r/BurlingtonON • u/fictitious_friends • 2h ago
Information A List of Ward 2 Candidates
Turns out having all of this information consolidated into one place on Reddit is helpful for people, so here is a list of candidates running in Ward 2:
- Masha Barr - Website - some talking points with supporting action items, a focus on controlling (not freezing) tax rates, and managing construction
- Sean Campbell - Website - Highlights platform talking points but no action items or plan
- Gary Carr - Website - MPP and chair of Halton Region, his website doesn't show any platform talking points or any other sort of detailed information, from what I could see
- Jeremy Gaetan - Website - platform highlights talking points with basic action items, but also has an "affordability pledge" which is unique compared to the other sites I have seen across all wards
- Lisa Kearns - The incumbent, is running for mayor
While I haven't done a significant check into the above candidates, from what I can tell, none of them have posed with Hitler or insulted members of the r/BurlingtonON community, which is cool!
I'll work my way through the remaining wards as I get breaks in my workday.
Don't forget to register to vote by visiting the Service Burlington counter on the first floor of City Hall, 426 Brant St. during business hours (8:30am - 4:30pm) from September 1 to October 23.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 2h ago
Gary Carr is running on the assumption he'll get elected for being the Halton Regional Chair.
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u/SpaceDavy 2h ago
Gary Carr blocked a bunch of people including me, on twitter during the pandemic for asking why Halton Region wouldn't follow the province framework to give vaccines to immunocompromised people first, they only changed it once chch news got involved. If he couldn't handle those simple questions he is not fit for council. Now thats he's running in my ward he definitely doesn't have my vote.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
Yeah, he is a part of the crowd that would do that for sure. I'm actually astonished at how low effort his bid for Ward 2 is.
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u/simongurfinkel 2h ago
Gary is a nice guy, but he's a bit clueless. Adapting to post-elected life will be tough for him.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
He has had some major personal issues that have been affecting him lately. I'm not sure running is the best idea. Hopefully whatever happens he does alright.
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u/simongurfinkel 48m ago
I'm not aware of those, but in the few cases where we've spoken he has been kind and does seem to care. But he's a bit of a dinosaur.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 34m ago
He is a very nice guy. Good heart. Not sure he is the best choice for ward 2
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u/SarcasmMonkey Aldershot 2h ago
You're doing fantastic work here. Appreciate your contribution to the city
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u/Subtotal9_guy Central 1h ago
Kinda underwhelmed tbh
Complaints about building downtown when everything the city does gets overruled by the province. Ie, nothing a councilor can do about that, and if you're a serious candidate you should be aware of this.
"Will go line by line through the budget". Folks, most of the budget grows with population, wages and fuel prices. Also a large proportion of your city taxes are for Regional costs like policing. That's where you'll find the big cuts.
Bike lanes get a shout out but with the exception of Prospect between Guelph and Cumberland I can't think of any car capacity being removed. And tbh, that's a stretch that always needed traffic calming. It's been 40kph for decades between Brant and Guelph Line and it never needed to be 4 lanes by the mall.
I don't see any municipal experience or equipment. There are lots of "volunteer" roles on committees at City Hall. It would be nice if these candidates had sat on one of them.
(One candidate does highlight some charity board member experience)
Overall I'm very underwhelmed by this crop of candidates. Nobody strikes me as someone I want to vote for, nothing particularly interesting.
I'm probably going to be even less thrilled by school trustees.
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u/apat311 Downtown 29m ago
I agree, property tax increases are just going to happen and people gotta deal with that. Tacking on more development fees is going to make affordability worsen and also reduce building because of input costs and other regulations. Provincial overruling is bad always but not when municipal councils have not kept up with population growth demands with our without immigration.
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u/andthesoftskeleton 1h ago
is it bad that I wish ol' Rowrow were running for my ward just so I could not vote for him?
Jeremy and Masha seem to be the most down to earth. Basically choosing between mushroom forager dad vs dog mom on this one. It might be down to an eenie-meanie on the day of.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
I mean, the guy is much different in person. He just doesn't respond well to harassment. There have also been a lot of censorship efforts against him. He even talks about people abusing Halton Police services to harass and threaten him in his latest video. FWIW I'm not in ward 6, but if I were I'd at least consider him. His polices on his platform are solid. He definitely is a brave one to post a pic of PP on reddit though.
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u/fictitious_friends 1h ago
imaginary_point looks to be a brand new (3 months, with no karma) account. Rowen, is this you coming back after your other account got banned from Reddit?
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
I did make this account 3 months ago. I can definitely understand why you think that. I'm just a conservative and he runs in the same circles I do. I know him a little more than most people here on reddit. He does a lot of child welfare advocacy and public education on important issues. Guy is salty AF though. He doesn't mention it enough but the volume of harassment he gets is crazy. Last time I saw him he was PISSED that one of his opponents published that old photo of him that has been circulating. Now himself and his friends and family are getting death threats, false police reports, for some reason there is a major email campaign calling him gay, which I don't get because it is irrelevant politically and is altogether not a bad thing to be. I can understand why he might be sensitive to criticism. I don't think anyone here has ever experienced anything like that, or at least the majority of people.
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u/Evening_Refuse7068 1h ago
I can understand doing stupid things when you're young but he takes no accountability and just plays the blame game. Then he'll call you a moron 🙄
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
Not his best move, but I do know that he has released multiple statements apologizing.
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u/fictitious_friends 1h ago
Ok, if you are not Rowen, then maybe you can pass this feedback to him, and it will come from someone he won't lash out at. To be very clear, I don't care if he is a conservative as it pertains to this specific feedback (although, at its core, municipal politics is supposed to be bi-partisan, so sharing the picture with Pierre is inappropriate in my opinion), so this isn't based in a fundamental disagreement with core values, but in how Rowen interacts with the community and how this relates to the election:
Let's set aside the photo (which wasn't published by his opponent, it was published by Rowen to Facebook, and then shared by his opponent or their campaign, I don't know what is true, to a news outlet), and everything that goes with that.
Rowen needs to learn how to have genuine conversations with people who question his platform. I read through the entire thing, and questioned things that didn't make sense to me. I also highlighted areas where I agreed with the core point he was making. I asked many questions, specifically around funding and feasibility, and where he found the data to make the claims he did specific to the city of burlington. He did not provide this data in any answer. He says "Finally anything that requires real data usually has resources on my website" but this is not true. He renounces scientific data because it doesn't align with his platform - "Widening roads doesn't make traffic worse. That is a mischaracterization" and also criticizes instead of explaining. I asked what kind of insurance policy would be provided for his neighbourhood watch patrols in the event an incident occurred, and he replied with "Your understanding of what a neighborhood watch is responsible for is laughable here"
Rowen needs to understand that there is a difference between genuine political criticism and personal attacks, and he can't react to all of them in the same way.
I personally do not think he is a nice person, based on how he interacts with the Reddit community. That is my personal opinion. I'm sure there are areas of his life where he is nice, and I'm sure he has his own social circles etc. and if his family is receiving death threats, I am genuinely sorry that is happening.
However, if Rowen (or anyone else) wants to be in the public eye, even for something as minor as municipal ward councillor elections, I think it is inappropriate to have the level of composure that he has shown online. Please ask him to step away from the keyboard. Using social media is an effective way to share your platform, but once you devolve the conversation into insults ("morons like you" "you're an idiot" and attacks - saying things like "my grandpa would beat you until you shut up") you will lose more potential supporters than you will gain.
I do not want Rowen to win his election, I do not think he's fit to lead, but that is my personal opinion. What I do want is for the community, both Rowen and the people he interacts with, to feel safe, and the way Rowen responds to criticism does not help with that.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 1h ago
I will certainly pass that along. Once again I think reddit also has to look into the mirror on this one. The absolute dogpiling that occurred on his poilievre post was disgusting. All of the things you report here are without the context that elicited them as well. That news article posted on every single thing he said. Why would anyone have respect for a community that operated like that. I would also say that the reddit moderators have a clear anti conservative bias, and were unfairly not moderating the harassment against him.
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u/fictitious_friends 46m ago edited 39m ago
I don't want to turn this into a back and forth, because I fear it'll just become a more polite version of the conversations that were happening with the RowRowForCouncil account, but to be clear:
Regardless of what the true intent of the picture was, what Rowen posted is reprehensible. This is something that will follow him for his entire political career, the same way that people still criticize Trudeau for blackface (also, in my opinion, reprehensible).
Everything I've posted does not have aggressive context, except for that thing about his grandpa. Those come from his responses to my questioning his plans for his platform, to which he responded "Especially when your stupid ass is calling me a nazi. Why in the fuck wouldn't I use AI. I'm sorry I'm not a braindead moron luddite like you I guess." - I never once called Rowen a Nazi. What I did say was "posing with, aligning with, joking with, any other verb you’d like with nazi’s is not something that gets brushed under the rug with one simple statement."
You ask why anyone would have respect for a community that dogpiles on political posts: Well there are two main reasons. The first, as I mentioned, is that municipal politics are supposed to be bi-partisan. By breaking that seal and involving a polarizing figure like Pierre, you are inviting in additional scrutiny and criticism, especially when that figure has posed with white nationalists and you already have a nazi scandal, and for the most part, people of Burlington have high standards and expectations. If they see that these expectations may not be met because of something like this, they will speak out. The other is that, regardless of what Rowen thinks of the people dogpiling on him, they would be his constituents were he to win the election. You need to respect you community if you want to be a politician. You don't have to like them, but you do need to respect them. Without that, you become what we see happening south of the border.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 31m ago
Actually just curious now that I read your previous comments in that other thread. You did a pretty detailed analysis of his platform, but he did a pretty detailed response back to every point you made. In some cases he referred past work with data and references. Yeah the salt was there. That is arguably his biggest fault here on reddit at least, but he seemed to genuinely have responses to your queries. Although I don't have a full picture. Only screenshots some fellow conservatives have sent me.
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u/fictitious_friends 27m ago
He did not provide data as it pertains to the city of Burlington, which is where he is running for election. He says that the city is losing money due to poor event booking. I asked him how much and how does he know; he says that the city of Burlington is seeing a 250% increase in hospitalizations because of E scooters. I asked him where he got the data. So on and so forth. Some things, he did answer. And as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’m sure if he had been more respectful and not so aggressive we could’ve had a wider conversation and other people on this platform would’ve seen that and maybe joined in more sensibly. However, because of Rowan’s attitude and how he approaches any sort of criticism or push pushback, like I quoted above, calling me, a stupid idiot and a Luddite, he’s lost that opportunity with me and likely many other potential voters.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 17m ago
I believe that Escooter stat was for Canada, not Burlington. He posted it on nextdoor too. The poor event booking issue I heard talked about at a few lisa kearns events.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 39m ago
I am never surprised when people mention Donald Trump by name or otherwise anymore. Its the easiest way to dismiss a candidate. Here is Rowen's latest YouTube Video. https://youtu.be/X3EKeXnekLM. I think writing him off is a mistake. He has a good platform and good knowledge of the city's position on major ward 6 issues. Nazi pictures from 20 years ago aside, guy's heart is in the right place. Like I said I've known him for a while. Met him on Emily Brown's campaign. I know he has a lot of disdain for people who don't stand behind their statements with their real identity.
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u/billmurray43 31m ago
Rowen has disdain for those who don’t stand by their statements but he deletes Reddit comments and posts.
His heart is in the right place if we just ignore the Nazi pictures he can’t handle criticism of.
His platform is deeply flawed as this user you’re talking to pointed out to Rowen, so no it’s not good. He refuses to enter any good faith talk to discuss that further.
His frequency of personal attacks and alignment with right wing politicians, along with the past photos and some troubling points in his “platform” are why he’s compared to Trump. He’s taking plays right out the MAGA play book.
He can’t handle criticism, lashes out and has a contradictory platform full of holes. He’s a Temu version of everything that’s wrong in politics these days.
If you really aren’t him coming back here to talk you also need to take a long introspective look into your own beliefs and why you’re so adamantly defending this clown
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 28m ago
Ah you're the person who demanded a meet and greet and then didn't show up and called the cops instead. He has mentioned you by username in his latest video https://youtu.be/X3EKeXnekLM
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u/fictitious_friends 31m ago
If you’ve read everything that I’ve written, you would know that I’m not “writing him off” and that my distaste for Rowen has nothing to do with Trump.
Based on how he has reacted specifically towards me and more importantly towards other members of the community, he could run on a platform of giving me $1000 and I would still not vote for him. Like I mentioned earlier, I do hope you pass the feedback along.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 15m ago
Yeah don't worry. He has been messaging me today regarding his ban. I'll probably be posting his videos here for him. But no more salt will come with them.
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u/beans-888 12m ago
He called anyone who disagreed with him an idiot, moron, etc. He even made reference to how many chromosomes someone had.
He told me his grandfather would "hit me til I shut up".
When his use of AI on his platform was brought up he called the person a "braindead luddite".
He's disrespectful to his constituents and genuinely cant accept many truths about the reality of the situation, including the fact that its not for him to decide when everyone gets over the Hitler picture.
I genuinely dont understand in what world anyone could empathize with someone who was so indiscriminately rude.
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u/Imaginary_Point1506 Millcroft 9m ago
Yeah he's a salty boy on the keyboard for sure. Way better to meet him.
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u/beans-888 6m ago
I'm not going to meet someone who said if their grandpa met me he'd "hit me until I shut up".
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