Last Updated on: 21st April 2015, 09:32 am
Municipal elections can be confusing beasts. Here in Kitchener Waterloo, for instance, we have on the ballot a mayor, 2 councils (city and regional), a Regional Chair and whatever your flavour of school board. You cast one vote for Mayor, one for ward representative on your city council, one for Chair of the Regional Council, up to four votes for your city’s representatives on Regional Council and up to 4 votes for your area’s members of the Waterloo Region District School Board. That’s a lot of people, and it can be hard to keep them and their agendas straight.
Thankfully, the local newspapers have, for the most part, done a pretty good job of letting us know who everyone is and where they stand on the important issues around here. So if you still need to make some decisions, here are some links that may help.
These are the Kitchener Post’s candidate profiles for everything but the school board, which are in their own section here.
The Waterloo Chronicle has also been profiling candidates, but if you can find them in compiled form you’re a better man than I. At the best of times this lack of organization sucks, but considering that both of those papers are owned by the same company it’s especially lame. Get it together, Waterloo! You’re supposed to be the centre of the tech universe, for god’s sake!
The Cambridge Times has breakdowns of the election races in their Hot Topics area, plus a special section for all things election.
The Record, our area’s biggest paper, has an alphabetical list of everyone running for everything. I appreciate the comprehensive list of profiles, but organizing it by race and municipality would’ve been nice.
Finally, if you’re around here and wondering where to vote once you’ve sorted everyone out, WRVotes.com has everything you need. There are links there that will take you directly to the election pages on the websites of your respective cities. I assume you know where you live, so figuring out where to go from there shouldn’t be too difficult.
Carin and I voted in advance as she mentioned after we did so, but if you haven’t, please do get out tomorrow. Every election is important. The federal ones have the power to screw up your country, The Provincial ones can screw up your particular slice of the country and these here municipal ones can screw up your back yard. No, politicians aren’t perfect, but I’d rather choose the folks I think are going to screw things up the least in all those places, if nothing else. Hopefully you do, too.