In 2008 in the lead up to the municipal elections there were a number of civic watchdog groups that came into existence. We had the Saanich Civic League, Steve Hurdle had Inside Langford, right after the election there was the Victoria Voter's League. All of them have been quiet for some time.
I am not surprised that the Saanich Civic League has gone dormant. I did not see the energy and drive there that launched the Guelph Civic League in Ontario. The SCL was clearly a partisan group which decided what the public wanted before asking them.
The Victoria Voter's League had a lot of energy right after the election, though strongly from people that ran from council and did not do that well.
Steve Hurdle has not been extracting much interesting news from the Kingdom of Langford and his majesty Stew the First. Is this is sign that things are better in Langford and the public seems closer to the council? Certainly I am not hearing much from the opposition minority any longer.
Sue Stroud did much of the same sort of thing in Central Saanich, but she has been rather quiet since the summer. She has been the one person watchdog for farm land and trees in the area.
The various neighbourhood groups continue on, but even on that level I am hearing less from the ones that I pay closest attention to - Burnside Gorge and Tillicum Gorge.
Other than Jim Legh, there is almost a complete silence on the amalgamation front. The Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce has been absent in in any sort of civic issues for most of the last year.
The only civic watchdog group in all of greater Victoria that I can find that is active is JohnsonStreetBridge.org - though I expect that group to diminish as the issue changes. The bridge seems to be the only issue that has managed to get anyone interested.
The Green Party was active in the last municipal elections and even elected two members to Victoria City Council, but the Greens do not seem to be doing anything on the ground.
Vibrant Victoria, the main online place to discuss issues of civic politics in this region has seen the level of traffic drop off. It is now only a small core that are regularly taking part in discussion. Yes, I am one of those geeks expressing an opinion there.
Civic engagement seems to at a rather low level in this region at the moment, this does not bode well for good local governance and for an engaged and lively local election in 2011. Anyone have any idea why civic engagement has dropped off so much lately?
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A quick note on my comment of Ross Crockford being well placed to run for mayor - he was over for dinner last night and made it entirely clear he has no interest in getting elected to anything. He has several books to write.
6 comments:
Bernard, any recommendations for watchdogs for BC and federal politics?
I'm quite bullish about CTV's political shows "Power Play with Tom Clark" on weekdays on CTV News Channel, and "Question Period" on Sunday. For federal politics, you'd be hard pressed to do better, and these shows between them produce 6 hours of content (minus commercials) per week so they sometimes spread a story over several days and dig pretty deeply into it. Power Play is drastically superior to the show it replaced, "Mike Duffy Live", a show which had a reputation for bias on several issues.
I don't know of a good source for the same provincially, unfortunately.
As for the local level, "interesting" news is relative I suppose, Bernard. :) With the fight over the ALR, recent moves to sell small parks in Langford, and the unusual issue of the municipality cracking down on invasive species vigilanteism, I thouht the news had actually been pretty interesting in Langford in recent months. I don't deny that I haven't had the time for civic involvement I would like to have, as the day job has been getting in the way a lot. Comments from readers obviously dropped off post-election on Inside Langford, but have held steady since (even increasing somewhat lately).
Your observation that reader participation in the Vibrant Victoria forums has lessened is interesting, as traffic to their news articles has been increasing. Perhaps Vibrant Victoria is undergoing a change in its readership rather than a downturn. I am a contributor there, but I don't have access to all their stats so I can't definitely say whether the increase in traffic on news articles is enough to offset any drop-off in forum participation.
Thanks Stephen. I don't think I have an extra 6 hours per week to watch all this :-) so I'll just check-out the weekly one ("Question Period").
If anyone knows of a good "watchdog" newsletter, show, or website for BC politics, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
I've been helping out James Legh with the Amalgamate Greater Victoria blog as a co-author. We don't really have a significant community of readers right now, but I'm hoping to grow the blog in 2010. I am busy until after the Olympics
but at some point I would also like to help organize some meetings or events in Victoria to raise awareness about amalgamation.
One blog you missed was Gregory Hartnell's Concerned Citizen Coalition blog. He does a good job of updating it regularly, although I find the format of the blog difficult to read for some reason. Maybe it's because of all the bold, italics etc. that he uses.
Another active organization is the Victoria Public Education Coalition. It bills itself as "VPEC is a community based organization open to all who support a fully-funded, high quality public education system." Does anyone know anything about this group?
Found this list of a handful of federal and provincial government watchdog groups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Government_watchdog_groups_in_Canada
This site looks perfect for keeping track of what our MPs are doing:
http://openparliament.ca/
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