Re: Residents favour amalgamation (News Sept. 3).
So Angus Reid ‘constructed’ a poll which we are encouraged to believe accurately reports the feelings of ‘the majority’.
Honest reporting of such an event would include, at the very least, the questions these people were asked, how many people responded, and if they were home-owners (eg, tax-payers) or simply ‘residents’?
Information gathered through polls are famously inaccurate and misleading, and to report such a sampling as a factual representation of the true majority is, at best, sloppy journalism, and at worst, intentionally misleading.
Further, where are the studies supporting the contention that municipalities which have gone down this path have profited financially and improved quality of governance: Toronto, for example?
Electing Rob Ford as mayor of, say, Esquimalt or Oak Bay would not doom the entire metropolis to suffer through his reign, and the trouble such a person may create can be offset in some ways by the fact that there are high quality people of integrity in the adjacent communities.
I do not believe for a second that ‘a majority’ of home-owners (and not simply residents) would prefer such a scenario. Please, report facts, not Angus Reid’s fantasies.
Personally, one of the things I have always loved about Oak Bay is the feeling of small town, where the mayor and the elected officials live nearby.
They are neighbours, and very often, friends.
They are accessible, and, more importantly, they are ordinary people doing the sort of work that most of us would rather not do. In the last 25 years, I have not seen a single mayor of Victoria that I felt could hold a candle to any of those of the smaller municipalities.
Alec Allison
Oak Bay
