AYLMER, QUEBEC | A municipal election is heading our way, with councillors polishing their re-election machines and potential candidates testing the water for support. This slow process, which will turn into a torrent of magnificent promises, includes the mayor's race, and it's here that we are hearing the most noise.

Many people are unhappy with Mr. Bureau's performance, although it is not clear exactly what they expected. The municipal realm is a different animal altogether from federal and provincial governments. Our cities and towns are creations of the provinces with little power of their own.

Basically, they are here to defect complaints for skimpy municipal services away from the province, which is the real agent responsible for skimpy funding of streets, water purification, police services, green space protection, libraries, and so on. A mayor is more a proxy for the provincial government than an independent leader who can set out new directions. Mr. Bureau's arena of action is very small, although his opportunity to be a politician with promises, grand vision, and charisma is as large as anyone's.

And it's here that Mr. Bureau gets the most criticism: no charisma. The criticism comes, though, in the form of attacks on his transparency, efficiency, team-building, general governance, and handling of day to day business. Really, it's all about charisma. The media -- and the public, apparently -- eat up charisma and personal style.

At the same time that candidates for the various wards are preparing their campaigns -- which includes criticizing their opponents -- and the mayor is coming under a lot of fire for his unassuming leadership style, we are also hearing suggestions that Gatineau look again at municipal political parties. Several pundits have said that a campaign is the time to raise this question.

But before we rush into accepting political parties as a possible solution for our dissatisfaction with municipal government, we ought to look more carefully at both the results of political parties elsewhere and also look at the problem itself: inadequate funding from the higher governments combined with a tight restriction on what city governments can do to expand their revenue base.

Wouldn't political parties merely add another bureaucratic parking lot for more inaction and bafflegab? Would parties be any better at improving the province's starvation wages for its cities?

There's an interesting coincidence here with the larger political world. Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown is widely criticized for his weakness in "communications and tactics," according to the Guardian Weekly. These are basically the same charges leveled at Mayor Bureau. In Britain, the solution lies with Brown's political party. The party is supposed to replace him or shape him up. Is this the sort of scenario we would into get with municipal parties? Instead of government by people we elect, we'd be governed by organizations -- political parties.

Don't we need less obfuscation, less bafflegab, less passing the buck, and fewer appeals to rules, regulations, and procedures? Political parties give us the opposite.

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Copyright © 2008 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/08.08