As much as I’m still uncomfortable with saying that there’s a vacant council seat in Brighton, especially with Councillor Faretis’ celebration of life still to come this Saturday, council was required to declare his seat vacant within the first two council meetings after his passing. That was this past Monday. Council postponed determining how his seat would be filled until this coming Monday, so that we would have more opportunity to hear from residents about how it should be filled. In this post I’ll break down some of the pros and cons of the various options available to us, keeping in mind that I have an obligation to keep an open mind until the vote is called.
We wanted more time to hear from the public because we know that how councillors are chosen is very important, and to some residents more than others. We’ve had a small amount of feedback already, with varying suggestions. In a staff report received at the meeting after Byron’s passing, our options were outlined; I will examine them, and offer a few suggestions of my own.
Option 1: By-Election
This is the obvious answer for a lot of reasons. First, because councillor is normally an elected position, and our elections are structured to reflect the way that our representatives are chosen from among the residents, by vote of the residents. When Port Hope had to replace a councillor last year (one of their members was called to be a Justice of the Peace and had to resign), they originally opted to call up the runner-up from the election, but there was a strong preference from some residents for an election so that the choice would reflect the will of the people. They ended up holding a by-election on that basis (and ended up electing the same guy they otherwise would have appointed).
I could write a book about all of my concerns with the way that our current democratic processes happen, but there’s already been several of them. For your interest, check out Too Dumb for Democracy? by David Moscrop about the social psychology that influences our votes; or Teardown by Dave Meslin, about the way that our systems could be drastically improved. Both are from Ontario: I met Meslin in Cobourg once, and Moscrop is originally from Peterborough. In any case, here’s the short argument against the notion that an election, and a by-election in particular, is meaningfully democratic:
Our concept of democracy as the rule of the people depends on a few things, key among them being an informed and engaged public. By no means am I insulting anyone when I say that, in general, the public is neither well informed nor engaged in municipal politics. We have almost no local media, council matters are not well-followed (we usually have no more than two people in the gallery), and one of the main reasons that I write this blog is because our processes are neither simple nor easy to understand. Voter turnout at the best of times is just over half the voting population, and a by-election usually draws 20-30% of the electorate. So some would call it a bit of a stretch to suggest that whoever is elected in a by-election is there by the will of “the people”; rather, they got the most votes of the few who engaged. (Similarly, I get frustrated when I hear a politician who won an election with 38% of the vote — especially when that 38% doesn’t even count the huge number of people who didn’t vote at all — claim that they have a “strong mandate” to do whatever they campaigned on.)
Once someone is elected, though, how they got there doesn’t matter; we all have the same role, which is to represent our neighbours as we make decisions in the best interests of the community as a whole, striving to do the most good at the least cost. It’s entirely possible to have a slate of council candidates in which the first place councillor gets 10x more votes than the last placed councillor, but they would both be just as legitimate. Volume of votes strikes me as a minor issue, but not a non-issue.
Much more concerning is the way that election campaigns occur. I’ve run in elections at every level, and I can say with certainty that it’s really hard to get anyone’s attention. At the federal and provincial levels, people tend to vote based on party affiliation rather than for specific candidates; at the municipal level we have no party affiliation, which means that voters need to do more work to look into their candidates, at the level of governance that people seem to know the least about. Without a strong local media doing profiles of candidates, these investigations either mean hoping a candidate will knock on your door, or going to a local all-candidates meeting, neither of which usually happens in a by-election. Many municipal candidates in small towns win based on general name recognition: if someone’s name sounds familiar, it’s easier to vote for them than for someone you’ve never heard of. It’s no wonder that engagement in by-elections is low: it’s legitimately hard to cast an informed vote.
And when candidates do get attention, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. Elections are often fairly toxic, with parties looking for attention through mudslinging and soundbites designed to stoke outrage. Some of that even filters down to the municipal level: in our last campaign I encountered residents who conflated our municipal election to federal parties and their positions, and someone even produced an attack ad against a local candidate. I sincerely hope never to see the likes of that in Brighton again. Fear of that happening is not a reason not to have an election, but it’s worth noting that the amount of noise that occurs during campaigns makes it harder to cast an informed vote too.
Further, elections are a daunting process that most people don’t want to have to go through. That process itself can become a roadblock for people who would otherwise make excellent councillors. While I’m certainly in favour of having candidates jump through a few hoops in order to show commitment to the role and give the public a chance to get to know them, the list of people I’d love to be able to vote for but who have declared that they’d never want to go through an election is very long. You might even be on it!
And finally, the staff report points out that holding a by-election would cost roughly $35,000 – money we wouldn’t need to spend if we filled the position in another way.
So while having a by-election is the default “democratic” option, it’s far from clear that it’s the best option for choosing someone to represent our neighbours. The Municipal Act makes it clear that we don’t need to have an election: council is able to fill the vacant seat however we choose, including the following options indicated by staff.
Option 2a: The Runner Up
Another option that seems inherently more democratic than others is to pick the first runner up from the last election. While they didn’t get as many votes as the person whose seat has now been vacated, they did still put their name forward and go through the election process.
I think the case for this method is stronger the closer we are to the last election. If someone dropped out in the first few weeks or months of the term, it would be the clear and obvious choice to ask the runner-up to step up. In our case, we’re now over halfway through the term; it isn’t clear if the runner-ups from the last election would still have an interest in the position, or that they would still be electable, two years later. Much has changed.
The other complicating factor in Brighton is that the first runner-up has long since moved away. There are three people who ran in the election who still live in Brighton, but two of them ran for different positions (Mayor and Deputy Mayor, not Councillor); should they be considered as runners up for a position they didn’t run for? Would the last-place candidate from an election from two years ago be seen as embodying the will of the people? Nothing at all against him, he’s a good guy who was brave enough to run, but it’s hard to see that as a “democratic” decision. Again, volume of votes isn’t the biggest issue, but it’s not a non-issue.
Option 2b: Taking Applications
A simple way to fill an open position is to treat it like a job: council could receive applications (through the Clerk’s Office) and go through something akin to a hiring process, choosing someone based on their resume.
I’ve heard from some that this seems undemocratic, and at first blush that seems true. But even setting aside the very thin veil of democracy that covers our election processes as I argued above, everything council does is on the basis of the public delegating authority to us as their representatives. The Municipal Act includes making this decision as one of the things that fall within council’s authority, so council filling a position on council is explicitly not un-democratic.
Filling the seat this way also gives council the opportunity to choose someone on some basis of qualifications. What those qualifications are, however, is not clear: the nature of this position is that it does not require any particular expertise (and even if we have relevant expertise, it is not our role to sit as experts in a council meeting). Qualifications, then, should be about what the person brings to council:
- Do they bring a perspective that is currently lacking on council? We’re currently a very white, middle-class group, in a community that’s increasingly diverse. While some people might grumble about a “diversity hire”, in this case diversity of perspective is part of the reason we have a council in the first place. I’m also interested in diversity of backgrounds that go beyond demographics: we currently have a council with two retirees, a publisher, two realtors, and a local retail business owner. Would it be beneficial to have an academic or a blue collar worker?
- Do they have past experience on a council, or otherwise know what they’re doing? While members of council are not subject matter experts, there’s still a long learning curve on all of the processes and our roles in them, and I know that I was pretty timid when I was first elected just because I didn’t know what I was doing yet. Halfway through the term I finally feel like I really know what I’m doing, and I know it could be difficult for someone brand new to start now. (That said, sometimes it takes someone new to question things with a new perspective!)
- How’s their attitude? During an election campaign, sometimes the person who yells the loudest can get the most attention; but that can often set a government up for challenges and infighting. Not everyone needs to agree all of the time, but I would have a hard time choosing someone with a chip on their shoulder. Byron was the person on council that I disagreed with the most, and yet we grew a friendship through talking about our differences of opinion.
- I hate to even have to mention this here, but: do they have a basic science literacy? Are they prone to conspiracy theories? We live in a time when we can’t take it for granted that we all believe the earth is round, much less that addressing climate change is an important priority. I would not like to waste council time having debates about reality itself.
I would hope that members of the voting public would weigh those considerations before voting, but certainly if council were to choose someone to fill the vacant seat it would be top of mind for me to look for these things.
Option 2c: However We Like
Council has the authority under the Municipal Act to fill this seat, without direction on how. The options presented above are common ways of doing so, but ultimately we don’t need to do any of them so long as the seat is filled. This includes simply naming a person; we aren’t required to even justify our choice. Understandably, this seems unnecessarily un-democratic, even with all of my provisos about democracy above. My first instinct was to reject this fiat power, wanting to ensure that we went through an open public process, lest people think that we just picked our friend. (If you think we’re all close enough to have friends in common, you haven’t come to enough council meetings!)
But the more that I think about it, the more I realize that the open nature of option 2c presents us with opportunities to have a public process that simply wasn’t listed above. This is where we might get even more democratic. Here’s a few ideas:
- In a truly democratic system, someone is chosen from at random from a pool of qualified electors (voting for people is technically called aristocracy). Back in ancient Greece it was a limited pool of wealthy men who would draw straws to determine their roles. What if we collected a pool of applicants, similar to option 2b, and then chose from among them at random? It would give us some opportunity to narrow down the pool based on the qualifications I mentioned above, but it would also prevent people from saying that we just chose our friend.
- Alternatively, we could have an open public hiring process. This could simply be the way we choose to carry out option 2b above, but I had assumed that it would be a private meeting at which we discuss the qualified applicants (similar to a hiring). But what if we required all applicants to come to a town hall meeting and make presentations for why they would be a good fit for council? Council could choose, in open session, based on our appraisal of the candidates’ public presentations.
- Building on that, what if we randomly selected a group of residents (in the same way that people are called for jury duty) to form an ad-hoc committee tasked with choosing from the applicants? This is a very democratic process — perhaps even more democratic than an election — and shifts the task to a group of residents who have less direct stake in the selection (e.g., they can pick someone they won’t have to sit next to for the next two years). This would have some cost (we would pay the committee members for a few meetings, and have to go through a process to select them), but much less than an election.
Every one of the options I’ve discussed above has some merit. What do you think? Email me, or comment below, and let me know! I’d like to get more feedback before I make a decision on this one, as I recognize it’s a very special decision beyond the scope of what we usually do.