In a cluster of election campaign signs at West Saanich Road and McTavish, something is missing.
It’s B.C. Green candidate Rob Botterell’s face, which was neatly cut out of his sign.
Campaign manager Patricia Pearson said she was initially disappointed when someone reported Botterell’s damaged sign, but after mulling it over, she decided to roll with it.
Instead of replacing the sign, she opted to leave it up and encourage supporters to take a picture with their face where Botterell’s should be.
“I thought two things: One, it was an important message to leave it up, just to show that there is damage taking place. And then, second of all, I just thought that it would be a cool opportunity to turn it into something positive,” said Pearson, who is running Botterell’s campaign in Saanich North and the Islands for the Oct. 19 provincial election.
Pearson is planning to collect photos of people posing in the sign, along with one of Botterell himself, and put them together in a collage for a “Where’s Waldo”-style game she’s calling “Where’s Rob?”
Damage to campaign signs is nothing new, but it’s a waste of volunteer time and campaign donations when they need to be replaced, said Pearson.
In September, vandals tossed B.C. Conservative candidate John Wilson’s signs into trash bins and blackberry bushes near the Bay Street bridge in Vic West hours after they went up in his Esquimalt-Colwood riding.
Debra Toporowski, an NDP candidate in the Cowichan Valley, also had her face cut out of a sign.
The majority of sign damage Botterell’s campaign has seen has been on the Gulf Islands, Pearson said.
“I think there’s a lot of division out there, and so I think it’s a way to show people’s frustration,” Pearson said.
The B.C. Conservative candidate in the riding, David Busch, is seeing the most damage to signs on Salt Spring Island, said campaign manager Ryan Trelford.
“There’s been signs kicked in. There’s been some graffiti on David’s face and I think he had his face cut out, too,” Trelford said.
He speculates that could be because islanders don’t like signs — some for environmental reasons — or because the Conservative campaign has more volunteers working on this campaign than they have in the past, which means more blue signs on the Gulf Islands than in previous campaigns.
“So maybe it’s a reaction of some locals who haven’t seen blue signs before,” Trelford said.
About 90 per cent of the campaign’s sign damage has been on Salt Spring, but overall damage is much lower than in Busch’s two previous federal campaigns, he said.
Trelford said he would expect about 10 to 15 per cent of signs to be damaged, but only about one per cent are being destroyed this time around.
Independent candidate Amy Haysom said she hasn’t noticed any damage to her campaign signs. Instead, she’s received positive feedback because her signs are repurposed from a community event, with stickers of her photo and name covering the original content.
As an independent candidate, Haysom wasn’t allowed to begin collecting campaign donations until the writ dropped on Sept. 21. As a result, she didn’t have her signs installed until last weekend and she has fewer signs than candidates who are part of a political party, she said.
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