Apathy was the big winner in the Kelowna civic election. With only one out of five eligible voters bothering to cast a ballot and many important issues still to be decided like the downtown CD Zone and the new Official Community Plan, it seems like the majority of residents just don’t care. But this is largely the consequence of the kind of community that Kelowna city council has fostered in the past decade. They have turned Kelowna into a retirement haven for the wealthy where people come to live out the last ten or twenty years of their lives without any interest in the community beyond that time frame.
Mayor Sharon Shepherd says the problem is the way we vote and suggests that a modified ward system will spur residents to become more interested in their community. But the only kind of interest that will encourage is an unhealthy and insular “my neighbourhood first” mentality which is already a rot in our body politic. No, there is no way to organize apathy. It has to be cut out like a cancer if it hasn’t spread too far, but it looks like it may already be too late and that the patient is terminal.
