City with a ‘small-town feel’ dealing with big-city problems
Cambridge candidates wading into serious issues like homelessness and the opioid crisis
CAMBRIDGE — Jill Summerhayes, a city resident since 1978, summed up the five-person race for the mayor’s chair in a single adjective. “Complicated,” she said.
So let’s break down the race in its simplest terms. There are a teacher, a nurse and a banker. Those are your veterans in incumbent Doug Craig and challengers Kathryn McGarry and Ben Tucci.
And there is a landscaping company owner, and a roofer who runs a pallet company. Those are your newcomers in Colin Tucker and Randy Carter. Those are five names on the ballot to become mayor. Many, including Summerhayes, figure the Oct. 22 vote will cap off the most competitive campaign for the mayor’s seat since Craig topped Greg Durocher by 26 votes in 2000 to win his first of five straight terms.
Craig, Cambridge’s longest serving mayor, won by 8,800 votes in 2003. He beat his nearest competitor by 2,300 votes in 2006 and by 4,500 votes in 2010. Last election, Craig finished 8,928 votes ahead of his closest challenger as voter turnout checked in at 30 per cent.
So Cambridge hasn’t seen a tight race in 18 years. “Certainly, not between three well-qualified candidates,” Summerhayes said pointing at Craig, McGarry and Tucci.
“There are weaknesses and strengths to all three. Trying to determine which is the most important and which will get us to the best place in the future is not easy.”
Summerhayes said she knows all three well and will find choosing one very difficult. She doesn’t consider Tucker and Carter as contenders.
“The other people, I don’t know and I would consider them also-rans,” she said.
That’s a simple take on a complicated municipal race that sees incumbents in all eight wards and each of them facing at least two challengers.
Two regional council incumbents face three challengers for two seats.
But Cambridge — its residents’ sense of safety rattled by the opioid crisis, with discarded needles along trails and tent cities in wooded areas — isn’t as simple a place it was even a year and a half ago.
There were 86 overdose deaths in Waterloo Region in 2017, and Cambridge was a trouble spot with at least 29 deaths. So far in 2018, 34 overdose deaths are reported in the region, with nine in Cambridge.
No longer does the location of a proposed $80-million arena-and-gyms multiplex dominate city council and coffee shop debates.
Big-city problems have emerged to drown out news from flatlining talks with the owner of the Cambridge Centre to set up luxury rinks and hard courts at the mall on Hespeler Road.
Homeless issues and council’s effort to keep a proposed supervised injection site out of the three Cambridge cores — while the region keeps pointing at two sites in downtown Galt as prime locations — are top of mind now.
The Bridges homeless shelter, a lightning rod for community frustration, is looking to move out of a Galt core saddled with a bunch of empty Main Street storefronts as the city installs the latest of 15 security cameras.
“People feeling safe in their city is a big thing,” said Lindsay Reed, a Hespeler mom who has led a social media-organized walking group that discovered homeless camps near her home.
“There’s a lot of anger, we’ve learned along the way. It’s not directed in the right place. There are certain limitations to what the mayor can do or what a regional chair can do.”
Answers don’t come easily, when city, regional, provincial and federal responsibilities and interests intersect. It’s a tangle of societal issues no one level can solve alone. How can you separate the affordable housing shortage from the issues of addiction, mental health homelessness and public panhandling at the city’s busy Delta intersection?
“They are distinct and different,” Craig said of the issues of the opioids crisis and homelessness. “And they’re intertwined, also.”
And so are the three veteran politicians seeking the mayor’s office.
When Craig edged Durocher 18 years ago, McGarry was one of Craig’s scrutineers watching over the manual recount — in the same election that saw Tucci acclaimed in Ward 4 as part of his 17 years on city council.
McGarry, until recently Cambridge and North Dumfries MPP, spent time as Minister of Natural Resources and Minister of Transportation in the Liberal government that was defeated in June.
Just months later, the one-time Heritage Cambridge president is running for mayor against Craig and Tucci. In 2006, Tucci topped McGarry by 260 votes to hang onto his Ward 4 seat.
Both McGarry and Tucci have repeated Cambridge’s need for change in their campaigns. And both, who rent space in town, were addressing the issue of their out-of-city residency as voting day drew within a month.
McGarry, a self-described constructive problem-solver in Cambridge for almost 30 years, listed her North Dumfries home for sale with the intention of moving to Cambridge. Tucci, whose banking career took him to Toronto four years ago, was shopping for a home in Cambridge, where he had previously lived for 23 years.
The issues facing Cambridge, where online voting returns for a second election at 10 a.m. on Oct. 9, have changed as the city has grown.
“It’s very complicated,” said Tucci, who aims to focus on city finances. “It’s a city of 135,000 people. While we should continue to champion our small-town feel — and celebrate the Hespeler, the Preston, the Galt and whatnot — now, we have to start behaving like a big urban centre.”
And big urban issues like crime and homelessness and opioid deaths have arrived in Cambridge, just like in many other cities in Ontario. McGarry said she saw the wave coming during her seven years serving on the region’s crime prevention council. The impact has been overwhelming. “People that live here and work here are frightened,” McGarry said.
On this, all five candidates are on the same page, Tucker says. But he won’t concede political experience gives the three veterans an advantage.
“I’ve lived here 20 years and I’ve talked to people on a daily basis for the last 14 years,” Tucker said. “I have experience that way. It’s not political, like they are. It’s more one-on-one with people.”
If Carter was intimidated by his more seasoned opponents when the campaign began, he isn’t any longer. “When I first went into it, I did. I felt like they’re all higher than me and stuff. But you know what? I don’t feel like that any more because they say pretty much the same thing that we are saying. They just word it differently.”
Cambridge has its headaches. The long-awaited $187-million expansion and renovation of Cambridge Memorial Hospital is two years behind schedule. GO Train service to Toronto is still a long-held wish. The multiplex issue seems perpetually vexing.
But a highrise has come to Hespeler. The pedestrian bridge across the Grand River in Galt and the Old Post Office digital library have opened. A pair of 20-storey towers are going up on the west side of the Grand on the site of an old foundry.
“A lot of people seem to believe that we don’t want the city to grow,” Summerhayes said. “That we like it as it is. Why can’t it stay the same? A city is like a plant. You either nurture it and it grows and flourishes. You ignore it and it dies. You have to do something. They can’t stay constant.”
But which candidate should be the next mayor of Cambridge is a complicated question for a city facing complicated problems.
“I have sorted it out,” Summerhayes said, pledging eternal silence on her choice. “I have told each of the three prime candidates that I will never let them know who I voted for.”