With beaches beckoning and campsites calling, there’s a good chance this fall’s municipal election is the last thing on your mind.

Not to be the chocolate bar at the bottom of the pool, but there’s a civic election in 72 days—and keeping track of who is running and what they stand for in the 13-municipality CRD is no walk in the park.

Thirteen municipalities mean 13 mayors, 78 councillors, plus school trustees and rural CRD reps.

That's a lot of politicking. You need a scorecard to keep up. 

Fortunately, a coalition of community advocacy organizations is working on just that.

Livable CRD says it wants to make it a little easier for voters to decide who to support, so it’s preparing a list of roughly 100 questions to send to each candidate. 

“Municipal elections are important, and we keep hearing from people that when they vote in municipal elections, it’s really hard to find out where candidates actually stand on issues,” says Michael Bassili, a Livable CRD spokesperson.

“So, we're trying to give all the information possible as openly and easily as possible so that people who are going to go vote for a certain candidate have the ammunition they need to make an informed decision,” he tells Capital Daily.

The group consists of area advocates from 12 groups, including Climate Justice Victoria, Family Doctors for Saanich, and Better Transit YYJ—a transportation advocacy group for which Bassili serves as an advocate. Collectively, they’re crafting a series of questions for candidates ahead of the Oct. 17 municipal elections.

Each group will contribute questions in its area of expertise, and Livable CRD will send those queries to suss out each candidate’s position on issues facing CRD residents: transit, housing, climate, walking, cycling, healthcare, arts, and good governance. The advocates will mark their responses using a letter grade (A-F) system. 

Candidate surveys and profiles with letter grades will be published ahead of election day, with results available on the Livable CRD blog, the group says. There’s also a mailing list voters can subscribe to.

Bassili said Livable CRD has no stake in the race—and the idea isn’t to convince anyone who to vote for. 

“We're hoping that people will gather general information—enough information that they'll feel confident about casting their vote for that particular candidate instead of having to rely on just the promotional material that they put out or maybe flyers they got in the mail, that sort of thing.”
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Not everyone is enthusiastic about the project

While the goal is to increase civic engagement, Livable CRD is facing another engagement challenge—not everyone wants to take part.

The municipal advocacy group Save Our Saanich is backing a slate of candidates in that district. It says none of its six candidates plans to respond to the questionnaire, “as biased results will be the only outcome of this effort.”

Bassili denies any bias. 

“At our core, on our website, and in all of our press releases and news appearances, we stress that we are a nonpartisan organization and we don't endorse any candidate. Period,” he said.

“Some people have already come out publicly saying that they don't want to participate in the project, which is completely fine, up to them,” he said. 

“But the goal, of course, is to get as many of them, ideally all of them, to fill out the questionnaire.”