Fresh start for councils

The capital region’s municipal councils will see new faces and new directions after Saturday’s elections. Some of the new faces were expected, as in North Saanich, where Mayor Alice Finall is stepping down, but others were a surprise, as in the defeats of Mayor Nils Jensen in Oak Bay and 25-year councillor Pam Madoff in Victoria.

It’s difficult to take the pulse of voters before local elections, where opinion polls are rare, so we might never know what led residents to kick out well-known figures such as Colwood’s Mayor Carol Hamilton or vote in untested newcomers such as Sharmarke Dubow, a former refugee who was elected and cast the first ballot of his life — both in the same election.

Readers of political tea leaves decided Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps was in a tight race, but she beat her nearest competitor by more than 13 percentage points. Meanwhile, what might have seemed a close election or even a sure thing for the incumbent in Sidney saw Mayor Steve Price beaten by Cliff McNeil-Smith 3,740 to 929.

Unlike in provincial or federal elections, where big issues can dominate voter decisions, municipal elections often hinge on local issues, name recognition and hard work: Defeated Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell attributed rival Fred Haynes’ success to his almost non-stop campaigning over the past four years.

The campaigning is over. Around the council or schoolboard table, the division and competition have to be put aside. As the outgoing council in Nanaimo has demonstrated, it is easy for elected bodies to go off the rails and forget their job is to do the public business.

Regardless of how or why they won, these freshly elected politicians must now sit down and work together to serve all the people of their communities.