Signs of these times: Does humour have a place in municipal election campaigns?

Brady Rogers’ campaign signs had at least three different spellings for the word “council.”

“Brady Rogers for Mayor … Just kidding. City Counsil,” one sign read.

The British Columbia man didn’t stop at that. Other campaign signs included satirical remarks like: “Fine, I’ll do it,” and “How hard could it be?” or “I barely want to do this,” and “Just trying to pay my rent.”

But his campaign strategy — despite being unconventional — has won him a seat on Kelowna city council following the Oct. 17 municipal elections in B.C.

Whether Rogers’ victory was purely due to luck or he’d earned the votes of 2,635 residents, it leads to a big question: Are humour campaigns cozying up into municipal affairs?

The jokester campaign helped Rogers unseat longtime incumbent Maxine DeHart, who had served on council in Kelowna since 2011. Could it do the same for Ottawa councillor hopefuls this coming Monday?

The back of Butch Moore’s van is full of lumber, cut-up boards and drills.

It is not atypical for the Bay Ward 7 councillor candidate to head to a ballpark to paint his own election signs and tape them on hand-built frames.

“I don’t know if I have any fingers left,” he quipped in an interview.

Moore is running up against two opponents, including incumbent Theresa Kavanagh, with the fraction of their resources and name recognition available to him.

A grassroots candidate financing his own campaign, he says making his own 4×8 signs cost him $50 per sign as opposed to the $150 retail cost of getting them done.

“It took me about a month to figure out how to make them and get them to stand up and how to weather the storms,” he said. “I finally got into a bit of a groove about four or five days ago. It’s late to the game, but it seems that they’re working.”

The process has left his hands worn, but on social media Moore’s signs have gained traction, including a Facebook post by Knoxdale-Merivale Ward 9 incumbent Sean Devine.

“Believe me a picture of me would only hurt my chaces,” one Moore sign reads.

“I was actually working on the sign and a guy came up to me and he said, ‘You know you made a spelling mistake, eh?’ And I didn’t realize it,” Moore says, adding that he has a reading condition where, every once in a while, letters drop out of his words.

“Like I might spell the ‘th’ instead of ‘The.’ It’s just some blank thing in my mind. I’ve never had it checked out.”

Though Moore says he thought the process would be as simple as buying some cheap plywood and gluing the signs on, which would take him about 15 minutes each.

Instead, Moore says each signs takes two hours or more.

“I can see why the $150 per sign is worth it for those who want to go that way,” he said.

If he had the resources, Moore said he would pollute Bay Ward with a funny signs.

“But I’m a one-man show. I’m $1,600-man show,” he said, describing his campaign funds.

Moore may have a sense of humour that gets residents’ attention, but he also chokes up when he’s asked why he chose to run.

“Don’t make me cry here … Oh God,” he said. “There was a woman sleeping on the cement in front of the Metro store and that was the big thing for me. That’s what got me into the election. All the other stuff came after.

“But to see that lady sleeping with her face right on the cement … broke my heart.”

He proposes using an Ottawa-owned land farm in Fitzroy Harbour, a 223-acre waterfront property, to build tiny homes to house every unhoused person in Ottawa, similar to the tiny-homes pitch by mayoral candidate Neil Saravanamuttoo.

Moore is a person with some serious ideas on how to stop homelessness, how to save OC Transpo and how to promote tourism, but he says he lacks the advantage of name recognition that Kavanagh has after sitting on council for Bay Ward for the past eight years.

“I’ve always said this: In a parking lot full of Lamborghinis and Jaguars and Ferraris, you know what really stands out is the 1966 Rusty Rambler, the one vehicle that just doesn’t belong there, but it really, really stands out. So that’s what I am.

“I’m the 1966 Rambler.”

Moore is not the only candidate trying to use humour to his advantage.

For Barrhaven East Ward 24 councillor candidate Yoosaf Melparamba, the race is about visibility in a field of four other candidates, including incumbent Wilson Lo.

Lo has been the ward’s councillor for the past four years. Melparamba says its his personal responsibility in this election to hold Lo’s decisions at City Hall to account.

Melparamba, a licensed realtor with a background in administration, has propped up 400 small lawn signs bearing his name and picture, but there are another 12, bigger signs placed next to signs promoting Lo. One reads, “He voted for return to office,” and another says, “He voted yes to bus fare hike.”

“(On) all my signs, I have put exactly when that happened, when that voting took place, how Wilson voted,” he said.

Melparamba says the ward has only had one opportunity to hear from councillor candidates in a debate setting. After an unsuccessful attempt request for another debate with a residents’ association, he turned to using signs to relay his ideas.

“(I had) no option to talk about the public record that the incumbent has and that left me with no choice,” Melparamba said.

Knoxdale-Merivale candidate Cole Fraser Jones uses social media to make light of the fact that his signs as smaller than those of his two opponents.

“We had to rely pretty heavily on social media, but I feel that it wouldn’t make much of a difference because what we’ve been doing on social media is providing substantive, long-term solutions to the problems that we’re facing,” Fraser Jones said.

He says he falls in the centre of the political spectrum. “Some centre-left solutions are good and some centre-right solutions are good.

“So I think I find myself like a lot of other Canadians at this point in time: I’m quite politically homeless, not really aligning with one party or the other two parties. Getting caught in this ideological culture war nonsense that you’re seeing occur right here, it is beyond frustrating.”

Turnout for Ottawa’s last municipal election was 44 per cent, meaning more than half of eligible voters didn’t cast ballots.

Humour is a tool for those like Melparamba and Moore, who say they have noticed residents being reluctant to vote while knocking on doors in this campaign.

“Whatever makes people get engaged in civic engagement is very important for me, and that’s one of the things that Ottawa lacks,” Melparamba said. “I want everybody to be involved in any way that’s possible.

“If humour helps, I will definitely use humour and creative ways.”