Picture this: You’ve been elected to council, with all the best interests of your entire community in mind.
Most nights, you sit facing an empty gallery, a sign of a disinterested and mostly unengaged electorate.
Until one day, you make a decision that upsets a certain group.
Your next meeting is inundated. The gallery is full of pissed-off rabble-rousers, and they even brought kids. Some of the kids speak at the podium, likely urged by their parents, and while at the microphone they do their best to cry (again, likely urged by their parents).
A shameless appeal to emotion.
No, this is not referring to the Waldorf wave that crashed down on council July 9 (as far as I saw, it was just the adults crying at the podium for that one). This was the exact scene on June 7, 2022, at the first meeting after the Whistler Racket Club learned its footprint wasn’t in the plans for the proposed Northlands rezoning.
A wave of angry citizens descending on our decision-makers, determined to sway them by sheer force of numbers.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
But those pesky pickleballers aren’t the only ones who have needs in town.
Take the Feb. 6 council meeting of this year, where more than 50 local seniors turned up to state their case for a dedicated seniors centre in Whistler.
I didn’t see any tears at the podium in that instance, but that doesn’t mean their concerns are any less valid.
It’s funny, but when I heard of council’s decision re: the Waldorf school, my first thought was it was somehow connected to the Northlands rezoning, and the relocation of the Racket Club—which would be ironic, given the other special-interest group recently banging down council’s door.
So now we’ve got three niche, somewhat opposing clans trotting out to select council meetings in an attempt to show how important they are to the community—all claiming they are vitally important—while really only representing a small fraction of Whistler’s population.
Meanwhile, our municipal council is still tasked with making the best decision for all of us.
The only thing that’s certain is no matter what council decides, somebody is going to cry about it.
Before we go any further, it is worth noting this is not a comment on decisions made, one way or the other.
In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t have kids, and I don’t play tennis. I own nothing, have no real interests, and no illusions of making Whistler my permanent home (my retirement plan is to die in the climate wars).
Where these decisions ultimately land bears no effect on me.
But I don’t believe land-use decisions should be based on which side has the best, most smothering PR push, or can tug on the heartstrings the hardest.
And so I empathize with our elected officials in times like these.
Because that is where our municipal council seemingly finds itself: just trying to make the right decision that benefits the most members of our community, while being shamed, shouted at, and manipulated by people on all sides. People who, for the most part, can’t be bothered to show up to a single council meeting before their pet issue lands on the agenda.
This is not something I thought I would write this week, or ever. But watching recent council proceedings leaves me in a rare state of empathy for the powers that be.
Go watch the July 9 council Q&A, during which the Waldorf crowd hooted and hollered, and more than once ignored appeals to quiet down and respect the process of council.
Go read all the letters, and tell me the rhetoric of some isn’t at least a touch out of line.
It’s good to stand up for what we care about, and make our concerns heard. But it is imperative we do so with respect and basic decency for our elected officials and the hard work they do for our community.
It’s a thankless job, and the discourse around our politics is only getting more toxic by the day. If we want good people to keep going into politics, we need to learn to check the emotions at the door.
So here’s to our councillors, who have to wade through endless letters laying down all kinds of appeals to emotion, while all effectively saying the same thing; who sit through meeting after meeting, presentation after presentation, tasked with soaking in and understanding a lot of information in a very short time frame; who get dragged endlessly by anonymous armchair experts on Facebook who often have no Earthly idea what they’re talking about, only that they’re mad; who still have to make decisions on behalf of all of us at the end of the day.
It’s a big, dirty job, and somebody’s gotta do it.
Better them than me.
