Claire,

Merci pour votre commentaire. C’est vrai ce que vous dites, et j’aurais du penser à ca. Vous pouvez me telephoner à 819-997-9080 pendant la journée et le soir à 819-827-6328. Entretemps, je vais essayer d’écrire quelquechose à mettre sur cette mini-blog là.

Mike

Dear Ryan,

Thank you for your comment. It clearly demonstrates a point I have been trying to make about the inherently nasty tone of preservation Chelsea. I’m not sure why you care about getting ahold of me since you wouldn’t vote for me if I was the only person on earth to vote for.

And it’s GeisterFER.

Thanks Ryan. Good luck with Geoff Bleich’s campaign.

Ryan,

As I said in my earlier post, good luck with Geoff Bleich’s campaign.

Michael

I’d hoped to get this posted at the top of my page, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. Here’s a bit about me:

The first thing I like to tell people about myself is that I am a fiscal conservative. It’s true. In 2000 I ran as a candidate for the Canadian Alliance in Hull-Aylmer. I lost, badly, but I learned a lot about myself. On the Conservative spectrum I am apparently what is called a civil libertarian. I believe in small government, low taxes and manageable debt. I have strong opinions about things like gay marriage (I’m for it) and abortion (I’m pro-choice, but anti-abortion) so I am not really a social conservative.

From my perspective, the role of government is to manage change and conflict, and to provide guidance and regulation where necessary. There will always be a multitude of views in Chelsea, and they will not all get their way. Politics is the art of compromise, which is one of the few platitudes I will allow myself in this piece. My role as councillor will be to channel the views of my constituents to the council chambers to advise the decision-making process.

Ultimately, it is not so much what I think, as what my constituents think, or at least the majority of them. It’s not always the fairest system, but it is the best we have so far.

The role of the municipality is to serve its citizens, not the other way around. Sometimes I feel as if the tail is wagging the dog (that’s a cliché, not a platitude). Dealing with municipal staff can make going to the dentist look like fun. I intend to change that, through the proper channels.

Some people are worried about the pace of change in Chelsea. We’ve accumulated too much debt, they say. We should stop everything and catch our breath. I think what we really need is a reality check. While it is true that we had less debt ten years ago, we also had worse roads. What we didn’t pay in interest payments to service the debt, we paid to repair the suspensions on our cars.

We’ve also taken on more responsibility from the provincial government who has been dumping, er…downloading services onto us. We have had to build fire stations and buy fire engines and hire staff, all of which costs money.

Is our debt excessive? No. Should we plunge into more of it? No. Can we reduce it? Maybe, but that requires choices. We all know that we can’t lower taxes and lower the debt at the same time. In fact the two have an inverse relationship: you lower one, the other tends to go up. I don’t want to raise taxes any more than you want to pay them.

Are there services that can be cut? Maybe, and that is one of the things that any council coming in will be taking a look at.

I think it should be fun. I look forward to being your councillor!