The post-mortem

Bruce Deachman’s column is here. Below is the entire video of Jeff Leiper’s concession speech.

Transcript

Brigitte Pellerin (00:05) Hi everyone. Hi Evan. You look different. That’s nice.

Evan Potter (00:08) Good day.

Brigitte Pellerin (00:10) And I sound different. This is the real-life podcasting, road-tripping edition. I hope that the image is stable enough and the sound is good enough. I am not driving, don’t worry about it. I’m just sitting here pontificating.

Evan Potter (00:20) So you’re in a new place and I’m in a new place, without a beard. There you go. We’re both in new places.

Brigitte Pellerin (00:29) How long since you last shaved? I’ve never seen you without a beard — but I haven’t known you for years and years, so.

Evan Potter (00:38) My lifetime. I was always clean shaven. It was just a COVID holdover. And I can grow a beard. Not everybody can grow a beard.

Brigitte Pellerin (00:48) Right. There you go.

So we are back after the election. We did the live stream, and I just want to say again to the people who joined the live stream: thank you. It was so cool to be able to do something like that. And I’m so gratified by the engagement and the feedback we get, and keep getting, from the people who watch or listen to our little conversation.

We’ve had a chance to sleep on things a little bit, a couple of days. And now we have a bit of a post-mortem.

Evan Potter (01:20) A bit. There’s lots of time.

Brigitte Pellerin (01:20) Let’s go from the easier to the trickier. How about that?

The easier, obviously, is that — as we’ve been saying the whole time, and you were right from the beginning — in Ontario, historically speaking, incumbents tend to win unless there’s a big reason why they shouldn’t win again. And this was, I think, a case study showing that. Comments?

Evan Potter (01:49) Well, you didn’t need to spend a lot of money on polling to realize that Ottawa council was not going to change. And I’m not patting myself on the back. I’m not a professional forecaster. I just know one thing — political scientists know one thing. Municipal politicians have a huge incumbency advantage, especially when there are no official parties. That just compounds the advantage.

So when I said last year that we were basically going to get the 2022 council again, I wasn’t trying to pat myself on the back. I just felt that was something Captain Obvious would say.

What I didn’t know was the mayor’s race. The other question was, would the mayor’s race be competitive? Again, last year I didn’t think it was going to be competitive. I was hoping it was going to be competitive, and I was hoping that you were going to be right all along.

But in terms of the ward races — no great surprise. In fact, a lot of the ward races were predictably blowouts. Catherine Kitts, ninety per cent.

Brigitte Pellerin (03:05) Yeah. There’s a couple of them. I think Theresa Kavanagh also got ninety or ninety-ish per cent. Laine Johnson, same thing. It’s as though nobody was running against them.

And in a way, it’s not just the incumbency advantage in some of those cases. I think that especially at the ward level, people are very satisfied with the representation they’re getting from their councillors — especially in the cases of those who got ninety per cent. And that’s as it should be. That’s the point of democracy. If people are happy, they go out and they vote.

Evan Potter (03:35) It’s as it should be. And I would also say that most of the candidates, with a few notable exceptions, did not start their campaigns until the official campaign start on May first. So these were candidates with low name recognition, if they had any recognition at all, starting at the official start of the municipal campaign. They had no chance.

And at the time, in the summer, I was thinking of writing a column about all the candidates. But I couldn’t do it. I think it would have just been — I would have told them not to bother, quite frankly. And that’s not good. I didn’t want to do that.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:14) Right. Because even in those wards where there was no competition, effectively, it’s good that there was some competition, even nominally. Look at me using my big words. It’s good to have people challenging even very popular incumbents.

Evan Potter (04:33) Well, for some of these challengers this will no doubt be their first campaign — and you need to have a training campaign, quite frankly. So for some of these, hopefully they’re training campaigns, and down the road when a ward becomes an open race they will have acquired some name recognition, some experience, and then they’ll be able to be serious competitors.

Brigitte Pellerin (04:59) Or perhaps go to a provincial-level election, or some other kind of public service position.

This is all good. And if you’re going to do a training campaign, do it in one where you kind of know you’re not going to win, so you’re not heartbroken at the end. And you get to make mistakes, and you get experience.

When you’re competing — I used to compete in kickboxing, and I used to say: I win a fight, or I learn something from a fight I’m not winning. And that’s the spirit in which a lot of those people went and fought in those wards. Saying, I probably am not going to win here, but I’m going to learn a whole bunch, including about myself and about my community and about how this politics business is played. And next time around I’ll come in with some experience under my belt, and if nothing else be much less nervous about how this works.

Evan Potter (05:48) Yeah. But there is a negative implication of having non-competitive candidates enter the race against an incumbent, and that is that it probably contributes to driving down the voter turnout. Because people look at —

Brigitte Pellerin (06:01) We’re going to get to that in a minute, because I have things to say.

Evan Potter (06:06) That’s part of the downside. What else? Can we talk about Jeff Leiper and Neil Saravanamuttoo?

Brigitte Pellerin (06:11) Yes. I just wanted to finish on the wards.

We both saw Erin Coffin dislodging Allan Hubley in Kanata South. So that’s not a surprise. The surprise to me was Bob Bell doing as well as he did in Ward One against Matt Luloff. There were two serious challengers there, Bob and Barbara Gandolfo. And Bob Bell finished the night, I think, close to twenty-five per cent — for a first-timer who didn’t have a lot of name recognition. He did remarkably well. That to me was a surprise.

Evan Potter (06:46) Okay. So Bob Bell — that is a great training camp for him and his campaign team. I think we should expect that the message Bob Bell and his campaign team will take is: hey, I got some traction, I developed my name recognition, developed my political brand, acquired some political capital. So I think he’s somebody who will come back. And I’m hoping that Barbara Gandolfo also comes back.

Brigitte Pellerin (07:15) And beyond the lessons of what this says about Bob Bell as a political personality, if I can use that word — it’s also a good idea for people to look at the campaign he ran and see what issues really resonated with voters. And what is it about the way he presented his positions on those issues that resonated?

Because this could have lessons for the four years ahead, for how to cover those issues. So I’m going to be looking at that. But also for next time, for him or anybody else: what really resonates with the voters in this ward? There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this exercise. That’s why I wanted to point to that ward.

Evan Potter (08:03) So there’s going to be a provincial and a federal election between now and October 2030. That’s coming up, and there will be another municipal election in 2030. So Bob Bell has some choices to make.

Brigitte Pellerin (08:17) It’s good to have choices in life.

Yes — Jeff. Speaking of the devil. Who was doing well, as I understood, in Orléans. Somehow that was not enough. He finished at thirty —

Evan Potter (08:34) Thirty-three point nine.

Brigitte Pellerin (08:…