Head Tale

 

Like the title says, I’m voting “Yes” in the Regina Waste Water Treatment Plant Referendum. But it’s not for the reason you might expect…

I think I’ve mentioned in passing on this blog that I sometimes regret getting more heavily involved in party politics, first by joining Ryan Meili’s 2009 Sask NDP Leadership bid and then as a member of the Coronation Park NDP Executive.

It’s not because I don’t like the NDP or feel that they’re (usually but not always) the best reflection of my values and the party I’m most likely to vote for. And I do think being engaged and aware politically is important – however people chooose to do that.

But what I don’t like about being a known supporter of the NDP is that it automatically comes with baggage where some people assume they know a lot about you – how you feel about everything from unions to taxation to social issues – just because of the political party you support.

In fact, one of the many things I liked about Ryan Meili was that he occasionally took difficult positions that ran contrary to what you’d expect from a progressive left winger.

Or more to the point at hand, Alex Mortensen, a U of R student and former NDP candidate, wrote an op-ed for the Carillon where she came out strongly in favour of the “No” side in the Waste Water Referendum, gaining lots of criticism in the comments to that article, much of which basically amounted to the fact that she wasn’t being a “good NDPer”.

(I had my own issues with her op-ed – mostly that her analysis reminds me of how I sometimes thought and wrote when I was a young U of R undergrad student! 🙂 But I can’t fault her for making up her own mind rather than toeing some perceived party line.)

Which is all a long tangent to say that, given my politics, you’d probably expect that a “Yes” vote in the Regina Water Referendum would be an automatic for me. I mean, I’m a CUPE member (ooh, boogeyman!) and I’ve even been in Jim Holmes’ living room (his wife makes excellent cookies!) 😉

But I decided to try something unique this time – I thought I’d watch events unfold, (try to) put aside my biases, do my own research, and make up my own mind on the issue rather than just doing the easy, expected thing.

I knew both sides would have legitimate points. I knew I would find arguments for and against P3 water projects and examples from around the world where they’ve been successful and where they haven’t been.

But a funny thing happened on the way to making up my mind about how I’d vote in the Referendum. Even though a new Waste Water Treatment Plant is a huge project with a massive budget and long timeline, I realised something even bigger was at stake.

Now, this is a heated topic and I know both sides are going to try to do anything they can within the agreed upon rules (eg. existing legislation and democratic principles) to get the result they want.

But one side seemed much more willing to not just make their arguments within the rules but to change the rules to suit their goals too, undermining democracy itself.

First, when it looked like Regina Water Watch was going to hit the required number of petition signatures to force a referendum, the City tried to move the goal posts by saying the number should come from Sask Health numbers instead of census data as legislated in the Cities Act.

When that didn’t work, the City tried to throw out a number of signatures using dubious methods. The most blatant was a requirement that all signatures be dated to include the year. (If the petition was started in 2013 and ended up 2013, wouldn’t common sense dictate that people signed the petition in the year 2013, even if they didn’t write the year?)

When that didn’t reduce the number of signatures below the threshold, the City moved on to potentially illegal methods to reduce signatures. While legislation says that the City could use a couple different methods to test the validity of the signatures collected, it didn’t say they could do both things – which is exactly what the City did.

City employees also called people at home to verify that they’d actually signed, again, possibly in violation of The Cities Act (which you’d think City employees *really* should be familiar with, no?)

There were numerous other examples of the “No” side bending if not outright breaking the rules, heavily towards their own goals – even though “The City” (which is also in charge of running the referendum) should be neutral, even if the elected council isn’t.

More examples?

The City is spending 3x as much promoting the “No” vote as they are to promote the fact that citizens *should* vote. The City is sending out material about where people should vote that includes information about why people should vote “No”. They are refusing to allow scrutineers in certain advance polling locations and there are also other irregularities being reported. They’re using misleading numbers (will the City get $58 million from the Feds for doing a P3 or “up to $58 million”) and acting in a secretive manner generally about how they arrived at numbers or what various reports contain.

[Edit: Prairie Dog has just released a good summary of all of these shenanigans which would’ve saved me a lot of typing if it’d been up earlier!]

In terms of the abuse of democracy, I’m also disappointed when I hear “No” supporters say “Council was elected to do this job, let them do it” without also acknowledging that the rules also allow citizens to force a referendum as part of our democratic process if they do the legwork to get the ~20,000 or so signatures required – which Regina Water Watch did.

Oh, and on that note, I’m not a huge fan of how Regina Water Watch is being villainized as a front for CUPE. Full disclosure: I’m a CUPE member but even then, so what? It’s not like there aren’t organized groups on the local and national level promoting the other point of view. How come the Regina Chamber of Commerce and Canadian Taxpayers Federation or even the Regina Construction Association, which the Mayor previously led, get a free pass but CUPE doesn’t? [Edit: And now it’s come out that the “No” side is sending Regina taxpayer dollars to a company in the US – yet another choice that is way worse than anything the “Yes” side is doing. At least CUPE is a Canadian union!]

In all honesty, if I wasn’t so disappointed with the anti-democratic mishandling of this whole situation by the city, I suspect I would’ve voted “Yes” in the end, even after doing my research and so on. There are a lot of people out there – from Pat Fiacco’s kids to various lefties on Twitter who you know how they’ll vote.

Much more interesting is those who’ve changed their position. For example, a local writer, who was originally supportive of the “No” side has just posted a thoughtful blog post saying he’s decided to vote “Yes” which sums up many of the same arguments I’m trying to make in a much better fashion:

Thus, voting against the P3 not only makes economic sense, it will also send a message to City Council that we, the people, will not tolerate fear mongering, abuses of power, or disrespect for the electorate. Give us honest information and real numbers so that we can support your position. And frankly, we expect more from elected officials than to accept dubious reports that fly in the face of published and peer reviewed research and then call it due diligence

Not to end on too high blown of a note but I keep thinking about how I send my six year old son to school each day and how he’s going to learn about Canada and our democratic process one of these days. Unfortunately, what those school day lessons usually don’t include are details about how democracy often leads to arrogance, entitlement and elected politicians even making voters cry after verbally abusing them. Maybe school kids should be the ones telling politicians how to behave instead of the other way around?

Like I said earlier, a new waste water treatment plant is big project with a long time frame and a huge budget. But in my view, this has become about something even bigger than the waste water plant – this is about how we run our democracy.

For that reason, I’d encourage you to vote “Yes” on September 25.