Transparency needed in municipal elections

The feeling of not wanting party politics practised at the local level is understandable but may be wrongheaded.

Municipal party politics, to many, implies Conservative, Liberal or NDP but it need not be so. It could be slates independent of political parties, such as is the practice in Vancouver and Montreal.

One might be the Progressive Voter League and the other might be the Friends of a Better City, or whatever, and there could be more than two. The point is that, whether it’s parties or slates, each would present a policy platform outlining how they would solve the problems residing in our city and region.

The real need is for transparency, so voters will better understand the choices before them. As it stands, in the 2014 municipal election many conservative councillors were elected under a hidden banner supported by an electoral machine. We saw the results.

If we had had some form of party or slate politics at the local level some 12 years ago, when the proposed St. Catharines hospital location was a forefront issue, this city might look differently today.

Most certainly a slate or party would have opposed the NHS plans to build the new hospital at the edge of the city, and provided an alternative platform to have the hospital built, in stages, in the inner city at the very location where the empty General resides today, like other urban hospitals are built throughout North America and Europe.

Today, we would have a new inner-city urban design hospital and cancer clinic beautifully placed overlooking Centennial Park in the midst of an established medical community.

This modern hospital would have been the key to the restoration of the downtrodden Queenston Street area as the Cities Reclaiming Ground Report had cited.

Ron Brydges

St. Catharines