In light of the shameful federal election turnout, it is rather clear that Canadians need to begin to pay attention to politics more closely on all levels whether they like it or not.
I see a direct correlation between low turnouts and political idiocy in our municipal government. In the 2007 civic election, a pathetic one in five or so Calgarians took the twenty minutes out of their lives to vote and look at the collection of fools that we have populating city hall now.
We have been watching the economy slow rather dramatically lately. Naturally property values have followed suit. Now city hall will be faced with a large drop in revenue and in light of their past performance, it is very unlikely that our alderman and mayor will have a clue how to deal with this.
Bronconnier has never been able to conceive of anything more creative in policy aside from whining with his hand out to every level of government for more transfers of funds. Annual tax increases have come along with Bronconnier’s simplistic beg, tax and spend strategy. We can be assured however that our simplistic mayor will retain his job as long as he chooses to as Calgarians are by and large much too lazy to pay attention to municipal politics much less put in that terribly heavy effort of voting.
Even worse than Bronconnier with his lack of creative initiative is when our Alderman decide to get creative. Nobody typifies this more than Brian Pincott.
Due to Erskine resigning with next to no notice within days of the municipal election, Pincott got lucky and was elected before any rational candidates could get organized and make a run for the seat. Now Calgary has it’s very own version of lunatic Darwin award winner Tooker Gomberg (wanted to flood Edmonton’s streets in winter so people could skate to work and save the environment).
It has been a challenging year for Calgary. Gangs have been roaming our streets, infrastructure is well behind, traffic is a mess and on and on.
Instead of dealing with these issues, Pincott has focused on a strategy of banning and spending. Pincott wants to ban you from fertilizing your lawn and killing anthills. Pincott wants to violate your property rights and ban you from cutting trees on your own property. Pincott was happy to support spending a million dollars to have artistic decoration at Calgary’s sewage processing facility and wanted to go one step further by hiring a city of Calgary poet for $250,000 per year. Pincott happily supported spending $50 million dollars on pedestrian bridges downtown while we have countless unfinished infrastructure projects in every sector of the city. Pincott has howled for a review of Calgary’s off-leash dog parks. Apparently they are cutting in on the pleasures enjoyed by his latte-lapping buddies doing their daily jogs who feel that the thousands kilometers of dog-free pathways in the city are not enough for their chosen jogging routes.
With the coming cash crunch in Calgary’s city hall, is Pincott finally beginning to show some common sense and planning? Not for a second.
Brian Pincott’s latest crusade is the banning of backyard fire pits. While city hall is considering pissing away a fortune in licensing fire pits in this non-issue, Pincott feels this is not enough and we must ban them. Apparently, city hall has had over 300 complaints in a year about fire pits. Hmmm, out of a million people, how much of an issue is this? How many of the 300 complainants are the kind of folks who call the city when a neighbor leaves their outdoor light on one minute past 10pm?
Hours will be wasted in debate and countless thousands wasted in trying to enforce new regulations. The real reason for Pincott’s push here is his environmental extremism of course. How dare people burn the carcasses of deceased trees!!! This celebration of the passing of one of Gaea’s creations is repugnant and must be banned!!!
As with Elizabeth May, Pincott is of the Sierra Club alumni. This “green” version of PETA is churning out record numbers of nuts who realize that in partisan politics they would be exposed as the nuts that they are thus they have gravitated to civic politics where they can slip under the radar.
Pincott has pulled off quite a collection of idiotic notions and motions in his short year in office. Doubtless he will be doing a great deal more in the way of policy pollution in his remaining two years in office. Perhaps a policy enforcing the mandatory wearing of organic clothing and veganism by Calgarians will be next.
The time to arrange an opposition to nuts like Pincott is now and it is important. Had there been any indications that the electorate in Calgary is awake, I would feel somewhat confident that the residents in that ward would already be determined to turf this loon at the next possible chance. Unfortunately I am not so confident in this and it will take and effort to dislodge this tax-draining parasite.
We are clearly coming into a period where fiscal restraint is going to be critical on all levels of government. The city of Calgary is no exception and we need to clean house in city council. NDP Bob Hawkesworth and Druh Farrell are well worthy of removal as well but Pincott does indeed stand head and shoulders above them in waste and foolishness. Our future comfort as Calgarians depends on our municipal management. Will we take the reigns and fix it?
