The MRC Council of Mayors is off for the month of July. It’s a good chance for the warden and mayors to recharge their batteries after what has undoubtedly been a challenging and exhausting year.
When they come back to the table in August, there will be just one year remaining before our next municipal and county warden elections in the fall of 2025. The big question is who is going to run for what jobs? And what will they stand for?
More importantly, what do we, the electorate, want them to stand for? What are the priorities we need them to carry on our behalf into the local political debate?
One thing is clear. Whatever good things are going to happen here, it will be because people here make them happen. We need to start by taking stock of the abundance of assets, resources and opportunities within our grasp that offer all kinds of promise. And we have to make a plan that has buy-in from one end of the county to the other for how to turn those endowments into prosperity.
We’re going to have to get organized. We need to be strategic. We need to be visionary and at the same time practical. We need the process to be inclusive, transparent and accountable. We need outcomes that are economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. And we need to elect a group of people fully up to the challenge of leading that charge.
In our view, they are going to have to be people who are committed to discussing public policy in public. We can no longer afford bad ideas to be hatched in private meetings. Surely the incinerator saga taught us that. We, the public, need to know what our elected officials are cooking up on our behalf from the get-go.
This means we need councillors, mayors and a warden committed to holding their meetings in public, with the proviso, of course, of being able to shift meetings in-camera, but only on an exceptional basis when discussion of issues of a human resource, proprietary or security nature require privacy. On all other matters of public policy, why would anyone not willing to speak their mind publicly seek public office?
While we’re at it, let’s look for candidates who recognize that electing 127 people to represent 14,000 residents is simply ridiculous. That’s an average of one elected representative per 110 residents. We need to elect people who will chart a path to an MRC composed of four or five municipalities, even if it means giving up their own seat to get there. Think of what could be achieved if resources were pooled and we could pay our representatives a decent full-time wage.
And because Pontiac’s stand will be strongest when the two Pontiacs are integrated, we should look for candidates who will not just sit and wait for something to happen on this file but who will actively take up the cause of merging the county and the municipality, enabling everyone from Breckenridge to Swisha to work together in making plans for our shared geography between the mountain and the river along this beautiful western-most edge of Quebec.
Given the time and effort it takes to mount a political campaign, there’s no time like the present to start looking for the exceptional people among us who can become our representatives in the next municipal elections, now just over a year away.
Have a great summer, and keep your eyes open for good candidates.
Charles Dickson
