Adam Wilson, on crutches, at Tom Dyas' victory celebration.

Image Credit: FACEBOOK/Adam Wilson

While Tom Dyas points to having more time and door knocking as the keys to his success in unseating Colin Basran to become mayor of Kelowna, his other big weapon was Adam Wilson.

Wilson has deep ties to the Conservative Party, from his student days as president of the Conservative Association at McGill University to being the national youth chair of Kellie Leitch’s 2017 Conservative national leadership campaign to working on Kelowna-Lake Country Conservative MP Tracy Gray’s re-election campaign 2021, plus more.

But, he told iNFOnews.ca, jumping into a local government race really has nothing to do with political parties.

“What I love about municipal politics, at least in Kelowna, is there are no parties,” Wilson said. “I find that party lines tend to get blurred the closer you get to the local level.”

Wilson grew up in Kelowna and now works in the city as Director of Government Relations for the Canadian Pharmacists Association.

He also describes himself as “politically engaged.”

He was not involved in Dyas’ 2018 failed bid to unseat Basran, which got a late start to the campaign.

READ MORE: ‘Time’ biggest difference in campaigns for Kelowna’s new Mayor Tom Dyas

While the Conservative party is deeply entrenched in Kelowna, things like its membership lists are proprietary so Wilson, and Dyas, had to start from scratch creating their list of supporters, Wilson said.

The campaign started with Dyas and his sister, Susan, knocking on doors in June.

“Who knows how much better we’d have done if he had saved all his data from last time because data, obviously, is important in a campaign," Wilson said. "When you start with zero, it can be hard."

He expected the Basran campaign to have the advantage because it would have had a much bigger list of supporters to draw on after two previous mayoral campaigns.

Dyas' door knocking helped shape the campaign as he found people were most concerned about crime and traffic.

While traffic didn’t surface as much of a campaign issue, crime certainly did, especially with Dyas pushing in the later parts of the campaign that Kelowna is the crime capital of Canada.

Knowing how to run such an organized campaign and how to pick up on the cues delivered by the public is important for a campaign manager, as Wilson was.

But, with party faithful being tired from provincial and federal elections in the past three years, he found that most of the people who joined the campaign as volunteers were strangers to him, not connected through the party, he said.

He could not speak to the role the Conservative Party may have played in shaping the new council where three of the top four finishers were newcomers, including former Kelowna-Lake Country Conservative MP Ron Cannan, who finished first.

The only incumbent councillor to be defeated – and one of the very few sitting councillors ever to be removed from office in Kelowna – Gail Given, takes a different view of the influence of the party.

Kelowna Coun. Gail Given

(ROB MUNRO / iNFOnews.ca)

She was a strong Basran supporter but doesn’t see that as the reason she dropped from second in the polls in 2018 to tenth this time.

“Declaring in one of the candidates surveys that I’m no longer a member of the Conservative Party of Canada was probably a bigger factor,” Given told iNFOnews.ca. “There was a significant Conservative influence in this election.”

She said she left the party long before its most recent leadership convention.

“For a long period of time I said I don’t believe party politics belongs in municipal government,” Given said. “I saw an element of it at the last election and it really was quite strong at this election. I had to do things that aligned with my beliefs. There was a lot of very negative rhetoric and phone calls that came and I don’t like negative rhetoric. I said, no, I’m kind of done with it. I don’t think it’s helpful for either the country or the province or community. That style of campaigning, both federally and locally, goes against my approach to things.”

When asked if the party made a difference in the mayor's contest, she said it likely did and pointed out that Wilson was Dyas’ campaign manager.

“Lots of people around the campaigns of many candidates are known in the community to be Conservative Party supporters,” Given said. “People don’t realize what the backdrop is in these types of elections. I had people say to me: ‘It’s going to be a Conservative council that’s elected’ which is really interesting because I used to be amongst those they supported. Declaring I was more neutral than I might have been in the past might have been a strategic error but, at the end of the day, I’m comfortable with it.”

She described her treatment since leaving the party as one of silence where she did not receive endorsements from groups that had supported her in the past.

“There were all kinds of rumours that were floated, some of them extremely outrageous,” Given said. “And it was all to discredit Colin. That’s not the kind of politics I want to be involved in.”

If she had been re-elected, this would have been her last term in office, she said. When she spoke to iNFOnews.ca in the spring about whether she was going to run this year, she was uncertain and the final decision was touch and go.

Given admits she is not a good campaigner, does not do much on social media or go door to door. That’s the strategy she’s always used and it got her elected and re-elected since 2011, she said.

And, while her support of Basran and leaving the Conservative party may have both been factors in her defeat, she also philosophically noted that “I’m not everybody’s cup of tea."

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