June 27th, 2008
Rate your councillor
By Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler // 8 Comments
A web site called RateYourCouncillor.com recently started up and it wants you to, you guessed it, rate your councillor.
While unclear who or what is behind the site, it allows you to pass judgment on your representatives at city hall based on three criteria: whether you would re-elect the councillor, the councillor's responsiveness to constituents and the councillor's communication with constituents. For the mayor, it substitutes the communication section for vision (in my opinion, both have a place on each politician's report card).
Though the site states upfront that its results aren't statistically valid and very few votes have been cast, at least one councillor is asking her constituents to take the opportunity to tell her what they really think in this seemingly anonymous forum. Councillor Shelley Carroll linked to RYC in a post on her Facebook wall dated June 9.
Hello everyone,
Thanks so much for supporting me all these years. There is a new website where you can rate city councillors. Please go to the attached link and let me know how I'm doing!"
At the moment, RYC allows you to rate Toronto and Vancouver municipal politicians. The site says that it will expand to include other cities in the future.
Photograph by myJon.
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The photo and photographer are from New York.
The second language is Spanish, not French. The other two languages are Chinese and Korean.
This site is a bit of a joke considering what has been going on at Toronto City Hall.Maybe just a nice diversion for the politicos who are getting ready for the federal election.Seems our MPs are acting more like councillors these days.
W.K.>Incidentally, Elections Canada does provide material in several of the most spoken aboriginal languages on their website, but it's up to the local officials to use it.
This appears to be a junk site. No indication of who is running it. Since you have to rate your councillor, at the minimum you should giveyour postal code to indicate that you are in fact represented by the Councillor. Otherwise it's just another absurb rant and rave opportunity
Grace> I tend to agree. It's like Rate My Professor that allows students to anonymously rant about a prof.
It doesn't have even basic protections against multiple voting, so its data is even less reliable than you'd expect from a site like this.
They've even gone so far as to have a private .com domain registration; that's not expensive, but it is a little weird.
Shawn> that gives me an idea "Toronto Councillors: Hot or not". Well maybe not such a great idea.....
I'm trying to figure out what country that photo was from. English and French could make it Canada, but the other two lines make it somewhere other than Canada.
I thought to be a Canadian citizen and vote, one would have to know English or French. Being from neither English or French background, if it is Canada, then why wasn't my parent's original language included? Why was Algonquin or Cree posted? To make it fair, every single language in the world should be posted, if other than the official language is used.
Comment by W. K. Lis
June 27, 2008 | 7:41 pm