The Turner Files: Kelowna’s common-sense slate for council that might be centred around a chatbot

The Turner Files: Kelowna’s common-sense slate for council that might be centred around a chatbot Published 8:15 am Friday, July 31, 2026 As Kelowna prepares to go to the polls in October, the list of candidates vying for positions as councillors and mayor is starting to take shape. One of the entries that caught my eye is BRACE for Change, which stands for Businesses and Residents Against Crime Everywhere. I will share what drew my attention after I describe who they are. This coalition has brought together three council candidates, including Michael Harris, Humberto Morales, and JC Rathwell, with one seat still available – an open invitation on their website reads “Join Our Slate.” It appears that Rathwell is the most visible force behind BRACE for Change. As a local businessman with a history of running for council, he now operates a home-finding and property business, as well as a car rental venture that he claims was shut down by the city. The BRACE for Change website organizes the coalition’s platform around five key pillars: safer streets, accountability, support for small businesses, common sense, and transparency. One of the things that caught my attention while browsing the BRACE website and watching its videos wasn’t the politics, but rather the look and language. I decided to run the site’s text and videos through a tool that detects AI-generated content, and sure enough, both were flagged as being created by a machine. After reading the bios, I want to know if these candidates are really speaking from the heart, or are they just repeating the same scripted lines? Is this really a coalition of unique individuals, or is it just a group of people depending on AI to give them their lines? The more you read, the more it seems like the language is being generated by a machine, rather than coming from real people with their own thoughts and feelings. Concerns are being raised in recent reporting about the pervasive use of AI creeping into government and board room decision making. Some companies have even been unable to explain how their own AI systems reached a conclusion. A local political slate leaning on the same tools to generate its public face is a small version of that same story. It’s worth drawing attention to. When I see a chatbot being used to create a platform, I want to know who will be making decisions at the council table after the campaign is over? Will council debates be outsourced in the same way that messaging was? While a language model can generate a slogan, governing a city with over a hundred thousand people is a different story altogether. We need judgement that comes from real world and localized knowledge that understands the responsibility and consequences of a decision. Not from a distant data centre. The people making decisions need to be able to weigh the pros and cons, consider different perspectives, and think critically about the impact of their choices. Another item that drew my interest is an overused phrase on the BRACE site: common sense. It shows up constantly, attached to leadership, to policy, to the whole premise of the slate. But can a language model, or a slogan borrowed from one, actually generate common sense? Common sense is not a phrase that provides insight into specific policy initiatives or solutions. What BRACE offers instead is a term that has been sanded down by years of use in Pierre Poilievre’s federal messaging and in the broader populist playbook, where “common sense” functions less as a description of anything specific and more as a signal that says trust me, I am one of you, without doing the work of explaining what any of it actually means in practice. While the pillars of its platform spell out five key areas, all which seem jargony, the name of the group is worth taking a closer look at. It’s true that crime and disorder are serious issues in some areas of Kelowna, and business owners have every right to feel frustrated. However, by calling themselves BRACE, or Businesses and Residents Against Crime Everywhere, this city council slate seems to have their focus almost entirely on one issue. But the reality is that the municipal government is responsible for so much more than just policing – it’s also about managing transit, housing, parks, water, and climate resilience, not to mention arts funding, accessibility, and reconciliation with the Syilx Okanagan Nation, on whose land the city is situated. There are dozens of other important files that have nothing to do with crime and policing. By reducing the role of governing Kelowna to a single issue, the slate is making a marketing decision that reveals their narrow view of what the job entails. This is a much simpler vision than what the job actually requires. What does this mean for the city’s future? Another area worth looking at is Rathwell’s bio. Let’s break it down and see what it really means. He says “I stand for a leadership that is awake, not woke—focused on public safety and hard-working families rather than ideological agendas,” which is a pretty interesting choice of words. When he says “woke”, what is he actually talking about? It seems like he’s using it as a way to avoid saying something directly. In reality, “woke” has become a term that gets used to criticize things like inclusion policies, protections for gender and sexuality, and reconciliation work – basically, anything that tries to make a city more accountable to people who aren’t already in a position of power. If that’s what he’s really talking about, wouldn’t it be more honest to just say so? It’s like he’s trying to sneak in a criticism without actually being clear about what he means. He also uses the word “ideology” which has also become a buzzword that is merely an empty container. It lets him signal to a base that already knows what he means while keeping deniability if he is ever asked directly what he’d actually cut or oppose. Perhaps we should ask him if this applies to things like climate change initiatives? And “hard-working families” leaves out a lot of Kelowna. Seniors on fixed incomes are not working families. Students are not working families. People living alone, whether by choice or circumstance, are not working families. Retirees who spent forty years building this city are not working families. A council candidate whose language only imagines the city through the lens of the two-parent household with a job is not offering a governing vision, he is offering a demographic he feels comfortable speaking to and calling it the whole city. That is not even common sense. That is a narrower version of Kelowna than the one that actually exists. Just because BRACE is talking about these issues, it doesn’t mean they’re not real problems. A lot of people in Kelowna are worried about crime, how hard it is to start and run a business, and the cost of living. These are all valid concerns that need to be addressed. But when a group like BRACE uses language that sounds too perfect, like it was written by a computer, and takes slogans from bigger political movements, it starts to feel more like a marketing campaign than a genuine attempt to solve problems. And when they focus only on crime numbers and family issues, it’s like they’re trying to sell a certain image of the city rather than really listening to its people. Kelowna voters should think carefully about what this means before they make their decision in October.