Our Ottawa hopes to fill a handful of seats on city council in the October elections.
Our Ottawa, the political party that isn’t, wants to change city council for the better.
While relatively little is known about this group and the specifics of its organization, other Canadian municipalities have experienced partisan politics, some for the better, some for the worse. Quebec and British Columbia have political parties at the municipal level.
Henry Aubin, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, says political parties work at the provincial and federal levels because parties have different points of view. At the municipal level, major parties hardly diverge in their opinions. Aubin says this makes membership in Montreal’s two main parties, Union Montreal and Vision Montreal, practically interchangeable.
Karim Boulos, a former Montreal city councillor, agrees. “At a municipal level, it doesn’t make sense because the war in Afghanistan is one issue, garbage is another. You can’t talk about ideology when it comes to garbage.”
Municipal hegemony also makes it difficult for smaller parties and independent candidates to get elected to city council. This has been a problem for left-wing parties trying to gain power in Montreal.
“The leftist party has only had power for eight years in the last century. Then it’s tweedledee and tweedledum,” Aubin says, referring to the handing off of power between Montreal’s two major parties.
An 11-member executive committee, handpicked by the mayor, makes decisions on behalf of the ruling party in Montreal. “They’ll decide how to deal with everything from a juicy contract to a zoning change,” Aubin says. He adds that city council is centralized because a few people dictate the decisions of the party in power.
Municipal systems such as Ottawa’s, where there are no political parties, may be better suited to making meaningful decisions on behalf of citizens, Aubin says.
This is because councillors must convince each other that certain decisions are better than others, and no one is told how to vote.
“In Toronto, everyone is independent. The mayor has to go out and convince everyone about the rightness of his decision. If you have to convince everyone, instead of telling them how to vote, you get better decision making,” he says.
But Andrea Reimer, a city councillor and member of ruling party Vision Vancouver, says the mayor in a political system is ensured support from his executive committee, so citizens will see the policies they voted for come to fruition. “[In other cities], mayoral candidates can have those strong platforms, but then they have to go shop around for support.
And in the case of Mayor David Miller, he didn’t seem to have that support. So then the public doesn’t get what they paid for, figuratively speaking.”
Party politics matter in a municipal context, Reimer says.
They ensure city councillors are held accountable if they don’t uphold the platform their constituents voted for.
“My sense of having a formal political party where people know who is working with who is actually a big advantage for the public…because they know what they’re buying into when they go into the elections.”
Still, Boulos believes politics have no place in local governance, which should aim to cater to citizens’ needs quickly and efficiently. “When there’s a crack in the sidewalk or when the garbage is not picked up, or the recycling is late, you feel it directly and immediately,” he says.
Boulos left municipal politics when he realized a single party could not meet the diverse needs of people in his city.
“I didn’t understand why somebody halfway across town, with a very different demographic, and different everything, needed to agree or disagree with my position on something. I don’t know his or her reality, they don’t know mine.”
Aubin and Boulos say Montreal political parties have proven to be corrupt money-making “machines,” rather than vehicles for change and ideas. “The two main parties here are just glorified vacuum cleaners for sucking up money from contractors,” Aubin says.
Money donated to mayoral candidates comes from people who will benefit from a given party’s platform, Boulos explains.
“The amount of money it takes for the mayor to be seen in every borough, all the PR, all the TV, the bus shelters and all that other nonsense, ends up costing a lot of money…Where do you raise money? These contractors, these promoters and these construction people that are giving money through their friends and family, presumably in exchange for favours.”
But Reimer says Vancouver has yet to experience such underhanded behaviour in the municipal system. She says campaign financing must balance governance and electoral policy in any municipal system.
To combat shady campaign financing, she suggests Montreal re-assess whether its municipal governance and electoral systems are truly suited to the city and its people.
“In British Columbia, we’ve had these big debates about how we should be doing provincial elections. And the number one complaint is that parties have too much power. If that’s the complaint, then that’s not the election system, that’s the governance system.”