2009 grade: D+
2008 grade: C+
2007 grade: C+
Debbie Hum cries---a lot. Initially, a few years ago, Hum only cried when council was having a moment of silence for a recently deceased person she used to work with, and who would fault her for that? Then, she started crying when just anyone died, whether she knew the deceased or not---still in the realm of acceptable behaviour. But nowadays, Hum is crying when councillors disagree with each other, or when someone expresses a strident opinion.
The entire point of having a city council is to vet out disagreements, so Hum’s crying routine has become something of a self-parody. More, Hum seems to have slipped into a permanent state of uncertainty; she can’t seem to complete a sentence, trailing off into some private inner world. “I don’t know how I’m going to vote,” she says quite often, and then votes with the last speaker.
In the past year, the only discernible political opinion I’ve witnessed from Hum concerned “tax reform,” and she went entirely the wrong way on that. Otherwise, there’s still some vague remembrance of positions she once held, but although she doesn’t seem to know exactly why she held those positions, and holding onto that tenuous thread is all that’s preventing Hum from sliding into utter failure.
