 WINNIPEG - Following Winnipeg's Mayoral Election, which concluded with a win for incumbent mayor, Brian Bowman, the city of Winnipeg Policy Council put forward a motion to stop the official polling data from being released to the public. Typically, the council has one week to approve of the ballot count before releasing the official data to the public archives. Now, four weeks after that traditional deadline, citizens are beginning to question why the council is stalling the official release, with some residents questioning the legitimacy of the election.
Janice Otipimesiwak, the leader of the Open Government Organisation, a global charity that assesses how transparent governments are says that the behaviouir from the new council "is especially concerning." She notes that the minutes from the original policy meeting show that only the mayor and councilors who were deemed re-elected have seats on the committee that has the responsibility to release elections data to the public. "When you have a room full of people who weren't expected to win their seats this time round... in control of the data that can prove how the vote breaks down, you have cause for concern," Otipimesiwak reported in a Public Letter on the OGO's website and Facebook page this Monday. Legal expert John McLaughlin tells us this has happened once before in the history of Winnipeg. After the third mayoral election, the council refused to release elections data using a loophole in the City Charter. "It took 9 years of court battles to force the city to release the information, and it turned out that the election had been so poorly mismanaged, that nearly one third of polling stations never reported official numbers," McLaughlin shares. For Otipimesiwak, who says the OGO will be taking this matter to court, "the concern is that, given how slow the court system is for matters like this, we might not have a verdict until two elections from now."
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