nice attributes in a councillor. But all we really care about is how they vote on land use.

And in that respect, there are a few known quantities in this election. Three incumbents have demonstrated, without fail, that they will consistently vote in favour of the preservation of the North Saanich we know and love. They are:

Kristine Marshall

Irene McConkey

Sanjiv Shrivastava

Now, there's been a whole lot of bickering at the hall over the course of the past couple of years. Did these folks play a part in it? Who knows! 99% of the nonsense happened at in camera meetings. But two observations are telling:

1) these councillors tend to vote the same way on many issues, and

2) in the past two years, their votes have most often been the minority.

In other words, we'd wager that these three councillors probably haven't been getting their way in the innumerable closed meetings council has been having lately. Ya know, like the one where a majority voted to suspended the committees. And the one where they decided to sack the guy who wrote the made-in-North-Saanich OCP. And the subsequent one where they decided to publicize, in the middle of a campaign period, selective bits and pieces of things that have happened in closed meetings, which just happen to make certain candidates look bad. (We've got pretty strong stomachs when it comes to politics, but that was pretty icky.)

We have no idea whether Marshall, McConkey and Shrivastava are serene and saint-like behind closed doors, though they certainly seem perfectly reasonable in public. We do know, however, that they have reliably voted to save North Saanich. And when the rubber hits the road, that's all that counts.

But they're on a SLATE!!!

Indeed. All three are endorsed by an electoral organization called "North Saanich Strong". World-weary skeptics that we are, we undertook some serious recon with respect to this organization, including who's involved and what the plan is after the election.

What we've concluded is that, when it comes to the preservation of North Saanich, they're on the exact same wavelength as we are. They are also similar to us in that, after the election, they plan to piss off and let the councillors get on with their jobs with zero interference. Unlike us, they had the energy to get their act together and form an electoral organization. Truly, we are impressed and relieved that someone stepped up to do this.

What about the rest of the slate?

There are two other candidates on the North Saanich Strong slate - Greg Warner for council, and Felice Mazzoni for mayor.

We don't have a public record to go by in assessing Warner, so we tracked him down before we wrote this post for a conversation (okay, interrogation). He is a guy who has logged a lot of hours on a tractor. He grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan, and a knack for the business side of the farm led him to a career in accounting. (And apparenty he did okay while he was an accountant - he recently donated a whopping $750K to make the Harvest Hub project a reality at Sandown....yeah, we had to read that twice, too.) He's come full circle at this point, and is now working on converting the 10 acre farm previously owned by beloved North Saanich resident and historian, Diana Chown, from primarily forage to food production. He's so enthusiastic about promoting agriculture that even our eyes were glazing over - this is a good thing. And how does Warner feel about the six storey structures demanded by the Province? "Absolutely not". By the end of the discussion, we were sold.

Then there's the mayor's seat.

There are three people running: incumbent mayor Peter Jones, incumbent councillor Jack McClintock, and Felice Mazzoni.

Readers may recall that we endorsed Peter Jones the last time around. By and large, he's voted the right way on land use. Mayors don't need to be all rainbows and lollipops (see, for instance, Alice Finnall, who was decidedly un-lollipoppy, but did a hell of a job protecting North Saanich for many years). However, they do need to lead in a manner that allows for civil relations between councillors, as well as between council and staff. They must also be able to provide clear, forthright and consistent answers to resident questions. On both points, Jones flopped big time.

That leaves us with McClintock and Mazzoni, and that's a tough one.

Mazzoni is the former Director of Planning. We were impressed with the work he did with the District. Like, really impressed. He coordinated extensive resident engagement before turning around an OCP that did not disgruntle the great majority of our notoriously hard-to-please population. In so doing, he stood up to some seriously powerful people on the local, regional and provincial level. Ultimately, it seems to have cost him his job.

We didn't know Mazzoni very well; he did a great job on the OCP, so we never had to give him any hell. But when we heard he was running, our eyebrows about hit our hairlines. We couldn't tell if this guy was doing this as a serious candidate, or just to stick it to his former employer. Because we are cantankerous cynics, we suspected the latter.

But then we talked to him. Repeatedly. We asked a lot of fairly pointy questions (such as "so, you're just trying to stick it to your former employer, right?") But damn it, we were impressed. Over the course of resident engagement, it was clear to us that he had waded very deep into the character of North Saanich and you guys, I think he has a crush on us. He is visibly passionate about protecting agricultural spaces and curbing density. He has very thoughtful ideas about ways to help residents use their properties in different ways depending on their stage of life, while avoiding subdivision and densification. He moved out here from James Bay this past summer. (You know they've got it bad when they move.)

He's worked within municipal government for 30 years. He gets it. He understands the appropriate interplay between council and staff (having been on the receiving end for decades) and he understands the relationships between municipalities and other levels of government. After his time at North Saanich, he probably has a reputation with the current provincial government as a bit of a pain in the ass. We count that as a mark in his favour.

Then there's McClintock. We have a lot of time for Jack. He can be brutally blunt, but he knows this district inside and out. He has also kept sight of the fact that he is on council not to beak off about his own personal opinions, but to represent residents....sounds pretty basic, but it's a surprisingly rare trait. We supported him for council the last time around and, if he were running for council this time, we'd probably do it again.

But he's always had a higher tolerance for density than we do. And, during this term, we've been disappointed on a few other fronts.

He isn't big on investing in agricultural infrastructure, as he's indicated through his position on both the Sandown farm and the Harvest Hub. But how can we promote agriculture in one of the priciest parts of the planet without incentivizing it somehow?

There's also the aforementioned icky release of selective in camera information during this campaign period. We'd like to think that the two mayoral candidates would have recused themselves from a decision to release HR information about a guy who's running for the same job.... but we can't mathmatically see how it could have happened without Jones and McClintock voting. His tendency to steer clear of muck-slinging is one of the reasons we respect Jack, and it would be a real shame if we're right on this. (Sadly, we think we are.)

Most alarmingly to us, on Tuesday night McClintock seemed to suggest that, if the Province tries to unilaterally amend our OCP, taking them to court will simply be too expensive. (You know what else is expensive? The tax burden of shouldering the infrastructure demands of thousands of new housing units.) This will probably be a moot point - it's not looking like Big Dave's Building Bonanza will continue past October 24 - but we were dismayed by Jack's apparent acceptance that we'd just have to roll over and let these yahoos run roughshod over our peaceful little district on the basis of a constitutionally-questionable bit of provincial legislation.

So who is better positioned to lead a council that will protect North Saanich? On the balance, at this point in the never-ending battle to Save North Saanich, we think the answer is Mazzoni.

To summarize, we think the following people would be great for the job:

For Council:

Marshall

McConkey

Shrivastava

Warner

For Mayor:

Mazzoni

We'll be back soon with the questionnaire results and some thoughts on other two council seats. Are we having fun yet???