I briefly considered running for mayor of Humboldt. Naturally, there are a few barriers to this candidacy, I don't live in Humboldt, I have no intention of moving there, and I don't particularly want to be mayor. Then, why on earth did I consider running for mayor of that city? Well, the reason is simple, there's only one mayoral candidate, and thus it will be an acclamation. It's one of five cities in the province that will see their mayors acclaimed, the others being Lloydminster, North Battleford, Swift Current and Melville. None of those cities will have a real mayoral race, and that seems like that's wrong.
The entire point of democracy is that the people choose the person who will be in charge of their city, their province, their county, or whatever public sphere we're talking about. Sometimes there's not much choice but it's still important for a choice to be there, so you can support whoever they think is the best for the job.
One can argue that an acclamation is support by omission, as everyone likes the mayor because they aren't interested in running against them. That's fine, but it's kind of a dangerous road to travel down. It might be the case in a city where a mayor is popular with the people and nobody has any issues with their policies or record. That's fine to an extent, but you have to admit that the entire point of an election is to get those candidates to defend their policies and record. If they get voted in by a landslide, then they did a good job over their term, but the entire point of the process is to make sure that they still have to have their record judged.
Naturally, not every city has this problem. Regina, which is coming off a popular candidate stepping down, has nine candidates for mayor. The surplus of candidates is likely due to people thinking they have a chance with no incumbent. It's also partially due to Regina being a larger city, all of the places with few candidates are smaller cities, which leads to the inevitable problem of a smaller pool to draw from. You have the people willing to be mayor, but that might be a fairly small pool. Take out everyone who likes the candidate who is already in place, and you've got a very small number of people to draw from, perhaps nobody at all in some cases. It's a shame if nobody wants to actually take a run at the chair, but you can understand it to some degree.
There still should be more than one candidate, however, and someone should have stepped up and declared they were running. They may not have had a real chance, but they would give the people of their city a real option, and in the process it would have made the whole democratic process make sense. Without the choice, these elections have no meaning. One candidate might be clearly superior, but at least we can say that through the election process.
The nomination process is done for this year, it ended on Wednesday afternoon. As a result, if you were on the fence, it's too late, you put off the decision too long. But everyone on the fence should remember this in four years, and instead of thinking of their chances or contemplating whether or not they like the candidates currently in the running, they should just take that chance. If not for them, for all of us, since democracy depends on having a choice.
