On October 2, candidates for Ward 2 and for mayor gathered at the Lakeview Elementary School for a pair of forums put on by the Lakeview Community Association. I recorded both but the audio kind of stinks and it takes a bit of Audacity magic to make them listenable. So I’m only going to post two excerpts from the mayoral forum that I’ve managed to fix up.

First, here’s how the candidates answered a question about the housing crisis and how they’d cope with it.

Download candidates’ responses to a question about housing at the Lakeview Community Association mayoral forum (72.MB mp3)Speaker order is Okochi, Novak, Fougere, Elliott, Donnelly, Brown, Brass and Wiebe.

I like this bit because it’s the only point in this forum where the candidates get a little feisty. These mayoral forums are pretty well-mannered affairs and the Lakeview one was no exception.

And, incidentally, Tim Siekawitch’s response is missing because he misheard the question and so his answer was pretty off topic.

Second, I wanted to post this response from Jim Elliott to the question of how to deal with the pension crisis. Typically, I haven’t been singling out stuff specific candidates have said because I frankly don’t want another accusation of unfairness right now. But here, Elliott suggests a way to use pension money to support local projects and I thought it was pretty smart. An elegant and novel idea in an election where there haven’t been a lot of surprising ones. I don’t know if Elliott’s suggestion is at all feasible or even legal (and a friend of mine who knows this pension stuff better than I do says it’d be supremely difficult to implement), but hey, I thought I’d throw it out there.

Download Jim Elliott speaking about the city pension fund and housing. (340kb mp3)

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