This Wednesday evening, THE EQUITY is hosting a Conversation with the Candidates running to be MRC Pontiac’s next warden.
We’re hosting the public event at École secondaire Sieur-de-Coulonge in Mansfield. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and our live stream, which you can watch from the comfort of your couch if you don’t want to make the trip up the line, begins at 7 p.m. sharp on YouTube.
Our mission is to help you get to know these candidates before you give one of them your vote. And we really hope you do get out and vote.
The video interviews published last week (available on our website and YouTube channel) are a good primer in who each of these people are, and what they hope to be able to offer the region. The candidates speak to questions like why they think they would make a good warden, what they believe is key to economic development in the region, and what their priorities would be in their first year in the job.
Wednesday’s conversation is meant to be a longer introduction – an opportunity to dig into their pitches for what they could do for Pontiac people, and to better understand how these candidates distinguish themselves from each other as leaders.
We are lucky enough to have four candidates to choose from. One has occupied the seat for the past eight years, and as the county’s first elected warden is the only model we have for what the job can look like and what an elected warden, no longer tied to mayoral responsibilities, can accomplish.
Now we’re being given another chance to take a temperature check and decide if we want more of this leadership, or something different. The new candidates joining the incumbent are promising change, but calling for change is surely easier to do than actually being the warden seven days a week.
Whoever we elect will still have to contend with the fact that they’re representing a largely anglophone community in a province that, at least under the current administration, seems to be quite determined to make life difficult for English-speakers. And this isn’t likely to change under a PQ government, which is currently leading in the polls.
Whoever we elect will inherit the decades-long challenge of bringing new jobs to the region, a task that has been at the top of every candidate’s campaign priority list, be they municipal, provincial, or federal, for years – easy to promise but a tough nut to crack.
Whoever we elect will have to have a thick skin to weather the storm of criticism they will no doubt receive for doing something, anything, with conviction, especially if they’re a woman.
An ability to take on these challenges will be among a long list of factors to consider as we choose who we want in the seat.
Over the past few weeks we’ve been collecting questions from you, voters, and asking about your priorities. While we had originally imagined choosing a few of the submitted questions to be asked by their authors at the event, we’re going to take a different approach.
An hour and a half is not a lot of time to cover the ground we want to cover, especially when, in the spirit of this “conversation”, we want to allow candidates time to give thoughtful responses. So we’ll use the input we’ve received from our survey and the questions submitted to form eight questions. Most will be in English, some will be in French.
We call it a “conversation”, rather than a debate, in an attempt to avoid slipping into a space where statements are being made but not heard; where candidates are regurgitating well-rehearsed policy lines rather than listening to and engaging with what their fellow candidates are proposing.
We’ve all been dealt the task of figuring out who we believe to be best suited to lead this county in its next chapter. It’s important we consider both what these candidates say, but also how they listen.
Sophie Kuijper Dickson
