Summer is gone, election campaign begins

By MEL ROTHENBURGER/ The Armchair Mayor

And so, a new season begins.

Yes, the unofficial end of summer is succeeded by the unofficial start to the civic election campaign. While nomination day is still weeks away, candidates are starting to pop up like a crop of autumn mushrooms or — as some might put it — zits on a teenager’s face after too much chocolate.

Expected any day, or maybe any hour, is school board chair Ken Christian’s announcement that he’ll go after a seat on council. (Sitting beside him at the opening ceremonies for the Western Canada Summer Games, I asked him to confirm or deny, and he did neither, which is a pretty clear confirmation.)

Christian, who earlier (and wisely, as it turned out), declined an invitation to run for the Liberals in this year’s federal election, is a likely shoe-in for a position at the council table.

If it’s true that incumbents have a distinct advantage over newcomers, the rest of the wannabe pack will be left to fight for just one remaining seat, since six of eight current councilors want back in.

At the moment, the front-runners for that final slot would have to be apartment manager Arjun Singh, fitness trainer and previous candidate Nelly Dever, and retired police officer Peter Sharp. As former council members, Singh and Sharp both have some baggage, but are much better known than Dever.

A handful of others have so far come forward, and the numbers should expand by another half dozen or so in the next couple of weeks.

Considering the issues, it’ll make for an entertaining election, though the slate isn’t likely to approach the record three dozen for council and five for mayor in the 1999 runoff.

One of the reasons is that there’s no apparent challenger to incumbent mayor Peter Milobar, completing his first stint in the chair after a pair of terms as councilor.

Christian could give him a good run, but he has a government day job that precludes it. Populist Coun. Denis Walsh would have had a shot at it but he, too, has declined.

There may be some irony in the fact that Milobar will either be re-elected by acclamation or go through the motions with only a token opponent, yet doesn’t exactly start from a position of dominance.

He has taken a beating over the parkade, social housing and water meters, and has more and more taken to lecturing those who disagree with him on and off council.

Maybe most significantly, he has declined to take leadership on the most controversial proposal to affect Kamloops in years — the Ajax mine, deferring to other levels of government despite his earlier high-profile, strident opposition to the easy-target ACC cogen plant.

Milobar is not an ineffective mayor, and has shown mettle at times, as when he called “bullshit” — in exactly that word — to the Interior Health Authority’s transfer of RIH control to Kelowna.

But there are enough issues upon which he can be challenged to make a mayoral race legitimate. An energetic opponent with a defined vision who commits to being a full-time mayor could make things interesting, but none is in sight.

And without a legitimate mayoral contest to generate excitement, the number of candidates quickly plateaus.