Is it just my imagination, or does this election campaign for Barrie’s next mayor lack edge?
With only a week left in the campaign, has it failed to reach a certain point of sharpness?
By that I mean the candidates have generally taken the high road at debates, in news stories, even in the pamphlets that have littered our mail boxes for a month now.
There’s been little, if any, mudslinging involving, in alphabetic order (so as not to cause ire among campaign teams) Andrew Gordon, Weldon Hachey, Rob Haverson, Gerry Marshall, Mike McCann, Alex Nuttall, and Barry Ward.
Ward, Nuttall and McCann have served time on city council and should know better than to play a straight game.
Marshall has been Simcoe County warden, but we’ll give him a pass. Same with Haverson, Hachey and Gordon, who are newcomers to politics.
Sure, Haverson took a bit of a run at Nuttall last week about the email scamming, but Nuttall would not take the bait.
Now I know what you’re thinking. If the candidates were hurling verbal abuse at each other, I’d be lambasting them for that, wondering aloud why the high road was too tough a path for the candidates.
Probably.
Maybe, in retrospect, the general dullness of this campaign is the media’s fault.
I’m sure someone would be happy to blame me for not asking questions that figuratively put the candidates at each other’s throats.
Why am I taking the high road now?
It’s not like I haven’t looked for points of contention between the candidates, areas to exploit and send them into finger-wagging mode.
There just aren’t many, and so far no one has banged their well-worn shoe on the podium to make a point.
But this isn’t all the media’s fault, or even mine — although some of it might be.
What about only three all-candidates debates or meetings or greetings in which they didn’t all bother to show.
I covered two of the three and, in my opinion, paint drying gave these political assemblies a run for their money.
The first was at Barrie Royal Canadian Legion late last month before at least 100 people who looked like they expected a few good arguments among the candidates. They didn’t get any.
In fact, the candidates didn’t do much more than read their brochures, tell us what swell fellows they were and ask for our vote.
No debate was allowed. No questions from the media panel of two. No queries from the audience.
Not even “why should we vote for you and not the other guys?" (There are no female candidates for Barrie mayor this year.)
“Or “can you tell me why I shouldn’t vote for (fill in candidates’ name here)?”
Nothing. It lasted about 40 minutes, then there was a chance to speak one-on-one to the candidates, pick up their brochures.
I checked. There were no raised voices.
The other debate I covered was on Zoom, which is how we all get together now, and hosted by Living Green Barrie.
Most of the questions had an environmental tinge, which is fine since humans have basically poisoned the planet on which we live and we had better care about the environment.
But there wasn’t much disagreement among the candidates. In fact, some of their answers were prefaced by agreement with the previous speaker, then adding a little of their own opinion — emphasis on a little.
To anyone looking for points of difference between the candidates, they were few and far between.
None of this is to criticize the organizers of these events. They undoubtedly did their best. And if I don’t like it, maybe I should have organized my own debate.
None of this, however, gets Barrie residents any closer to determining who gets their vote on the days leading up to and including Oct. 24.
There’s only a week to go!
Don’t expect any advice here. That’s not what, in my opinion, the media’s role is in elections.
We’re supposed to report the news, not make it.
Maybe this election campaign will still come to a very sharp point in the next seven days and the high road will be abandoned.
But if it hasn’t been forsaken yet, it’s unlikely to be.
Bob Bruton covers city hall for BarrieToday and will be directly impacted by whomever is the next mayor of Barrie at least once a week at the meetings, sometimes twice.
