Contrasting city mayoral candidates give voters a clear choice
Bennett and Therrien offer two very different options
Election day in the City of Peterborough is just over a month away. In addition to electing city councillors and school board trustees, an estimated 28,000 voters will choose between incumbent two-term mayor Daryl Bennett and first-term city councillor Diane Therrien to be their mayor. Because the race for mayor involves only two candidates, strategic voting will not be at play, nor will vote splits on either the left or right side of the political spectrum. As a result, voters will have a clear choice between two distinctly contrasting candidates and the directions for the city’s future that they represent.
For starters, the demographic choice is stark. Therrien is a young woman of average means who occupies a moderate leftist position on the political spectrum. Bennett is a senior male with substantial wealth who is a conservative with red Tory leanings. Her past experience is focused on public and social service; his is firmly grounded in the private sector.
Their management approaches are also in sharp contrast. Bennett is a resultsoriented leader who is impatient with opposition or delay. He is strongly opinionated, highly competitive and has very high expectations of those he takes into his confidence. Therrien is a new-generation collaborator for whom process is as important as result. She is grounded by principle and maintains a personal modesty typical of those motivated by social justice.
The two candidates differ markedly in their baseline approach to issues. Therrien is something of an ideologue who takes positions based on fundamental beliefs such as the reduction of inequality, the advancement of diversity and the new urbanism. Bennett, on the other hand, brings a business perspective to the operation of government and prefers a pragmatic approach to decision making. While not without a belief system, his positions are largely driven by a desire to find practical solutions to narrowly defined problems.
The role of policy development in government and campaigning also tells a contrasting story. Bennett has little interest in policy wonks. While he made substantial campaign promises as part of his first two campaigns, he is not likely to do so this time out. He does not attend policy conferences and rarely presents his own proposals to city council. His current campaign slogan is the single word “momentum,” which effectively means more of the same. Therrien appears to enjoy policy development and the community debate that shapes it. While it has taken her time to find a voice that is not clichéd, she is at her best when speaking to policy proposals and principled causes. Her campaign tag – “expect more” – offers an optimism that will and should be given meaning by substantive policy.
For voters, this polarity is good news: it means that their choices are clear cut. For the candidates, however, it raises some interesting strategic issues. Therrien will need to align herself with a more precisely defined and targeted campaign message. That message should embody a positive, youthful and future-oriented pitch; it should also enable a critique of her opponent and the deficiency she is attempting to remedy. She will have to aggressively sell that message in areas outside of the downtown and east city, where she is less well known. Bennett will need to neutralize an anti-incumbent sentiment by avoiding the trap of running only on his past record. His opponent’s defining of the debate through policy should be matched with prescriptions of his own. While holding onto his 2014 voting base may be sufficient to win, he can invigorate it with reminders of his opponent’s inexperience, alliances and voting record in relation to development.