With the municipal elections coming up this fall, on October 24, voters will be looking to our slates of candidates and judging them based on their ideas and platforms. Sometimes we spend so much time evaluating candidates by their politics, though, that we forget to evaluate them as potential leaders.
This is the second article in an ongoing column by Clarence Braun, former mayor of Niverville, about the qualities of leadership we should look for in those who will lead our communities for the next four years.
Last month, we talked about how each of us has an experience of leadership based on growing up in families. Whether we had one or two parents in our lives, we were all impacted by parental leaders. The reality is that we probably formed some ideas about leadership from those early experiences.
If you grew up in a family where your opinions weren’t valued, that might reflect on the lack of importance you place on your perspective as a citizen today. In a democratic country, the perspective of every citizen has the same value and worth when it comes to choosing our leaders.
But voter participation is at an all-time low in most democratic countries around the world. People have become disengaged from the political process and have stopped caring—to the point where they have ceased to exercise their rights to help elect their leaders.
Our provincial and federal governments have tended to be very partisan. Added to that is the reality that the greater the distance between a government and the people, the greater the lack of connection. The party system we inherited from the British Commonwealth is one of the best in the world in terms of democracy, yet it has problems.
Unlike a republic like the United States, which elects its president by a direct vote along with its senators, congressman, sheriffs, and judges, our parliamentary system elects a political party, and the party itself then holds a leadership convention to choose its leader.
However, the leader, having been chosen by the party, owes his or her allegiance primarily to the people within the party who elected him or her. Leaders in our system are actually elected with an agenda and chosen by a relatively small number of people.
The various leaders’ agendas are then placed before the populace and we elect a party to lead us based on those agendas.
I would suggest that this system is problematic.
It seems that the only way to get voter participation up is for the populace to get angry enough to show up in force to make a change.
The reality is that the party in power tends to work hard to maintain their power, meaning that good ideas from the opposition are rarely part of any meaningful discourse. This can go the other way, too, with the opposition parties so concerned with opposition that they don’t recognize good ideas from the party in power.
The good news is that the party system doesn’t come into play at the municipal level. Communities like Niverville are not led by partisan leaders. Leaders are elected to serve without any party affiliation, and they’re elected by people who believe that their voices are important and should be heard.
So there are many different kinds of leadership, but it should be important to all those who aspire to lead to walk alongside the people for the benefit of the community.
We don’t have to get angry to make a difference. We simply need to care and ask those who aspire to lead to engage with us. We need to ask those who desire to lead to communicate the things they see. We need to see the value in our own voices being heard, and we need to see the value in our ability to vote—to choose.
Free choice is ours and if we choose to be involved, then we choose to be part of the solution.
