Here’s a nice piece by the Citizen’s Bruce Deachman on Mayor Mark Sutcliffe using “data” from a Serbian website to crow about the city of Ottawa being ranked No. 1 in North America for livability. I have nothing against Serbia, of course. But it behooved the Mayor or someone in his Office to actually check the data. I won’t say the data is bogus but it is certainly not statistically relevant, to say the least. This raises an ongoing problem I have with how Mark Sutcliffe communicates as leader of our City. He constantly strays across the admittedly fine line between public information (this includes what I would call “civic marketing”) and personal political self-promotion. We all know when a politician is grabbing at any seemingly positive data point to self-promote. That’s what it sounds like when you read Mayor Sutcliffe’s social media posts, watch his videos and news conferences, and listen to his recent media commentary. Is this what Jim Watson did as Mayor? We know that Mark Sutcliffe is following the former mayor’s political playbook page-by-page. There’s a way of “campaigning” every day as mayor (per Joanne Chianello’s observation) without making it so obvious that you are doing so. Mark Sutcliffe does himself no favours with at least 9 or 10 members of Council when he makes it so obvious and then denies that he’s doing it. In this respect, he’s trolling everyone who doesn’t agree with him. But maybe voters in Kanata North or Barrhaven East don’t care whether their Mayor self-promotes at every opportunity—-actually that’s probably exactly what Sutcliffe and his coms team are thinking. He thinks that this is a winning communication strategy that will help him bury Jeff Leiper politically. We’ll see.

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