It's days after a watershed weekend in Prince George politics and there's still plenty of leftover crow to consume.
For those of you scoring at home, last week's column confidently predicted Don Zurowski would best Lyn Hall and become this city's next mayor in last Saturday's municipal election. Oh, the taste of bitter bird. Despite trailing Zurowski by 10 points in a mid-October poll, Hall beat his opponent 10,463-8,850 for a comfortable 1,613-vote win.
Since this column is already a thin feast of bleak feathers, here's some dubious math. The poll, conducted for the Citizen and CKPG by Ontario-based Oraclepoll surveyed 350 city residents from Oct. 15-20 with a 5.2 per cent margin of error, 19 times out of 20. Suppose - a large supposition considering, despite the largest number of votes cast in municipal history, voter turnout was 38 per cent - the poll reflected those who eventually voted and correctly identified just under half of those who would cast ballots for mayor were decided.
Based on that loose thinking, one could guess that of the 19,313 votes cast for either candidate Saturday, 9,822 of them were decided as of the October poll, of which the poll said 5,402 or 55 per cent favoured Zurowski and 4,420 or 45 per cent favoured Hall. That left 9,491 undecided voters to sway; if the poll holds true, Hall beat out Zurowski by a factor of almost two-to-one among undecideds, 6043-3448 votes.
If this flimsy logic stands up, Zurowski - a former longtime councillor and businessman in the city - had a bigger initial base of support than Hall despite the former's six-year absence from public life but Hall won by flat out convincing more people he was the better candidate. (David McWalter, who worked on Hall's campaign, told the Citizen their numbers showed the percentage of undecideds go from 58 per cent to 44 per cent on election day and that Hall was leading three days before Saturday's ballot.)
Hall's time as a school board chair served him well in galvanizing support - during their Nov. 6 debate, as he talked about the town hall meetings he'd taken part in as the board mulled closing schools, he projected the ease of someone who'd faced many crowds, many of them skeptical, some outright hostile. His campaign - which last week's column wrongly supposed wouldn't keep up with Zurowski's - also burned up the phone lines to connect with those undecideds - McWalter said eight volunteers worked four hours a shift for 20 nights to make 34,000 calls to potential voters. With apologies to Breaking Bad fans, maybe the tagline from the 2014 mayoral campaign is Better Call Hall.
As reported in the Citizen, he also may have benefited from an endorsement from the North Central Labour Council of B.C. and the backing of organized labour in general. Indeed, the council's picks make up seven of the nine seats on council - Hall, incumbent councilors Brian Skakun, Frank Everitt, Murry Krause, Garth Frizzell and newcomers Terri McConnachie and Jillian Merrick. Janet Bigelow, the president of CUPE Local 1048, which represents the city's inside workers, stressed the union only made recommendations in its endorsements but the union backed its words with a phone call/door-knocking campaign as well as a provincial union mailout in which Prince George was used as a case study for the "expensive and wrong-headed decisions" of a "right-wing mayor and council"; CUPE also contributed $2,000 to McConnachie's campaign and Merrick's campaign got $7,000 from CUPE Local 148, CUPE BC and the union's national body.
Spending curmudgeon Albert Koehler and eighth-place Susan Scott are the only councillors not to bear the blessing of brothers and sisters, which will make for an interesting test of this council when the current contracts with city workers expire in 2016.
Affecting those negotiations will be the efficacy of Hall's consensus-driven, new-day approach to city staff and administration and his answer to the political masterstroke of the campaign, Frizzell's open letter to the next mayor. The veteran councillor's outside-voice ruminations on leadership style singlehandedly framed the debate between Hall and Zurowski and contained perhaps the most scathing indictment of former Mayor Shari Green's reign between the lines of these two sentences: "I've worked with the style Dan Rogers fostered with Derek Bates and staff and the style Shari Green fostered with Beth James and staff. They were very different."
Top-vote getter Skakun hinted how 'different' at a forum with: ""Nothing is going to happen, moving forward, if we don't have a good council that works. The last three years have been challenging. We need the right people at the table, we need the right leadership." Hall ran extensively on a more inclusive, less heavyhanded approach - a Council Mayor rather than a CEO Mayor, according to the Frizzell dialectic. But it's one thing to talk of a united, can-do, Kumbaya council when everyone is just a name on a piece of paper - it'll be interesting to see if the fellowship lasts when the snow's falling by the foot, city workers come knocking for pots full of gold, or, heaven forbid, the Canada Winter Games go off piste.
Hall is in an interesting position in Prince George history. The last two mayors and six years of Dan Rogers and Shari Green were marked by troubled single terms at the head of the council table. Will Hall break the curse of Colin Kinsley or will Patricia Boulevard prove to again be a revolving door since the departure of the iconic four-term mayor?
But that's a question for another day. For the moment, congratulations to the new mayor, council and those unheralded captains of education on school board.
Now, back to that crow...
