ARMCHAIR ARCHIVES – Civic parties have a history of failure in Kamloops
Civic election forum in Kamloops.
Spring is here and so are thoughts of civic political parties — Kamloops Citizens United is pondering entry into the civic election scene. In the spring of 1986, thoughts were also being tossed around on forming civic parties. The following column was published April 4, 1986.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, the more they stay the same.
So Kamloops has a new political party. Or maybe two. Talk is going around that KACE (Kamloops Association of Concerned Electors), the KVA look-alike announced earlier this week, will soon have company.
As we speak, a second party is only rumor. Ivan Jakic hasn’t figured out who it is yet, but he’s sure somebody, somewhere, is out to get him and that whoever it is will form another political party to do it.
Newsman Jim Harrison says Jakic accused him of being involved in setting up a new anti-Ivan party, but Harrison denies it. “He said I’m part of it, and I said, ‘It’s news to me.’”
There may even be a third party in the wind. Last November, Dave McPherson tried to get a motion passed by the local NDP to set up a civic political party. It was defeated, but he says he’s “thinking about” the idea again in light of recent activity.
“I find municipal politics really boring,” said McPherson, who figures the party system would bring out more debate and specific platforms. But, he says, nothing concrete is going on within the NDP in that area right now.
That leaves us to ponder KACE, the party that’s so new it doesn’t have a platform. It does have some experience behind it, such as its chairman, Vince Croswell, who was heavily involved in Don Carter’s losing mayoralty attempt in 1984, and Richard Blair, who took time from sitting in his posh corner office in the Mair, Janowsky Blair law tower to sit in the back rooms of the unsuccessful Mike Latta federal campaign the same year.
Then there’s insurance man Ross Phelps, who gained national attention by parlaying an Amway distributorship into a delegate’s spot at the national Tory convention a couple of years ago when he got his fellow soap-suds salesmen involved in the party.
Blair and Phelps are Tories, and even Croswell (despite having worked for the diehard Liberal Carter in the mayoralty) has worked for the Tories, but all involved insist it isn’t a Tory or even Socred-Tory municipal movement the way the Kamloops Voters Association was.
The KVA membership list looked like a who’s who merger of provincial Socreds and federal Tories. Like KACE, it had only a vague platform, although KACE says it is working on policy. The KVA claimed as its major goal the “unity” of council. It failed miserably in that, but it did manage to elect three of its members, including mayoralty candidate Mike Latta, to council in 1976 and 1978, though several other KVA candidates where thrashed.
Its campaign manager was Doug Smith (haven’t I heard his name on the radio?) then of the same law firm that has produced Blair, former Socred cabinet minister Rafe Mair, and college board chairman Dale Janowsky. KVA president was Diane Kerr, who was one of the winning aldermanic candidates. Lois Hollstedt, who lately has been in the news over the Vancouver Y’s eviction of long-term tenants to make way for out-of-towners bulging with Expo greenbacks, was the other KVA alderman.
A week before the 1976 election, I did my own poll and found that almost nobody knew what the KVA stood for. KVA, having experienced a modicum of success, never did establish a municipal identity, and quietly folded.
One political insider who was involved with the KVA views KACE as a “a new growth of the KVA,” though the two aren’t connected.
The KVA wasn’t KACE’s only predecessor. In 1971, and 1972, we had no less than three of them. The Civic Campaign Committee (CCC) was thrown together over coffee and endorsed several candidates without even consulting them, including one from another party.
The main group was Planned Action by Concerned Electors (PACE), established by Dr. John Willoughby, who these days is occupied with trying to get junk food back into our schools.
A third group, the Coalition of Responsible Electors (CORE), was the closest the NDP ever got to establishing their long-sought civic party here. It included such as Nelson Riis, Richard Oleson, and labor’s Jack Kerssens, and one of its major planks was that developers should pay the cost of extending essential services to their land (where was Jim Walsh in those days?).
A few CORE and PACE candidates actually got elected, but that was because they were incumbents who would have gotten voted in anyway.
The establishment of KACE seems to have come about in much the same way those other groups did. Businessman Arnie Habetler, Blair and a few others started chatting about it a couple of months ago, and lo and behold, a new party emerged.
History indicates it’s much easier to establish a civic party in Kamloops than to keep one going. Those who insist that civic candidates these days need the financial support of a political party forget that exactly the same thing was being said a decade ago. The year the KVA made its debut, Howard Dack spent $200 on his independent campaign and came third; Don Couch spent $66 and placed fourth.
Maybe this time around, civic political parties are here to stay, but I hope not. I hope that anybody who wants to can still run for office here without being propped up by bag money from some party backed by big business or big labor.
It’s entirely possible that, one day, civic parties will be necessary or even desirable in this city, but not now. May KACE and any of its competitors lurking in the shadows, have a happy and short life.
Mel Rothenburger has been writing about Kamloops since 1970. He is a former mayor of Kamloops, former school board chair, former editor of The Kamloops Daily News, and a former director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He was awarded the Jack Webster Foundation’s lifetime achievement award in 2011 and was a 2019 Commentator of the Year finalist in the Webster Awards. He has also been a commentator for CBC Daybreak and CFJC Today and CFJC-TV. Contact him at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Lois Hollstedt, March 31, 2025
The column about the “failure” of civic municipal groups caused me to reflect on what leadership is, how it is learned and what motivates individuals to risk taking on a leadership role.
In any group trying to get something done, there is a need to determine how and who can help reach the goal. Who has skills or knowledge of the issue, who can listen and help integrate perspectives and ideas to build consensus and move to collective action and success. Joining a group of citizens like the Kamloops Voters Association is one way to learn how to work together to achieve success. I learned from both Diane Kerr and Mike Latta that we shared similar goals and could work together as did the other KVA candidates.
Leadership skills grow out of working in teams, building individual confidence providing learning to work as a collaborator. I am grateful for all the teams I joined over the last 60+ years and for all they taught me and for the many successes they achieved and continue to deliver. “Stronger Together” is a new slogan we are now hearing in Canada and it is just as true now as it was 45 years ago. Thanks to the KVA for help me to learn.
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Hi Mel:
Although your recent publication on Civic parties from a 1986 editorial was written years ago, there are a few statements regarding KVA that I wanted to elaborate on for the record. Firstly, the KVA did have a three point platform which was printed in publicly distributed materials, articulated in public forums and radio interviews, and voiced at various campaign events.
The three elected KVA candidates took that platform into office as priorities for action. Two standing committees were established to ensure that focus: An Economic Development Committee which Dianne Kerr chaired, and a Parks and Recreation Committee which Lois Hollstedt chaired. Other members of Council (not connected to KVA) were also integrated into the committees to encourage involvement and support for that focus from all members of Council. The result? Kamloops had a comprehensive zoning by-law within a year, an economic manager was hired to recruit business to Kamloops, land was negotiated from the province and the Southgate Industrial Park was built, another industrial park east of Valleyview was established for heavier industry, Riverside Park was redesigned, the Rivers Trail was built with funds successfully secured from the Devonian Institute, the train for the Wildlife Park was purchased and installed. Certainly those were the achievements of the Council as a whole but the catalyst for those accomplishments was KVA’s vision of a better future for the city.
Somewhere in the determination of its success or failure should be a measurement against the goals of the KVA itself. KVA did not set out to be a long term participant on the municipal electoral stage. It was an organization formed to deal with one election. At a time when Kamloops seemed to be rudderless following amalgamation in 1973, KVA sought to inject new blood and a city-wide focus into a governing body that was still suffering from the hangover of the ward system that had encouraged tunnel vision and focus on separate areas of the city, often to the detriment of the city as a whole. In that regard it was successful.
Another goal for KVA was to heighten awareness of the importance of the election with the hope of encouraging voter turnout. To that end, KVA members set up tables in malls and other public spaces providing copies of voter’s lists, encouraging voters to make sure they were on the list and providing them with information regarding registration if they were not. Although not record breaking, the turnout was better than the turnout of the previous election.
Like many things, not all civic parties are created equal. KVA focused on one election. It ran a full slate of candidates. (In retrospect, I would not run a full slate. I think the diversity of opinions across a Council with only 3 KVA members was healthy for both the communication and decision-making processes.) We recruited candidates on the basis of their experience and suitability for leadership responsibilities and on their agreement with the KVA vision for the future of the City. Candidates accepted endorsation from KVA only after assurance that, if elected, they would act independently without input from the KVA. Campaign funders were anonymous to the candidates. Not all civic parties operate as we did.
Is a civic party right for Kamloops in the next election?
The larger the urban centre, the more difficult it is for candidates to make themselves known to the electorate. That difficulty is compounded when the slate of candidates is extensive. Getting the word out and mounting a successful campaign is an expensive undertaking, one that deters many potential qualified candidates from throwing the proverbial hat in the ring. Kamloops has almost doubled in size from 1986. Couch and Dack were elected to the Kamloops Council as incumbents from the ward system. Both their incumbent status and their familiarity in the small locale of their “ward” made their name recognition much higher than anyone running for office for the first time. Without the backing of a civic organization, those with money or incumbent name recognition have a decided advantage over others. In 2025, I doubt that it is possible to mount any kind of campaign on the budget cited for Couch and Dack.
I will watch with interest as the future unfolds on the political landscape of Kamloops.
Dianne Kerr
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We’ll definitely see a slate or 2 for our next municipal election, now if you want to call that a “Political Party” or not that’s up to the reader and their relationship with semantics. What were your thoughts at the time about the rollercoaster ride of Team Action in ’88, that’s some memory lane reading I’d like to see next week.
Forty years have passed and times have changed, with a consistent paltry 30% voter turnout the past several elections one might quip desperate times call for desperate measures. I personally think it’s time we investigate a move to a “Ward System” to inject a little enthusiasm like it has in Brandon and Prince Albert, cities much smaller than ours.
But, what stands out most of all for me and perhaps other readers is the pornsache & ‘burns circa 1977, I’m picturing you with a white belt and shoes cutting the rug at Boston Bottoms or was it called Hennessy’s at that time?
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Action Team ’88 fell apart very quickly, just like the others.
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We are wrestling with the same tension on how to keep local politics pure, focused on the city’s needs when people naturally use it as a launchpad for bigger things? Mayors and councils should be totally independent, free from provincial and national politics. Your article seems to cheer that idea from the sidelines. You seem to be fed up with civic parties like KACE or the KVA turning into playgrounds for ambitious types and you name some of them who parlayed local gigs into federal clout or personal networks. The vibe is clear, as these parties often feel less about fixing potholes and more about who’s got the best Rolodex for the next election cycle.
Local leaders should answer only to their city, not some Tory, Liberal former Tory or NDP puppet master upstairs. You mention some scrappy independents, Howard Dack and Don Couch, who spent next to nothing and still placed high, a time when you didn’t need to build a bridge even in places where there was no river to cross, or a party war chest to matter.
I get that too, that municipal politics can be a snooze without some fire but the problem for Kamloops in my living here off and on for 70 years is, that these parties don’t stick around long enough to prove it, they’re more like pop-up shops for self-interest than lasting infrastructure. My read from this history independence sounds noble, and the article’s history lesson screams for it, but human nature keeps gumming it up. People like Croswell or Phelps don’t need a formal party to chase connections, they’ll find a way. So, total independence? It’s a hell of a goal, but the article’s cynicism hints it might be a pipe dream unless voters get ruthless about sniffing out the climbers. I’m with you on this one, let anyone run, no bag money required, but I’d bet those political stepping stones aren’t going anywhere soon. Can a city like Kamloops ever really break that cycle? We need to.
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Thanks for more memories, Armchair Mayor.
“Vision Kamloops” was a team of candidates that ran for civic office in 2014. Candidate Dudy became Councillor Dudy.
When he was on council, I emailed a few photos and a text message expressing serious concern about a particular incident. In a reply email, he stated that he thought it was a “full strength dumping ground”; his background in farming and mine also allowed us to recognize something in the photos that led us both to believe the same thing.
However, that was the end of his support. The next thing I received was an email from a fellow downtown and it had been carbon copied to almost everyone imaginable (except Queen Elizabeth).
If Mr. Dudy runs again for a seat on Council or as Mayor, I will like to discuss publicly the aforementioned topic whether he runs on his own or on another “team”.
Again, thanks for more memories, Armchair Mayor!
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