A word on fiscal responsibility

Election season has come, and with it the traditional flurry of campaign advertisement. Major contenders to our municipal council engage in a fundraising contest and spending spree, competing for voters’ attention. Behold lawn signs and road signs galore sprouting from the ground at major intersections!

Now ask yourselves what it says about the candidates in question. For starters, are these signs working? Not according to a recent CHEK News poll, in which 97% of respondents admitted that campaign signs do not influence their vote.

In a sense, I say this is the wrong answer. Campaign signs should influence your vote—negatively, that is. Because big campaign fundraisers and spenders will tax and spend once on the council just the same, in reckless disregard for return on investment at that.

Think about it for a moment. Even the smallest lawn signs can cost fifteen dollars per unit in bulk, the largest ones triple that amount. All one such sign displays is a name, a picture, and a slogan. Large road signs? Ask for a quote! and yet they display no more than the most modest of lawn signs. Moreover, they’re being erected at road segments motorists zip through without a care in the world trying to pay attention to the road, and even if they did care they would get no more information than the candidate’s name. Seriously, did you ever have a conversation with a road sign? They don’t say much.

In contrast, I bought business cards for less than twenty cents per unit which carry the same amount of information. I hand them over in person to start a conversation, and they stay in people’s wallets afterwards for them to look me up. For fifty cents a unit, I bought postcards filled with my background and crammed with platform highlights. And I did the graphics design myself instead of recruiting a professional.

But even these pale in comparison to wearable buttons. For about two dollars per unit, I can walk around town with a button that triggers a conversation wherever I go. I’ve been doing this for several months; these are the ideal ice breaker!

This is part of why I do not solicit donations. I’m used to living on disability benefits, which force recipients to spend their meagre budget wisely. I also want to make a point of being efficient, not to be beholden to large campaign donors, show that even the most modest of contestants can win on a shoestring budget, and ultimately lessen the influence of campaign donations in politics.

Besides, the best campaign advertisement nowadays is free. My Facebook profile is the talk of the town, my posts reaching thousands of people and eliciting hundreds of comments, yet I haven’t spent a dime on sponsored advertisement. Road signs and newspaper ads are campaigning methods better relegated to the past; social media are the way to go in the twenty-first century. Yet several candidates have no social media presence whatsoever, and instead invest all of their efforts into canvassing, which is about the most inefficient way to reach individual voters.

Speaking of which, I’m also a chronic pain patient prone to burnout, so I have to spend my energy accordingly. That’s one reason I don’t canvass; instead I attend community events, rallies, and protests. Think about it: instead of knocking at fifty doors over a whole afternoon hoping half a dozen random strangers will spare time to chat with me, I attend a one-hour event which draws fifty people whom I know in advance to be attuned to my priorities and disproportionately likely to get political.

Oh, and don’t get me started about the tedium of assembling road signs and spreading lawn signs across town, keeping track of their locations, only to take these back right after voting day and dispose of them at the campaign’s expense; no wonder candidates need to mobilize an army of volunteers. Somehow I’m glad this is beyond my physical capacity.

So when I promise to get the municipality’s finances in order and fund essential services without raising property taxes, I’m not bluffing. I intend to govern this city treating taxpayer money with the same respect as my own campaign finances. In this regard, I say contenders for municipal council shouldn’t be competing about who raises the most campaign funds, but who can win while spending the least. So far I’m running on $185 in donations and $300 of my own money. Let’s see if I can win a seat on the council with less than five hundred bucks. Place your bets!