People have been throwing their hats into the ring for the upcoming municipal election, including the incumbent – you can find a fairly comprehensive round up on the Ottawa Election News website. Choosing between candidates can be tricky. Usually, there are some candidates you can exclude immediately because they just aren’t an option. But, once you’ve excluded them you still have to choose someone to vote for. (If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.)

There are a number of things that a candidate in this election can mention while campaigning that will cause me to move them down my list (or off the list altogether).

Tinkering with the tunnel

Ottawa’s transit system is probably a good ten to fifteen years behind where it needs to be. We can’t put more buses on the road and surface rail in the downtown core isn’t going to work. We need the tunnel. Leave it alone. If you even suggest that we need to revisit this I’ll almost certainly cross you off my list.

“Zero Means Zero”

If you want my vote, you won’t campaign on a “zero means zero” policy. Holding property tax increases at 0% means that services are going to be cut or there are going to be more user fees imposed. Cutting services can affect everyone while imposing user fees can have a disproportionate impact on households with lower incomes.

Another way to implement a “zero means zero” policy is by cheaping out on infrastructure maintenance, which is only going to result in increased repair costs. It’s not simply a matter of deferring an expense, it’s actually going to cost us more.

Ultimately, a “zero means zero” policy means that sooner or later property taxes are going to have a big increase and we’re going to be playing catch up to compensate for your policy, possibly for years to come.

Actually, there are some things for which user fees aren’t unreasonable. One would be a per-bag garbage fee. The more waste that enters our landfills, the sooner we’re going to have to expand existing landings or build new ones. Some municipalities have established per-bag fees, either for all bags or bags in excess of one or two per household, with a certain amount of success. If you want to implement a system like this for waste, I won’t complain. (But you’re going to have to reduce or remove the solid waste fee that has started appearing on my tax bill since some of the costs are now being covered by the bag fees.)

And finally, something that just bugs me:

Negative attack ads

If the best you can do is a negative attack ad then you’re probably not going to win. Instead of telling people why you’re better than the other guy, you’re telling them why he’s worse than you.