Residents in Dryden and Sioux Lookout will have the chance to hear from their municipal candidates at forums run in each community on Wednesday.
The event in Dryden is organized by the Dryden District Chamber of Commerce. Deanna Parker, manager of the Dryden Chamber, said they’ve been asking the public to submit questions for the candidates.
“We’re [at] over 250 responses, which is amazing,” she said. “We have a lot of really good questions so I think that it could potentially shift the way our council is formed.”
“A lot of them are very thought provoking so I think that we’re going to get some good answers tonight and hopefully, we’ll see how that affects the election here in a couple of weeks,” she said.
Parker said both mayoral candidates will be there as will most of the council candidates, except for a few who are unable due to illness or unable to get out of work commitments.
Mike Ebbeling the news director at a local radio station will moderate the debate at The Centre from 6-8 p.m. said Parker, adding that the forum will be livestreamed on the Chamber’s facebook page for those who can’t make it out. “That was something that we had a lot of people asking whether or not we would do it for them, so absolutely we will, we want it to be accessible to as many people as possible.”
In Sioux Lookout, the forum is being organized by a pair of community members, Dick MacKenzie and Anne Saltel.
MacKenzie, the retired former owner of the Sioux Lookout Bulletin, said he has organized the last few municipal, provincial, and federal candidate forums with Saltel.
MacKenzie is moderating the debate held in the Upper Legion Hall from 6:30 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday.
He said it’s the only debate in the municipality. It will include candidates for council only, as the mayoral and school trustee positions have all been acclaimed.
MacKenzie said to eliminate monstrously long lines of people waiting to ask questions, orgtanizers have modified the format to have everybody entering the session put their names on a piece of paper if they want to ask a question.
"I draw names out of a basket for the people who are going to ask a question, so they can ask their own questions, we don’t know what they are ahead of time," he said.
MacKenzie said he’d like an organization to step up and do candidate forums in the future.
“We’ve done it just because no one else has done it. We’re happy to do it, there’s no question about that. [But] it probably should come from an organizer.”
The candidate forum in Sioux Lookout will be taped by the public library and will be posted on its YouTube channel in the coming days.
Internet and telephone voting begins at 10a.m. on Friday, Oct. 14 in Dryden and at 8 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 17 in Sioux Lookout.
