Sean Devine fights off challengers to hold Knoxdale-Merivale

Sean Devine is heading back to city hall with a much bigger mandate than the one he started with.

The Knoxdale-Merivale councillor took 59.2 per cent of the vote in Monday’s municipal election, even with two of his council colleagues working to unseat him. He first won his seat in 2022 with 39.2 per cent.

This time, he drew 7,083 votes once all 150 tabulators had reported.

“I am feeling very good. I am feeling vindicated,” said Devine at his election-night party at Fitz’s Classic Grill BBQ Smoke House in Nepean.

Rideau-Jock Coun. David Brown and Beacon Hill-Cyrville Coun. Tim Tierney both openly campaigned for the runner-up, federal public servant Anna Ielo-Tal. Devine told CBC News earlier in October it was “a pretty bold move for a colleague to do.”

“There was so much pushback, almost to the point of making us second guess everything about ourselves,” he said.

Brown, who was acclaimed, will be back at the council table with Devine for the next four years.

Floods first, campaign second

The Canada Day storm, which the city classified as a one-in-200-year rainfall event, put Devine’s re-election bid on hold. Campaign worker Tim Abray said the team didn’t start knocking on doors until after Labour Day.

“Normally, they would have started earlier but with the floods that happened the entire focus was on helping those people,” Abray said, adding that close to 800 people in the ward had water in their basements.

David Debarth, a ward resident of around 25 years, signed up to help with Samaritan’s Purse, a disaster relief charity, after the storm.

He found Devine working beside him on his first day.

“We both put in a full day in an unspeakably damaged house,” Debarth said. “Usually politicians kiss babies and they shake hands and they smile for photographs. But he bent over backwards like the rest of us and then he did more days.”

Shining a light on safety

For Devine, safety can start with something as simple as a street light. He said the city’s budget for new street lights not paid for by developers was zero for the first two years of his term.

“The only way I got a new street light in my second year was because it was at a location where somebody had shot somebody,” he said. “So, in Ottawa, you need to get shot to get a new street light.”

He also pushed back on police spending, voting against three of four police budgets this term. Tierney went after that record in a campaign video for Ielo-Tal.

Devine said that whenever he asked police for better service in his ward, they told him they needed a bigger budget first.

He wasn’t willing to give them one.

“In the first three years, my ward wasn’t getting the results from the police that we needed at all,” he said.

Debarth pointed to Devine’s support for ANCHOR, a city-funded program that sends trained mental health and substance use workers to some crisis calls instead of police.

“It was kind of a win-win for everybody, for the people in need and for the police officers that could be freed up to do other things,” he said.

What’s next

Devine’s second term will play out alongside Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, who won re-election on Monday.

First on the council’s agenda is setting its priorities for the next four years.

Devine wants infrastructure near the top of the list and noted that Sutcliffe and his main challenger, Jeff Leiper, both campaigned on it. The fixes won’t come cheap but Devine calls them necessary.

Debarth lives in a part of the city that was largely built in the 1960s, pipes included. For him, Devine’s focus on infrastructure is nothing new.

“For years, Sean has been talking about infrastructure and saying we don’t have enough money, and now everybody’s talking about it,” he said. “But I just remember him talking about it first.”

Some supporters already have bigger plans for him.

Nikki Diamond-Christudas, 53, doesn’t live in Knoxdale-Merivale but Devine’s office took her under its wing.

“When he talks about a problem, he looks at how it impacts everyone throughout the city,” she said. “I think the man should run for mayor, eventually.”