Image Credit: City of Kelowna

OPINION

It’s never good when you get scooped on a column by a prospective politician but I’m going to give it a shot anyway.

Kelowna mayoral candidate Tom Dyas has clued in to something I’ve been barking about for years — Mayor Colin Basran’s relationship with the City of Kelowna itself.

Dyas pushed out a campaign news release yesterday to note with precision that he’s not just running against Basran, he’s “competing against the City of Kelowna's money now.”

Marshall Jones, managing editor

He pointed to a video of Basran talking about Dyas’ own talking points on crime and safety and his own record (no pink shirt this time). The video, published mere weeks before the election campaign, was produced, published and paid for by the City of Kelowna.

Were this just one example, Dyas might have sounded like a quack in his release but this isn't even the most egregious example.

In his 2018 campaign I asked how anyone at the City of Kelowna thought it was a good idea to share on their own social media accounts a video from Parliament of then-MP Stephen Fuhr lofting a softball to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau so he could read a prepared statement saying a bunch of nice things about his buddy Basran.

It was one thing to feature the mayor in a number of videos pertaining to city business in the middle of a four-year term. But this bureaucratic influence on the election is reaching nose-pinching proportions.

The City paid to produce riveting podcasts featuring City of Kelowna bureaucrats speaking in monotone about their business. In June, again just months before an election, who did they push out front?

Basran of course, for not one but two laps in a friendly, warm pool. They sought questions from the public to put to Basran and of course whittled them down to the friendly ones.

My reporter, Rob Munro, and I wanted to know what questions he wasn't asked and after weeks of fudging, the City finally released them. Here’s a few of them.

“Does mayor, council, use bikes for their transportation?”

"Why are there no syilx people in your advertising about the Okanagan?"

“How can the city assist the small businesses struggling to staff and support community?"

“Why does the city still not have a qualified heritage planner on staff to help protect and develop our heritage assets?"

“What is council doing proactively to ensure residents in areas next to a large development can access their driveways or park outside their own property when developers don't provide adequate parking spaces?"

“Are you committed to lowering taxes and keeping financially sound spending reasonable?”

Instead of any of these perfectly reasonable questions, his hour and a half was spent answering questions like: "What do you do in your spare time?” and “name three things you like about the Mayor of Kamloops."

We see this kind of thing in federal and provincial governments all the time. But there’s usually at least some kind of effort to differentiate the Governments with the politicians and parties who run them.

Basran surely has no issue with this. It helps his campaign, which has shown in the past it’s not above dirty tricks (they tried hard to peddle stories in 2017 to suggest Dyas was a liability for the City because he was divorced once and has sued and been sued before) and Basran was particularly pleased with himself and his campaign for playing fast and loose with campaign funding rules.

READ MORE: Kelowna mayor feels no need to say how he spent $31,000 in pre-campaign contributions

So who is behind all this bureaucratic interference in a democratic election? Surely the bloated communications department had a hand in it.

But I also know Basran and City Manager Doug Gilchrist and other senior managers are friends, and they all partied together in a southern clime at the wedding of former city councillor Andre Blanleil. And we should all know by now just how much Basran likes to party. Hey Colin — who paid for that trip?

Never before Basran have we seen a Mayor get this kind of treatment at the expense of taxpayers. Certainly not Sharon Shepherd. We’ll see about the next Mayor.

Without context, Dyas’s release asking for help fighting against the City’s “media machine” might sound like hyperbole at best or paranoid at worst.

But he just happens to be correct.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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