Mayor wannabes will not get equal coverage

You’ve got to earn public’s respect and attention, beyond registering to run

Instead of waiting for the usual blast of criticisms about unequal news coverage of Hamilton’s mayoral race, I’m going to get ahead of the squall.

There are 15 mayoral candidates on the ballot and, like it or not, they’re not going to receive or warrant the same amount of media attention.

As the campaign unfolds, we’ll see if anybody other than incumbent Fred Eisenberger and Vito Sgro, a chartered accountant and political strategist, deserve to be considered serious contenders.

I’ll be delighted if that’s the case but I’m not waiting with bated breath.

To get their names on the ballot for the Oct. 22 vote, all 15 candidates were required to collect endorsement signatures from 25 eligible voters and pay a refundable $200 filing fee.

But the stony truth is, that doesn’t remotely make them equally worthy challengers. It’s not enough that someone wants to be mayor. To be given serious consideration, they have to work for it. They have to merit respect and recognition. They have to earn people’s votes.

You don’t do that just by showing up at all-candidate debates and giving your opinions, informed or otherwise, on the issues facing this city of 540,000 people. You do it by meaningfully advancing discussions and shaping outlooks and, possibly, outcomes.

To do that, candidates have to get their messages out to the voting public. They have to build a campaign organization, develop a platform, recruit volunteers, establish lines of communication and raise enough money — in the neighbourhood of $100,000 — to promote and advertise themselves and their ideas across the length and breath of the city.

That’s what separates political pacesetters from peripheral players. If you want to be elected, you have to work for it; if you want major media coverage, you have to earn that too.

Like loose threads, fringe players tend to stick out. Some may be in the race for a lark. Some may be looking for a bully pulpit. Some may even be delusional.

True, there may be others who though ill-equipped to run a full campaign have good ideas and insights. If so, it’s a safe bet they’ll feature in news stories. If they connect with enough people, in a close enough race they could even end up being spoilers. But their chance of winning is the longest of long shots.

As I said, we’ll be better able to separate the wheat from the chaff as the campaign unfurls. Thanks to Cable 14, you can get an early glimpse of the threshing floor next week. That’s when the community programming network kicks off its election coverage with a mayoral debate on Sept. 11 at 7 p.m. That debate will be followed by all-candidate ward debates over the succeeding three days.

Cable 14 general manager Brent Rickert says all 15 mayoral candidates have been invited. Ricky Tavares is the only one who declined to participate.

Rickert acknowledges that having so many candidates share the stage creates challenges but the station believes it’s important for its subscribers and the general public to be as broadly aware as possible of who the candidates are.

“There are front-runners and they’re, generally speaking, known,” said Rickert. “But we don’t feel it’s up to us to determine who those frontrunners are. They sometimes present themselves as their campaigns flesh out a bit more, but we don’t think it’s our responsibility to determine who is and isn’t a front-runner.”

As a one-off introduction to the mayor’s race, I can’t argue with that. But the campaign goes on for another six weeks and without some clearsighted focus, the whole race would devolve into a circus. In sum, media coverage isn’t equal simply because the calibre of the stumpers isn’t.

Other than those already mentioned, the candidates are Edward Graydon, Phil Ryerson, Nathalie Xian Yi Yan, Todd May, Carlos Gomes, Ute Schmid-Jones, Paul Fromm, Jim Davis, Henry Geissler, Michael Pattison, George Rusich, and Mark Wozny.