Northern Life holding live interviews with leading mayoral candidates

Starting tomorrow (Tuesday) at noon, NorthernLife.ca is bringing the leading candidates for mayor into our studio to answer questions on their plans for Greater Sudbury.

On the heels of NorthernLife.ca's opinion poll, we're bringing in Brian Bigger, Dan Melanson, John Rodriguez and Ron Dupuis to field questions from our three-person panel. For our first event, managing editor Mark Gentili, city hall reporter Darren MacDonald and Northern Ontario Business news editor Ian Ross will ask Melanson questions in turn.

The hour-long event will be carried live on our website, northernlife.ca, and a video of the full interview will be available immediately afterward.
Melanson will be followed by Dupuis on Oct. 9, Rodriguez on Oct. 10 and Bigger on Oct. 14. Bigger, Melanson, Rodriguez and Dupuis were the top four finishers in the poll, conducted Sept. 24-25 and released over the weekend.

The survey, conducted by Oraclepoll Research, also asked your opinion on such topics as a casino for the city; tax freeze versus service cuts; trust in city hall; and, your top priorities for the next city administration. We will incorporate some of the results into our questions, which will focus on restoring trust in city hall, plans for economic development, as well as more personal questions about why candidates want to be mayor.

Questions from our panel will take up about 45 minutes, with the last 15 minutes devoted to questions sent in from readers. Anyone who wants to submit a question, can tweet it using the hashtag #sudburyvotes2014, post it on our Facebook page, or send an email to [email protected]. Remember: short, thoughtful questions with broad appeal across the city are most likely to be selected.