Earth to rookie candidates! Earth to rookie candidates!

Here's a news flash or three for ya:

1) Launching a campaign with a court case against the incumbent, one that challenges the person's integrity in particularly specious and half-cocked ways, one that will, in all likelihood, be tossed out (the process hopefully including a nice wrist-slap for the rocket-scientist perpetrating the badly-considered theatrical piece), doesn't say much about your own integrity. In fact, it raises the question of whether you'd make a credible Councillor at all.

2) Yelling at the incumbent during a debate, providing the modern equivalent of hectoring, of frothy-mouthed rabble-rousing, doing the verbal equivalent of drunken nagging is not the stuff on which respectable Councillors are made. No matter how 'successful' you feel afterward in having scored points, no matter how much you're prone to bleating about it to those who get off on this stuff.

3) Taking a quite-common occurrence of election sign vandalism, magnifying and exaggerating the particulars, drawing the kind of conclusions and making resultant declarations about the context and ramifications of the incidents that not only connote guilt on the parts of incumbents but also damn them in the process (with no evidence whatsoever) only makes you look a) immature, and b) not-in-a-kajillion-years ready for the responsibilities of a ward Councillor.

4) Creating yet another 'Us vs Them' paradigm where you're spouting some ridiculous dogma where residents are on one side and business is on the other...only means that it's clear that you have absolutely no clue about the realities of needing to generate more commercial taxes to create better revenue pie slices...which means working with 'developers and business'. Unless you'd prefer that we have an even worse situation than we currently do.

5) If you're planning to harass the incumbent after they win on October 25th, if you're planning to make life hell for them once they're back in office, please try to remember that your actions over the next four years will not only be noted as they unfold and be cited here, in full-colour...and video where deemed appropriate...but that you will be held to account during the next election, should you choose to run. (No, I do not suffer fools gladly. And yes, I take enormous offence to the political arena being used so shabbily by those who make such a big deal of how their 'fresh blood and fresh ideas' almost always count more than experience and performance.)

6) If you want to defeat the incumbent, please spend at least as much time researching the issues and then actually coming up with salient ideas as to how things could be done better as you do at lowering the entire electoral process to something akin to tossing flaming shite-bags onto porches with all the spittle-infused name-calling and low-brow rhetoric.

Next up: News flashes for the voting public