There's a phrase that gets used a lot in civic life: "we're staying neutral." Community associations love it. It signals fairness, evenhandedness, a refusal to play favourites in an election.
These are volunteers. They mean well. "Lord, forgive them, they know not what tey do."
Neutrality is a choice made through action, not just through words — and the choices being made by community associations across Rideau-Rockcliffe this campaign season are anything but neutral in effect even if they may think so.
Here's what's happening. The incumbent councillor, King, has had multiple opportunities to meet with these associations — repeat visits, ongoing conversations, relationships built over a full term in office and reinforced again during the campaign.
The challenger, so far only me, the people asking voters to consider something different are being offered exactly one shared opportunity: a single debate.
One meeting, for everyone running against the incumbent, to do what the incumbent has already done several times over.
That's not neutrality. That's a structural head start, dressed up as fairness because it technically offers "equal" access to the one event that exists. But equal access to a single, constrained event is not equal access. It's a fig leaf.
The five-minute rule
And it gets worse once you look at how that one debate tends to be run. "You have five minutes to answer" sounds organized.
It sounds fair — the same clock for everyone. But rigid timing rules like this don't create a level playing field; they create a format that rewards whoever already has the most practiced, most repeated, most pre-tested answers.
That's the incumbent, every time. They've answered these questions before — in committee, in council, in the associations' own previous meetings with them. A challenger encountering many of these issues for the first time in public needs room to think out loud, to push back, to actually engage — not a buzzer.
Real dialogue needs follow-up questions. It needs the ability to challenge a vague or evasive answer. It needs more than one room and more than one association's blessing.
What we get instead is a format that — intentionally or not — protects the status quo: minimize exposure, minimize spontaneity, minimize the risk that a challenger says something compelling enough to move votes.
How incumbency advantage actually gets built
This is how it happens , not through one dramatic, unfair act, but through a dozen small structural ones.
- Name recognition.
- Established relationships.
- Inside access.
And now, the gatekeeping of the very venues meant to inform voters.
Community associations occupy a strange and powerful position in municipal politics.
They're not the media. They're not the city. But for a lot of residents, they're the most trusted source of information about who's running and what they stand for.
That trust comes with responsibility. When an association grants the incumbent unlimited access while rationing challengers to a single, tightly controlled forum, it isn't staying out of the election. It's shaping the outcome.
What would actually be fair
None of this requires an association to endorse anyone. It just requires a few honest changes:
- Offer challengers the same number of meetings, and the same kind of access, that the incumbent gets not symbolically, but actually.
- If one debate is truly all that's feasible, design it for substance instead of stage management: real time for follow-up questions, real time for rebuttal, real time to actually compare candidates instead of just clocking them.
- Be transparent about why access has looked so lopsided and fix it before the next campaign, not after voters have already made up their minds with half the information.
It's no wonder incumbents win so disproportionately when the institutions meant to inform voters keep handing them the microphone and handing everyone else a stopwatch.
But who knew, who even bothered to watch? This is the only debate Rogers removed from its library.
