Except for Halfmoon Bay, where both the regional director and school trustee candidates have been acclaimed, shíshálh Nation and most areas in the Sechelt Indian Government District, every community on the Sunshine Coast will have a chance to vote this Saturday.
From Sechelt, where 13 are vying for six council seats and three for mayor, to Rural Areas E and F where the candidates are locked in two-way races, voters have some extremely tough choices to make. In 2014, candidates won or lost in some cases by margins of only about 50 votes. The cliché that every vote counts is almost literally true, yet our Question of the Week suggests that almost one in three voters was still undecided in the last week of the election. Some readers have asked us why they should bother to vote, since they know so little about the people who are running.
Our response is simple. Water.
If one issue rose above others in this campaign it was water. Candidates expressed a range of views on whether water meters should be installed in Sechelt now or later, or never; whether the Chapman drawdown project, currently envisioned as a Stage-4-only emergency fix, should be pursued as planned or dropped like a hot potato; and whether the SCRD should resolve our critical supply problem by investing in wells, an engineered lake or in tapping a new natural source – and if so, which one.
These are questions that will have direct bearing on the quality of life, the limits of growth, the cost of services and the health of the environment on the Sunshine Coast for decades to come. The people who are elected Saturday will decide the answers.
If you read this Friday, or even early enough on Saturday, you can still get informed. Check out last week’s candidate profiles and visit their sites that are linked at the bottom, or contact them directly. Our election coverage began in early June, so you can search our website, coastreporter.net, by simply typing in a candidate’s name using the search tool at the top of the page. If you have more time, you can listen to interviews with almost any of the candidates on our Coast Reporter Radio podcast by clicking on the menu bar and going to “Audio.”
This is a very big election for the Sunshine Coast, with repercussions that will shape the future in the most fundamental ways. Choose wisely.
