The Document
The Document starts with 7 pages of standard conservative priorities: population growth, business development strategies, more police and surveillance cameras, and mainly low-cost suggestions for dealing with street-level disorder. No surprises.
The second section is three pages describing an aggressive strategy to discredit Linnsie Clark during the election campaign, providing “quotes” from the Municipal Inspection report. Although quotation marks are used, most of the “quotes” don’t actually appear in the report, and the writer would have known this, and therefore this section wasn’t meant for media or any print-based platform. I believe the quotes are meant to be talking points for anti-Clark candidates to repeat in interviews, meet-and-greets, door-knocking, etc.
The third and final section is a single page with 14 names on it, including Drew Barnes as the only mayoral candidate, plus 13 other names currently running for Council. The list states an intention to write cheques to these fourteen people. In short, it looks like a slate. A Big Slate.
The Document is not signed - there is no way to tell who created it, or if all three sections were created at once. The first two sections indeed look like a political strategy document for the Drew Barnes slate, but the last section, to me, just looks like trolling. In any case, it is now getting around, and may or may not lead to an actual story. I assume by now that many dozens or even hundreds of people have seen it.
So, there is much we don’t know about The Document or the “slate” that the last page implies. I’ll tell you what I THINK it is, but first let’s talk about the Slate attempt we do know about.
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>>The Little Slate.
File photo
Drew announced his slate a month ago in an interview with Jeremy Silver. The two were discussing Danielle Smith’s new policy to make Edmonton and Calgary use political parties in their elections. Drew was a provincial-level politician (our MLA) for many years, and Phaff is running on her credentials serving provincial conservative parties, so it made sense that they would form a pseudoparty for their campaign to take over Medicine Hat’s City Hall. There’s no conspiracy theory here - Drew was very open about it.
Barnes said he, Phaff, Cowan and Moritz were a Team running on the same ideas and values. He also said he was talking to several more candidates, and he intended to form a group of six to present to the voters as a slate. That was a month ago. You can watch it on Drew’s or Jeremy’s page.
It seems nothing has come of that. Cowan completely disavows the existence of a slate, or his membership in it. Drew hasn’t mentioned it since, afaik, and neither has Phaff or Moritz. No other candidates have mentioned it, either. It’s not actual news anymore in a journalistic sense.
In practical terms, though, voters can use unofficial slate information to guide their voting. For example, if you like Dumanowski enough to vote for him, you would have voted for Hider as well, since her only function on Council was to double Dumanowski’s vote. May as well add Hirsch on that pile: an effective slate of three. The fact that Hider and Hirsch backed out this round leaves Dumanowski much weakened: he now equals one, not three.
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Conclusions (or Assumptions)
We don’t know where The Document came from, or when it was created. But we CAN see that The Document lines up very well with Drew’s actual campaign. His campaign messaging has focused intently on criticizing the current mayor and council, to the point where the audience at the Esplanade started laughing at his relentless negativity.
Also, in the September interview, Barnes states explicitly that he’s looking to recruit additional candidates to a slate of six, enough to fully control every council vote. The Document appears to name some of Drew’s hopefuls.
I think it’s reasonable to believe that The Document was an early strategy piece by the Barnes campaign, at least the first two sections.
The list of candidates on the final page is mostly absurd, though. If this really was a planning document for the Barnes campaign, it was very early on (like August), and it quickly met with refusals from additional prospective members, if it even got that far.
Last week, one of the people on the list invited me to go door-knocking with them. Can you imagine that? Me, door-knocking for a far-right slate of Linnsie-haters? There is no way this candidate would have accepted Drew’s offer, if they got one.
Another person on the list told me at speed-dating that one of the participants refused to speak to them because they were affiliated with Barnes. The candidate was like, Me? Are you kidding? Let me set the record straight: Not affiliated with Barnes.
Yusuf is on the list, for heaven’s sake. Good lord, can you just imagine?
To my knowledge, the only candidates who are actually using the playbook in The Document (harping on the “chaos” and “insanity” of the past few years), are Barnes and Phaff. When it got down to the actual ground war of campaigning, everyone but Phaff toned it down, I assume because the language used in section 2 was so hostile it turned most voters off.
Bottom line: If you are a voter who leans hard right, the members of the Little Slate (Phaff, Moritz, Cowan and Barnes) may reasonably attract your votes as a group. This would hold true whether The Document is real or not.
There is no reason to think the Big Slate is real. Quite the opposite, I think there is good reason to think the Big Slate never existed except in the author’s fantasy, and that was months ago. As for its influence on your vote, I would ignore it.