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Speak Up

I had the great pleasure of greeting Riverview Mayor Clarence Sweetland in our newsroom on Tuesday and fine gentleman that he is, it pangs me sumpin' awful to do what I must do in this space today.

But as a Wildly Popular Columnist upon whose word billions upon billions of loyal readers depend for guidance and stern instruction, it is my solemn journalistic duty to get at it so here goes:

People of Riverview! Hear me!

Is there nowhere on your pleasant, well-barricaded streets, your fragrant hillside groves, your grassy, senior citizen-infested river-paths, yea even unto your play-parks where untamed rodentia once roamed wild and free, where a LeBlanc could not be found to serve as your lovely town's chief magistrate?

As dear and capable a man as Mayor Sweetland is, has the time not come for him to hang up the ol' chains of office and wrap them around whichever LeBlanc you, the people, are able to capture for imprisonment in some dank cell deep beneath the former "Riverview Heights Home for Wayward Girls" (now your Town Hall) pending May 12 in The Year of Our Lord 2012 when we storm off once again, pitchforks aloft, to the polls?

Clearly after the dust settled on Tuesday this week, and the tri-community area found itself blessed with not one but two Mayors LeBlanc, the sudden lack of symmetry was glaringly obvious.

Artistic merit aside, policy execution is at least as important and the strategic advantages of having three Mayors LeBlanc would seem equally obvious.

Now admittedly, Your Wildly Popular Columnist hasn't quite worked out the details as to why, exactly, this would be the case.

Nonetheless, if two LeBlancs are better than one, then three LeBlancs would surely, logically, seem a most desirable thing indeed.

One imagines for example a beleaguered Prime Minister Stephen Harper hunched behind his desk, those baby-blue eyes darting haplessly hither and yon like a giant porcupine caught in the headlights (the PM is a tad too near-sighted and, ahem, 'husky' to be considered a deer) as he is triangulated upon by not one, not two, but three, count 'em three Mayors LeBlanc who cleverly close in all sides and rifle the poor PM's pockets for federal infrastructural largesse before he is able to sort one LeBlanc from the other.

Besides, uniform, wall-to-wall LeBlancness in our own three oval offices would seem the only way to go in a metropolitan area where we wade as one in a gene-pool so LeBlancishly monochromosomal as to be already up to our arse in LeBlancs, where morning commuters get their coffee with sugar "and just a little LeBlancener," where the outhouses get a fresh coat of LeBlancwash every spring and yea verily, where any given sunny Sunday morning, every church bell in town peals the same distinctly Monctonesque call to worship:

'LeBlanc! LeBlanc!'

But is Mayor Sweetland already two steps ahead of Your Wildly Popular Columnist?

As you readers might have guessed from Wednesday's front page, Clarence was not the only metro-magistrate to occupy our newsroom that day.

Was the old campaigner merely here to sit rookies Mayor LeBlanc of Moncton and Mayor LeBlanc of Dieppe down, one to a knee, and instruct them in fatherly fashion from The Big Book of Bylaws?

Or were the New Three Amigos already conspiring toward nomenclative amalgamation?

Clarence LeBlanc, Mayor of All Riverview?

I think that's got a mighty nice ring to 'er, me.

People of Riverview! You will be amalgamated! Resistance is futile! After all, as we are reminded by the immortal Monctonian bard John Donne 'Ding-Dong' LeBlanc:

"Ask not after whom the LeBlanc bongs. It bongs for thee."

n City Views appears daily, written by various members of our staff. Rod Allen is an assistant managing editor with The Times & Transcript. His column appears every Thursday.