Greater Sudbury Municipal Election, 2006 - Mayoral Race

Mayoral Race

• John Rodriguez is a former federal Member of Parliament (MP) for the city's Nickel Belt electoral district.
• Lynne Reynolds was born to a working class family in the Sudbury area, where her father worked at the Copper Cliff smelter for 37 years. She became politically active in the early 1970s, when she worked to elect Liberal MP Maurice Foster in Algoma. She later served two years as a special assistant to Sudbury Liberal MP Diane Marleau. She was a coordinator of the Sudbury Region Children's Forum 2000, and later became a coordinator for Senior Friendly Sudbury. In 2004, she said that Sudbury had the potential to become the "retirement capital of Northern Ontario" in light of recent demographic shifts. She was elected as a councillor for Greater Sudbury in the 2003 municipal election, winning the second position in the sixth ward. She was appointed to the board of the Nickel District Conservation Authority in January 2004, and to the board of Downtown Sudbury the following month. In 2004, she supported an unsuccessful motion to have $650,000 held in reserve for closed recreational centres that could be reopened in the future. She also opposed retention of a bylaw restricting store hours, and called on the city to prioritize widening a section of Highway 17 to four lanes in 2005. She later endorsed Terry Kett's proposal to redesignate councillors' jobs as full-time rather than part-time. In late January 2005, she made a significant council speech criticizing Mayor David Courtemanche and top-level bureaucrats for what she described as mishandling a costly management restructuring and an election recount. Later in the year, she opposed a $27,000 salary increase for the city's top administrator. Some other councillors accused her of pandering. In November 2005, Courtemanche and Reynolds engaged in a vocal dispute over a letter she had written to the Sudbury Star, alleging that council was ill-informed and controlled by bureaucrats. She sought to lead the council's planning committee in December 2005, but lost to Ron Dupuis. Reynolds was the first candidate to officially register for the 2006 Greater Sudbury mayoral election. She later criticized Mayor Courtemanche's decision to establish a public consultation process on the effects of amalgamation of outlying areas of Greater Sudbury, chaired by Floyd Laughren. Reynolds argued that this should be the work of council, rather than an outside team. Her 2006 mayoral platform (which she delivered via a bullhorn while standing on top of a skylift) promised a complete efficiency audit of the city's books, a $10 Community Building Fund over four years, and the abolition of tipping fees. She later said that promised that would abolish the publicly-funded position of political advisor to the mayor, introduce a fair wage policy for city workers, and provide funding for outlying areas through casino revenues. Considered a serious candidate, Reynolds nonetheless finished a distant third place. She sought the Liberal Party of Canada's nomination in Nickel Belt for the 2008 federal election, but withdrew before the nomination to support rival candidate Sylvain Beaudry. Beaudry subsequently lost the nomination to Louise Portelance.
• David Chevrier operated Sudbury's first professional recording studio in the 1980s. He first ran for mayor of Greater Sudbury in the 2003 municipal election, and received 271 votes (0.50%) for a tenth-place finish out of fourteen candidates. He sought a position on the city's police services board in 2004, but was turned down. He runs a local business, selling air and water filtration systems. In his 2006 campaign, he supported a pesticide ban, favoured the creation of two or three community television channels, and sought to remove fluoride from Greater Sudbury's water system.
• Marc Crockford is a local landlord and businessman who declined to participate in mayoral debates or even release a photo of himself to the media, preferring to conduct his campaign entirely over the Internet. He said that he was reaching out to young and first-time voters, and complained when the Greater Sudbury election site removed its link to his website on the grounds that it contained "libellous" material. The Sudbury Star newspaper also declined to print a guest column that Crockford wrote about his candidacy, citing legal concerns.
• Popescu and Pokonzie are perennial candidates in the area, who have rarely garnered more than 100 votes in any election; during the 2003 election, Popescu was found guilty of assaulting his mother and sentenced to three years of probation.

Earlier in 2006, local media speculated that former mayor Jim Gordon might run for mayor again as well, but in September he ended that speculation by endorsing Rodriguez; Gordon had endorsed Courtemanche in 2003. Rodriguez was also endorsed by 2003 mayoral candidate Paul Marleau, former city councillor Gerry McIntaggart and the Sudbury and District Labour Council.

During the campaign, Rodriguez was sometimes criticized for making potentially unrealistic promises, such as eliminating homelessness in the city, which depended on lobbying the provincial or federal governments for funding and program cooperation that those governments had not guaranteed would be made available. However, both of his main opponents were also criticized as well. Courtemanche, who did not officially declare his candidacy until just a few days before the nomination deadline, was viewed by many voters as having been a weak and ineffective leader during the previous council term, and faced allegations that he had held off his campaign launch until the last minute precisely to insulate himself from having to answer that criticism on the campaign trail. Reynolds, meanwhile, was criticized by the city's media for a vague and confrontational campaign which was critical of the existing council, but offered very few specific new ideas of her own.

A Sudbury Star opinion poll published on November 1 placed Rodriguez in the lead with 49 per cent support among decided voters, with Courtemanche trailing at 30 per cent and Reynolds at 20 per cent. The other four candidates had approximately one per cent support combined.

On the final weekend before the election, Reynolds garnered the endorsement of the Sudbury Star, while the community newspaper Northern Life endorsed Courtemanche. Both newspapers acknowledged that Rodriguez had been the most successful of the three at defining the issues and direction of the campaign, but cited misgivings about his agenda as their principal reason for choosing not to endorse him.