It’s late October, 2022.

It’s the morning after an election win for five candidates who have successfully been selected as councillors for the Town of Renfrew.  Four of them are new to this, Councillors Dick, Cybulski, Legris, and McDonald.  The fifth, Councillor McWhirter, has served on council in the past, but this morning I’m describing here must still feel pretty good for him too.

There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as standing for office, or any other election-based position, and coming out the other end of it on top.  There’s a bit of a high attached to it.  And excitement.  Perhaps even a little bit of anxiety now that you’ve gone and put your name out there, and then won.  You’re happy, people are happy for you, your family is super happy, and proud on top of that.  It’s a cool experience.

Then you show up for work and find that somebody left the freezer door open, and the contents are not passing either the tests for sight or smell.  It appears the door has been open for awhile, a long while, and it further appears that nobody has gone to the trouble of doing anything about it.

The files, what there were of them in the first place, are scattered all over the floor in disarray.  When you make the effort to gather them up and put them back into some semblance of order, you find great gaps, missing files, files that have either disappeared or never existed in the first place.

The people who are in positions of support are either gone or heading for the exits.  You’re coming in the front door while many others are headed out the back.

There’s an emerging dread-creep, that feeling that, as irrational as it may seem, you’ve just walked into something not worth walking into.  That you’d just as soon walk-the-hell out of.  But you can’t, because you put your name out there, and people responded with their votes.  The very same people who know nothing about what you now seem to conclude for yourself:  the previous occupants have appeared to have left the place badly damaged, and that it now falls to you to fix the place up.  And you’re going to have use, to a large degree, the people’s money to foot the cost of the repairs.

What terrific choices you have.  Raise taxes, borrow money (if you can), raise fees, plunder reserves, or sell-off assets.  The politician in you recognizes that exactly none of these things will be received well, either by voters backing you in the election, those who didn’t, and those who didn’t bother to vote at all.

You’re holding a proverbial sack of shit, flies buzzing around it like it’s their version of Vegas.

Looks like you picked a bad day to quit smoking.

Remember the scene from Saving Private Ryan, the black sedan in the distance, approaching the farmhouse, kicking up dust as it draws nearer?  The woman sees it through her kitchen window while dong the dishes, pausing to dry her hands as she heads to the door to see who might be coming to visit.  She comes on to the porch as the car pulls up.  An army officer gets out.  Then a priest.  Then she knows.  And collapses.

That scene represents something that happened in 1944.  It could also pass as a bit of a descriptor for what it might feel like to be a newly-elected Renfrew town councillor in 2022.

Talk about the bloom coming off the rose.

Renfrew’s Town Council is currently dealing with the fallout from significant budget overruns and what could charitably be described as management issues related to the Ma-Te-Way complex expansion project. Initially budgeted at around $25 million — actually the previous council budgeted for $18 million — the costs have more than doubled due to what appears to be numerous governance and oversight failures.

For the first time ever in democracy, newly-elected members of council could demand an election recount.  “Hey, there’s no way I coulda won that thing!  Count ‘em over!”  Such a thing would be completely understandable.  Councillor McWhirter came up just short in the previous election and narrowly missed a chance to be part of that council.  Now he’s won his seat at the table back.  He essentially missed getting hit by a truck in the first instance, only to be hit by a train in the second.

For all of them, a thankless task lay ahead, one with no prospects of congratulations for any job well done, because the hole to fill is so deep, and the effort required financially so painful.

An external review performed by the firm WCSC Consulting highlighted a long list of issues to be addressed. 

The list is sobering, to say the least.  Poor and insufficient project management, poor to no financial reporting, no formal tendering processes, a seemingly intentional disconnect between the council and its director of Parks and Recreation.  Contracts seemingly awarded based upon nothing other than informal communications, and perhaps even personal networking.  The absence of competitive bids, as per recognized procedure and protocol, robbed that  council’s ability to have cost control when faced with project expenses spiralling out of control. 

But let’s not stop there.

That other council?  Where was their oversight?  What were they doing while all this was happening?  It’s a small town.  How could they not see?  I guess it may be tough to see when you’re not looking, or maybe not looking hard enough.  Accepting verbal reports instead of the required written records that are needed for accountability. Apparently excluding the town’s treasurer from financial aspects of the project.  This from experienced councillors, an experienced mayor, and an experienced reeve.  If all or any of this is true, then my God.

What, in blazes, is one expected to do when faced with all of this?  And how could you possibly survive politically?  Reminds me a bit of Winston Churchill, who took the top job in England at the start of World War 2 and shepherded that nation’s response to both Hitler and the Japanese.  A hero to many, especially in retrospect.  Those were hard times, the nation faced doom and disaster, yet he pulled them through to the other side of it.  Then promptly lost the next election after the war.  Thanks Winston.  And here’s a kick in the ass for your efforts.

This council, to its credit has done stuff to attempt making a comeback, but it’s a hell of a ways to come back from.  Like I said, the hole is deep, the fill is scarce.  New policies, which really should have been old, already existing policies, are being implemented in an attempt to avoid a repeat of what’s already happened.  Yes, the horse has already bolted the barn, I get that.  But you still have to close the bloody door to keep the other critters in there, and the bad critters out.  It’s a first step, and you can still go out looking for the horse that took off. 

Legal action has been pursued, a fraud complaint having been filed with the OPP to investigate potential misconduct.  Public trust is certainly at an all-time low, so coming back from that while at the same time finding unattractive ways to finance the unexpected costs is going to be a huge challenge going forward.

The Ma-Te-Way imbroglio has placed Renfrew’s current council and almost completely new town staff under significant a pressure they don’t deserve and didn’t ask for.  They’re going to face intense scrutiny from town residents, a scrutiny not applied to their predecessors, one of the reasons we’re in this mess.  Maybe a critical local media might have played a role, but we have nothing of that sort locally.  They print what they’re spoon-fed, so anything resembling pointed questioning of local actors is not part of their schtick.  By the way, It’s the name of the local radio station that happens to adorn the expanded Ma-Te-Way.   

The town’s staff, especially those in financial oversight roles, are also under increased scrutiny  and pressure to implement reforms, including measures designed to improve transparency and promote a more inclusive decision-making regime moving forward. That said, it’s a shame they don’t respond to emails.  When people do that, it’s more often than not that there’s something they don’t want you to know.  Which isn’t a really good look.  But they do it anyway.  We lose an administration that wasn’t really keen on transparency and replace it with another that seems to shy away from the concept in their own right.  It’s like the plan is to fix one mistake by covering it with another.

These are tough times for all involved.  And frankly, there’s no election in the world I’d want to win if the prize is a rotting sandwich of this scale.  And so, in closing, I wish both staff and council the very best of success as they continue with an onerous task that may well yield no thanks from the very people they’re trying to help.

It’s unfair, and more, it’s awfully unfair.  The choices they will have to make will be uncomfortable and unpopular.  People are angry, and that anger has a chance to be mis-directed at the who are actually attempting to remedy the situation. 

As the old adage goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.”

I truly hope for this not to be the case.