By Stephen Vance, Editor
In July four years ago we were starving for municipal election candidates, particularly for the position of councillor. At that time there were three mayoral candidates, however candidates for council were severely lacking. Even by the end of August in 2010, there were just three candidates announced for council seats.
That quickly changed with a surge of candidates around the filing deadline resulting in 13 candidates vying for the five council seats, and two each making a run for the Deputy Mayor and Mayor’s chairs.
This time around we aren’t lacking for candidates at this early stage. As of this morning, Meaford voters already have nine candidates to choose from for the five council seats, and two candidates are hoping to replace Mayor Francis Richardson in the municipality’s top elected post. Thus far the only position lacking a challenge is for Deputy Mayor with only incumbent Harley Greenfield having made his intention to run known earlier this year.
And there’s still two months until the deadline for candidates to file their papers, so many more candidates could surface.
A healthy roster of candidates may offer voters plenty of choice, but it can also make it more difficult for voters who may not have the opportunity to meet with many if any of the candidates personally in order to assess their vote worthiness.
At the end of this month, The Independent will be sending an election package to each of the candidates in which we are requesting the standard election time stuff – bio, platform, community history and so on. We’ve also got some questions for our candidates, but before we click that send button, we want to include our readers.
At The Independent, giving a voice to our readers is one of our primary goals, and for this reason we would like to include some questions from our readers for candidates to answer.
Do you have specific questions you would like council and mayoral candidates to address? Send your questions to us at editor@themeafordindependent.ca and we will select our three favourites to include in the candidate election package.
If your question doesn’t make it into our final three, fear not as we will publish all questions received on our website.
Submitted questions must include the reader’s name and contact information, however only the reader’s name will be included with the questions sent to candidates, and the same applies for the full list of questions we will publish online.
So come on Meaford, have your say, let us know what you want to ask of the candidates who are seeking your vote on October 27.
