Scanned, recopied or Internet copy, if there are errors, please e-mail me with corrections:
Opening comments: More at the end.
About Ward 9 protest candidate Antonio Ferreira Baptista.
To the web-page with the list of articles regarding this matter.
October 30, 2006 in Random Access - John Stewart's BLOG
Meet your talking head How are people going to choose between Candidate Flotsam and Candidate Jetsom in Mississauga’s municipal election one week from today?
With just a handful of all-candidates’ meetings scattered across the whole municipality, finding out about the policies and background of candidates is problematic. Most people will be looking at the answers that candidates furnish to The Mississauga News in response to the question of how they would make the City (in the case of council candidates) or the school system (in the case of trustees), a better place. They’ll also be checking this website for those answers. And, if they want to see their candidate speak to them directly, they can go to the website at Rogers Community Television.
This time around, as well as running three-minute meet-your-candidate blurbs on Cable 10 Television, Rogers has posted those same candidate clips on their website. That makes life a lot more convenient for people who want to put a name, a face and a voice to an election sign but can’t remember when to tune in for their ward information.
You can go to www.rogerstelevision.com/elections, then click on Mississauga to view the candidate pitches. “We’re getting a good response to it,” says local Station Manager Jake Dheer. Yeah, especially in ward 10, I’ll bet. With 23 candidates, sorting out the field is a full-time job.
One of the most valuable things about asking candidates to participate is that, inevitably, some choose not to do so. Then you can strike them off your serious-about-office list. It’s always amazing that people will go to the trouble of registering to be a candidate, then do nothing about actually trying to get elected. The candidates who don’t respond to the newspaper questions are almost inevitably the same suspects who do not respond to the opportunity for a free political broadcast.
At least one candidate recorded a message and then had a change of heart and insisted it not be broadcast. That, of course, is the one we’d all really love to see.
As with everything else, the incumbents usually have the advantage of being experienced before the camera and coming off best, though not always. One of the messages is very refreshing in that someone declares that you don’t necessarily have to vote for him. Ward 9 protest candidate Antonio Ferreira Baptista, who is charged with uttering death threats against incumbent Pat Saito over a poem he wrote and is running to bring attention to that issue, spends his three minutes slamming the incumbent and then says, “vote for me or someone else who is running” against her. So much for consolidating the anti-Saito vote, not that there is much in Ward 9.
There are no clips from the mayoralty candidates but Rogers will be recording the portion of the Cooksville Munden Park Homeowners Organization all-candidates’ session dealing with the mayoralty at St. Timothy’s School Wednesday night. They’ll broadcast it the next night at 7:30 p.m. On election night, Rogers starts its coverage from City Hall, and various local political camps at 8 p.m., anchored by Roger Wardell, host of First Local news.
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