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A worthwhile celebration

October 22, 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Tom Claridge

It was many weeks ago that I had a surprise visit by Lewis Baker, Q.C., a semi-retired Toronto lawyer who has been a longtime resident of Mono and whose wife recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and owns the Mono Museum at Mono Centre.

It was our first-ever meeting and Lewis came with a first-ever suggestion: that the Citizen sponsor three Mono all-candidates’ meetings.

Recalling the poor turnout in 2014, when there was no contest for the mayoralty, and aware of the fact that Mono Council had opted for online voting as a means of achieving more voter participation, I liked the idea and won approval from Doug Rowe, the paper’s general manager.

The first challenge we faced involved selecting dates and locations. We ultimately opted for Saturday, Sept. 15, Tuesday, Oct. 2 and last Monday, Oct. 15, with the first session in the morning and the other two on evenings.

The next big challenge was finding moderators for the three sessions. We ended up with two real winners in Jack Tupling for the first two meetings and Bob Burnside for the third. Although the two long-time Mono residents had different styles, both did superb jobs, setting time limits for opening addresses by the nine candidates (two each for mayor and deputy mayor and five for the three council seats) as well as for both questions from the floor and candidates’ answers.

With no prior experience in the area, I hadn’t a clue as to how many of Mono’s roughly 8,000 residents would turn out for any of the dates, although at one point Lewis advised that there had historically been poor turnouts when the meetings were in the Mono Community Centre at Mono Centre.

As we were mapping plans for the meetings we learned that the Mono-Mulmur Citizens’ Coalition (MC2) was planning a similar session for Oct. 1 and Dufferin Board of Trade was having a ‘Meet the Candidates’ session on Sept. 25. Five meetings were clearly too many, and the solution reached initially was to have the Oct. 2 meeting co-sponsored by MC2. However, for reasons I never fully understood, MC2 pulled out.

As for the Board of Trade session, I saw it as not really competitive, since it didn’t allow for a grilling of candidates from the floor.

Adding to the uncertainty over turnout was the fact that the first session, on a Saturday morning at Monora Park Pavilion, was aimed at attracting Mono weekenders and commuters who wouldn’t be able to make a 7 p.m. meeting.

Well, as it turned out there was a good attendance that morniing, a better one on Oct. 2 at Mono Centre and an amazingly large crowd back at Monora Park this Monday night despite the crummy weather.

Also interesting was the variety of topics raised and the lack of overlap in subject matter, with the need for improved citizen engagement perhaps the only common theme throughout.

The second and third sessions ran until well past the scheduled 9 p.m. closing hour, with Mr. Baker putting final questions to the candidates on both occasions.

At Mono Centre, he tested the candidates on a suggestion aimed at heading off the high litigation costs that resulted from a Mono sheep farmer’s bid to accept large volumes of landfill on his property and Caledon orthodontist Cliff Singers’ application to have up to four water-skiing competitions annually at the man-made lake on his 200-acre property, a worked-out gravel pit north of Mono Mills.

The suggestion was that whenever an issue came up that could lead to costly litigation, Mono Council would designated one of its members as a point person who would work with town staff and report back publicly on progress toward a solution that would avoid the need for litigation.

All the candidates seemed to like the idea, and it turned out that one of them, Ralph Manktelow, had already demonstrated that it could work, by taking it upon himself to negotiate successfully with the Adamo Estate Winery after neighbours complained about the use of “bird bangers” to protect its vineyards.

There wasn’t as much unanimity Monday night in response to Mr. Baker’s suggestion that the new council give Mono CAO Mark Early only until next February to recommend an affordable means of enforcing the town’s bylaws, and until June 2020 to find a means of giving all Mono residents affordable access to high-speed Internet.

The candidates all agreed that the two issues should be given high priorities but most felt arbitrary dates weren’t the answer.

How important are such meetings, and will they plus the online voting accomplish the objective of having far more than one in four Mono residents bother to exercise the franchise?

Next Monday we should find out.

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