MEADOWVALE, N.S. — Ron Trimper’s had six election signs stolen and three others have been defaced with black spray paint.
He’s a big supporter of the West Nova Liberal candidate Jason Deveau.
Wayne Atwater is working on the Chris d’Entremont campaign, putting up about 250 signs for the Conservative candidate in Kings County.
Somebody’s been vandalizing them.
In a chance encounter, Atwood was in the Greenwood area to put up a requested Conservative sign when he saw Trimper at the side of the road dealing with the vandalized Liberal signs. He stopped and the two old friends compared notes, with Atwater recounting what happened to Conservative signs in Aylesford.
One d’Entremont sign at the corner of Highway 1 and School House Road was ‘blackfaced.’ Somebody used black spray paint to create the blackface impression. The candidate’s eyes and mouth are all that are visible. Atwater replaced that sign and then somebody took a knife and carved d’Entremont’s head completely out of the replacement sign, leaving a head-shaped hole.
The Liberal signs on Highway 201, just west of Greenwood, were also tagged with black spray paint – a big circle with a line through it on top of Deveau’s name.
“Election time you have your choice, your freedom of voting for whoever you want – your team of choice,” said Trimper. “And that’s the way it should be. It’s a childish thing to go and deface other people’s property once they put it up. It’s advertisement, trying to get their name out if they’re not well known.”
Atwater agreed when Trimper described what was happening as disgraceful. He said putting up signs has been a long process.
“It’s a lot of work,” he said, “And it’s tiresome and it’s disgusting, and heartbreaking, and awful, and disgraceful - and the list goes on - when you find a sign, not just once, but twice, vandalized. The first time blackfaced and the second time the face is cut off.”
COSTLY
He said it’s costly. The signs are $30 or $40 each. And he estimates that in West Nova the Conservatives have spent $10,000 on signs. He said stolen or vandalized, it starts to add up.
“This sign is probably not going to get replaced,” Atwater said as he stood at the end of School House Road in Aylesford. “We’re out of signs and you have to draw the line somewhere.”
Neither Trimper, nor Atwater, are placing blame on supporters of the other party. In fact, the two can’t figure out what’s going on or what the motivation might be.
“The only thing I say is, please, whoever you are... please go vote,” he said. “If you marked up Chris d’Entremont’s sign, please go vote. Vote for whoever you want, but please vote instead of doing this. And maybe what you could do is volunteer to help us take them down, because we have to take all these signs down again too.”
Atwater said campaign signs are the first and most visible evidence of an election.
“When they drop the writ we can’t wait to get out,” Atwater said, “because you’ve got to get ahead of your competition, or at least you think you’ve got to get ahead of him.”
And party supporters ask for signs.
“I just had a call this morning and went over to a gentleman’s house in Greenwood,” Atwater said. “He said ‘Wayne, I’m going to vote for Chris. I’ve always been a Tory anyway. I really want to put one here by my road because Kings Transit and all the military people travel through here, so I want to make sure I get a sign up showing Chris d’Entremont.’”
GREEN PARTY
Green Party candidate Judy Green has lost signs too.
“Yes, a whole street of signs stolen,” she said. “Signs gone in Greenwood. Big signs vandalized in Annapolis Royal and Yarmouth. Apparently we have reached that point in this election.”
She said she wished people would realize that each sign is paid for by their friends and neighbours.
“Some of my supporters are on fixed income and donate $20 from each GST rebate,” she said. “These are the people they are stealing from.”
She has a video on her campaign Facebook page from a supporter showing new signs on his lawn and his parents’ lawn to replace ones that were stolen.
NDP candidate Matthew Dubois said he hasn’t experienced any sign problems yet.
“But we have so few signs up at the moment,” he said. “Ask me that question next week when we have more up and visible.”
WAYNE GAUDET
Wayne Gaudet, Deveau’s campaign manager, doesn’t know what’s happening either.
“We’ve got a group of volunteers who are working on Jason’s campaign that are putting up signs, and naturally they find it disappointing that these signs are being destroyed,” Gaudet said.
“I have contacted the police to provide them with an update on the information we do know,” Gaudet said. “I know around in Clare we’ve had a few that disappeared now. I can’t say if they were stolen or the wind blew them. I don’t know. So we just replaced them.”
Floyd Benjamin, who works in Deveau’s Middleton campaign office, provided Gaudet with a list of signs that are missing or were defaced. It starts in Paradise, where four smaller signs on Paradise Lane disappeared. On his way to replace a missing sign at Ernie and Joan Banks’ property in Meadowvale on Highway 201 near Trimper’s house, he spotted another defaced sign in Middleton. He said he knows of 12 signs stolen, including two large ones.
“This hasn’t happened here in 20 years,” Benjamin said. Like Trimper, Atwater and Gaudet, he doesn’t know why it’s happening and he’s not blaming supporters of the other parties.
All he knows is it’s keeping him busy.
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