Waterloo Region Votes
Information About the 2022 Municipal Election

Information About Media Sources

As part of our mission to help voters make informed decisions in the municipal election, we link to many external resources. This page describes our approach to including media on the site.

Here are our rules of thumb:

  • We link to media items that help voters decide who they support. Our goal is to do this in a nonpartisan way.
  • We focus on candidate races. We include short summaries of issues that have come up during the election on the Issues page, but this is not the primary focus of the site.
  • We reserve the right to refrain from linking to any particular media.
  • We are a manually-curated site, and only link to things we know about. If we are missing something relevant, please contact us.
  • We attempt to distinguish between opinions and factual news items, but this is a fuzzy area and we may not always get it right.

Issues Pages

We now have a brief Issues page. This page links to background articles for some of the issues that have come up during the election campaign. The purpose of this page is to help voters get a broad overview of the issue, and to dig deeper if they so choose.

On this page we attempt to link only to official pages (such as those published on municipal websites) and to established news sites.

“Established” News Sites

The question of whether a news site is “established” arises on the Issues page and for media items we classify as “Articles”. When considering what media outlets to treat as news, we consider the following:

  • Does the organization produce original, independent journalism, as opposed to reposts, opinion pieces, or promotional pieces?

  • Is the organization accountable to someone other than itself? Does it have a named editorial structure? Does it have a corrections policy? Is it part of a recognised press body?

We are looking for evidence of independence and accountability.

Some sites we consider to be established news sites include:

  • CTV Kitchener
  • Global News Kitchener
  • CBC Kitchener-Waterloo
  • Waterloo Region Record and other Metroland properties (New Hamburg Independent, Waterloo Chronicle, Cambridge Times)

All-Candidates Meetings and Debates

We link to most recordings of all-candidates meetings and debates, regardless of who produces them. The rules of thumb for being considered an all-candidates meeting are:

  • Were all candidates for a particular position invited to the meeting?
  • Are the candidates asked to respond to rounds of questions?

Questionnaires

We link to most questionnaires. We define a questionnaire as a survey that is posed to all candidates for a particular position, where all the questions are the same and the responses are published verbatim.

Many questionnaires are published by advocacy groups, but established news media sometimes publish surveys as well.

Opinion Pieces

We do not link to every opinion piece about the municipal election. We reserve the right to refrain from linking to any particular media item.

There are good reasons to consider opinion pieces skeptically. They are often authored by pseudo-anonymous authors. Sometimes they are written by people associated with a particular candidate’s campaign, or somebody who claims to be neutral but has a strong partisan agenda. Sometimes they contain statements that are hyperbolic or incorrect. Despite this, they can be useful to illustrate conversations and controversies that come up during the campaign.

Linking to an opinion piece is not an endorsement of its views. We sometimes link to opinion pieces that disagree with each other.

Some of the opinions we are more interested in include:

  • Discussions on forums like Reddit, which present a range of views.
  • Endorsements of candidates by advocacy groups (but see the caveats below).
  • Selected opinion pieces published in established media.
  • Selected blog posts that add context to election issues.

We will tend to link to opinions that add something new to the conversation. When groups use grassroots/astroturf campaign to flood the internet with many identical opinions we will not link to all of them.

Linking to an opinion (or a set of opinions) does not reflect how popular it is among voters overall. Some groups are noisy online but do not hold widespread views.

Endorsement Lists

Endorsement lists are a specific type of opinion. Usually they are offered by advocacy groups pursuing a particular agenda.

We link to most (although not necessarily all) endorsement lists published by advocacy groups. Sometimes an “advocacy group” consists of a single individual, and we do not go out of our way to distinguish these.

In principle, many endorsement lists published by organizations are not permitted, because those groups have not registered as Third-Party Advertisers with the municipalities where they are making endorsements.

We consider most endorsement lists to be like any other opinion, and will consider linking to them.

Voters who feel that a particular endorsement violates third-party advertiser rules should contact the relevant Municipal Clerk(s). The Region of Waterloo publishes contact information for all Municipal Clerk on its Municipal Elections Compliance Audit Committee page.

Candidate Profiles

Many news outlets produce profiles of candidates running in local races. We link to many of these, even though multiple profiles of the same candidate are often very similar.

Sometimes candidate profiles resemble questionnaires in the sense that all candidates are asked identical questions. Usually if each candidate is presented in an individual article, we classify these as candidate profiles. Otherwise we use our discretion.

Elections get heated, and some users of our site may find the contents of media we link to objectionable. Our goal in this website is to help voters make more informed decisions about the municipal election, and sometimes that information is unpleasant to read. As a reminder: we do not endorse the position of any media we link to, and as a nonpartisan website we do not endorse candidates.

If you are thinking of suing us for defamation, you should be aware of Canadian case law: in particular the Crookes vs Newton Supreme Court decision from 2011. This ruling asserts that in most cases linking to a defamatory source on the Internet is itself not defamatory.

Here are some background articles about this decision: