A surprisingly large crowd, easily more than 400 Pickering residents atttend the panel discussion of all the Ward 2 councillor candidates was held at the Chestnut centre Tuesday. Sept 6th. Moderated adroitly by local VIP George Turner who posed ‘big issue’ questions to the panel and to the three regional councillor candidates, Linda Cook, Bushra Rasool and Nancy Van Rooy.
Rookies vs experience pros
The councillor candidates were Stacey Lepine-Fisher, John Meloche, incumbent Mara Nagy, Sam Snyders and Vince Viapiana. Each candidate presented themselves well even as a number of them were rookies to the world of municipal politics and election campaigning.
Questions of significance
Turner posed 5 major questions to the panel:
- What do you think should be planned for Frenchman’s Bay?
- What change do you see as needed for the Fairport Beach-Brock Rd corridor?
- What program do you think should be added to Pickering’s current budget?
- What project(s) need to be added to deal with Pickering’s recreational needs?
- What priority(ies) do you see in the next 5 years in Pickering?
These were tough questions for many of the rookie candidates but every candidate responded with well-thought out responses. All the candidates coalesced around the expected topics: taxes, traffic congestion, homelessness, crime and neighbourhood security.
Of course, the audience was most attentive when the question of tax control and limitation was discussed with the panel tossing out ideas such as better retention of Casino contributions to the City and stricter control of expenditures to Pickering’s development. An aside to the tax issue was management and regulation of commercial business opportunities and growth. Developers were centered in the sights of the candidates as they criticized developers for not nuturing and constructively supportting small businesses with commercial devoted parts of every new development.
Homeless ness was the most sensitive of the topics touched by the panel and as one of the candidates said, ‘There’s no silver bullet to solving the problem of homelessness.” However, each candidate did offer ideas from greater social funding to fund more organizations like DARS in dealing with the growing problem.
The regional councillor candidates were secondary to much of the debate only because regional councillors seem to be of lesser interest to the residents as compared to the central or local councillors.
The large crowd in attendance may signal that more residents are taking not of this election and more interested in the campaigners than in previous elections. Whether this greater interest will impact on voter turn out on OCT. 26 remains to be seen. However, the Mayor candidates debate, scheduled for the next night may see if this interest in the election is real and more than a one night flash in the pan.
