Sayre’s Law: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.”
Voters in the Township of Langley might care about taxes, development, urban/rural tension, transportation or amalgamation but in the end the election in The Township of Langley was about one very stupid thing: eight councillors and one mayor who couldn’t even try to work together. The result? Voters chose to keep the councillors and dump the mayor.
Please Don’t Try To Make Me Care About Something That Doesn’t Matter
For three years citizens of Langley have had to endure a pointless adolescent drama in which veteran councillors couldn’t hide their resentment of an abrasive interloping mayor and a mayor who couldn’t hide his low opinion of clubby, comfortable councillors. Despite countless headlines, criminal investigations, petty punishments, bitchy soundbites and – sigh – lawyers I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation about (a) why any of this occurred, and (b) why any citizen should care. Slap fights about nothing have made Langley politics momentarily interesting for bored media types, but it still couldn’t push voter turnout past 25%.
Incredibly the Mayor seemed to focus his entire campaign on a dispute that mattered to only the fragile egos on council and the most hopelessly partisan voter. Even more incredibly he persuaded seven otherwise intelligent individuals to fight his fight with him by forming the dumbest oxymoron in BC civic politics, the “slate of independents”. They were the only slate of candidates in the Township and they all lost.
I can’t emphasize how quixotic the whole thing was: instead of racing away from the one thing that made him a symbol for all things unpleasant he forced voters to support him based on an irrelevant, incoherent argument that mattered not one whit to any citizen not related to him by blood. Oh, and it was also an argument that he had been losing for three years.*
Seriously, BC Politicians: Just Stay Away From Brown Envelopes
The coup de grace may have occurred right smack-dab in the middle of the campaign: after some weird Nixonan shenangigans involving an envelope supposedly swiped right from the mayor’s office the mayor earned himself a whole lot of very bad press, predictably declining to take the high road in response. Councillors, smelling blood, gleefully poked at him with a sharp stick instead of sitting back like adults and letting voters decide the thing a mere four weeks later.
This Is Going To Get Ugly
Of course, voters did decide the thing, and now we have a shiny new mayor, a couple of new councillors, and the same host of issues: taxes, development, urban/rural tension, transportation and amalgamation. In the next ten years Langley’s going to get hit by a bus: intense pressure for development and growth as the region starts to bulge eastward (in a town with 80% of its land in the ALR), a tricky regional transportation situation** in a high-commuting community, increasing demand for sophisticated city services, a once-sure policing contract that’s starting to look a little wobbly and a potentially effective, long-overdue grassroots initiaitve to merge the Township with the City.
Council probably needs a few more energetic, urban-oriented technocrats with well-informed ideas as it completes the transition from commuting exurb to fully-integrated suburb. @michellesparrow might be an interesting start: strong social media tendencies with a slight earth-motherish bent (but slow-loading, all-Flash sites suck, Michelle).
Three Minor Notes
- After this fiasco two short years ago the good citizens of Langley have decided that, for the most part, their Board of Education is doing just fine. Huh.
- The good folks running the Twitter feed and website at the Township offices are trying hard. I don’t think they’ve quite mastered the whole two-way conversational thing (seriously, it’s supposed to be social, guys) and the “watch the webstream for results” probably sounded cooler in theory than it worked in practice (try this elegant approach next time, Township friends), but they’re trying, and that’s good. It’s a start.
- I got much quicker results from on-the-spot citizens on the ol’ Twitter stream today than I did from any of the major news outlets. Hooray for Twitter.
* It’s simple, really: when a group of councillors get in a fight the headlines say “Councillors get in fight”; when the mayor gets in a fight it says “Mayor <name> gets in fight”. After two years in Langley I had no idea who the incumbent councillors were – the ballot didn’t indicate who was an incumbent so I may even have voted for a few of them by accident – but I sure as heck know which mayoralty candidate seems to be a basket of bad news.
** A question for the incumbent councillors: when you punished the Mayor for his various transgressions by removing him from a bunch of regional committees you justified this as being good for the citizens of Langley how exactly?
Filed under: Not Banking or Business, civic politics, election, Langley, politics
