F olks, are you asking yourself this question? What’s the point of dragging yourself out of the house on a perfectly nice autumn day to stomp down to some barren gymnasium and scratch an X next to the name of somebody you don’t know but who wants to represent you in local government?

If so, then you might be part of the 65 percent of the local population who have registered to vote but see no point in doing it for local government elections. Like you, they say “screw it” and stay home.

Of course, these people later scream bloody murder and jump up and down and yell epithets at the elected officials who just decided to allow a 10-story high-rise next to their house and a stinky sewage plant down the street.

Or perhaps, you’re a member of the other 35 percent of the registered population that sees a very important reason to vote in municipal elections. These people want their neighbourhood, their town, their whole dang region to grow into the idyllic community of their dreams.

And how do they do that? By electing people who think as they do. People who share the same values. People whose vision of an “idyllic community” pretty much resembles their own. Well, that sounds easy enough to do. Except most voters don’t really know the people they’re voting for.

Casting a vote based on a familiar name or because you know somebody who knew somebody who knew a candidate 10 years ago is politically dangerous. Because there are chameleons out there who appear to be the kind of people who share your dreams but who will actually crush them at the first opportunity if you give them half a chance.

These are people who never reveal their real agendas or their real motivations for running for public office. They talk in vague terms or not at all because if they ever said out loud what they really plan to do with your vote, you’d grab the nearest stick and whack that mole back into the hole it crawled out of.

So how should an honest citizen decide who deserves their vote?

What you really need are a few defining questions. Ones that tell you pretty clearly whether this person or that one thinks like you and shares your dream. So with the help of a few local curmudgeons and crazies, Decafnation put three questions to this year’s candidates for public office.

The idea behind our first question was to find out who supported the common good during the pandemic and who is probably driving a monster truck around town covered with Canadian flags the size of Montana. We don’t know if Aaron Dowker, a candidate for Courtenay mayor drives a truck but one of his social media posts sure makes him sound like a Freedom Convoy Guy and possible anti-vaxxer.

That’s probably why he’s one of the few candidates who didn’t respond to our questions.

Our second question gets to the heart of both public process and community development. We suspect more than a few of the candidates running this year are still angry that the CVRD didn’t bend to the wishes of the Big Money Gang and allow 3L Developments to build 1,000 single-family homes that only their friends can afford on the banks of the Puntledge River. Affordable housing is something they don’t get. Instead, they want to gain control of the Courtenay council in order to annex some of that land in the Puntledge Triangle and pump up the real estate profits.

Our third question is meant to expose the climate deniers lurking behind those smiling faces on the fancy campaign signs. We suspect there are a few, including Tamara Meggitt running in Electoral Area A, who pretty much outed herself in a single social media post in March wondering, “Could environmentalism be the biggest scam of all time?”

Yeah, let’s elect some people who think like that and hasten the demise of the human species.

So think about your dream future for the Comox Valley and see which of the candidates on your ballot comes the closest to sharing that vision.

For starters on your who-to-vote-for list, scratch off all the losers who didn’t respond. Any candidate afraid to answer a few questions doesn’t deserve another minute of your time.

If a candidate won’t respond to issues of interest to electors before the election, how forthcoming will they be if they’re elected and no longer need to hear from the electors for four years? Think about that.

We’re publishing the candidates’ responses by jurisdiction. We begin today in a separate post with the Village of Cumberland.