Orleans Weekly Journal
Published: Friday, June 20, 2008 

Let's stop the bickering and work together

With all of the rain this spring, our lawns and parks are as green as the hills of Ireland. As a bonus, I have not watered my lawn once in 2008, so thank you Mother Nature.  

However, we’ve had too much political rain in the form of the public spat, dueling letters to the editor and sniping sound bites between our MPP Phil McNeely and Innes Ward Coun. Rainer Bloess. As someone who is somewhat wired to the political beat of our community, similar slights and sadistic sarcasm – although not as public or prolonged as the McNeely-Bloess tiff – are also evident in the federal-provincial and federal-municipal dynamic when it comes to the relations between our MP, MPP and three east-end city councillors (four if you include Michel Bellemare).

From my experience at city hall, as a former federal candidate in 2004 and with some 20 years of partisan and activist involvement under my belt, politics at its best can be a noble, selfless and community-uniting endeavour. But far too often we see the underbelly of elected life which is petty, personal and pathetic.

This is in no way meant to disparage our current crop of east-end elected officials with whom I have good relations. Royal Galipeau is my MP and I worked for him in the last election and will proudly do so in the next one. Phil McNeely, while not of my partisan stripe, has earned two successive and convincing mandates to represent us at Queen’s Park and he is always open to suggestions or criticism from my “blue corner of Fallingbrook-Pineridge.”

And councillors Bloess, Monette and Jellett were great to work with at city hall and very supportive during my exhilarating (albeit brief) stint with the mayor. All are hard-working, put in 70-plus hour weeks and I do believe are sincerely motivated to serve our community.

When it comes to human interactions (just like in our own lives at work and at home), they can hold passionate points of view and disagree with their colleagues around their own council table or at another level of government. Fair enough. So I won’t pull a Rodney King and whine for us all to get along, but what residents do expect is for our politicians to hash their differences out in private as much as possible.

Dirty laundry, tit-for-tat spectacles make for great theatre during Question Period and are fun for columnists and political junkies, however, they do nothing to move the key issues of our community from dream to reality.

Our politicians of varying stripes can hold partisan views and memberships, but when they get elected, the party card needs to be put in the back of the wallet and old scores and grievances need to be forgotten. Our community is in competition with other regions for jobs, investment, public infrastructure and attention from senior orders of government. Given this backdrop, infighting amongst our local politicians is deplorable … folks, enough is enough.