When Kelowna City Councillor Graeme James ran as a candidate last fall on the issue of protecting agricultural land in the city, I thought he was creating a false issue as there are adequate protections in place to preserve agricultural land, specifically the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). How surprised I was then to learn that at a recent city council meeting at his first opportunity to rule on whether to continue to protect some viable agricultural land in the case of the Stober property on Dilworth Mountain that Councillor James voted to recommend to the Agricultural Land Commission that this property be removed from the ALR. So instead of carrying out his election promise, James here favoured developing some of the agricultural land that he campaigned to protect.
But then I never took his election grandstanding concerning protecting agricultural land seriously, knowing James to be another anything-goes-development type in which he neatly fills the empty shoes of Carol Gran and joins like-minded councillors Andre Blanleil and Brian Given on council. It can be seriously questioned whether James who essentially bought his seat on city council having spent over $16,500 in his election bid, which was more than five times the average amount spent by councillor candidates, would have won otherwise. But now that he has gotten his foot in the door, he will likely enjoy a long career on council as Kelowna voters being a timid lot by nature don’t like to throw out incumbents no matter how bad their performance might be. It seems that the electorate prefers the devil that they know on council rather than take a chance on change, the only problem being that as a result they usually end up with a lot of devils.
