The agenda is out for Tuesday’s Renfrew Town Council Meeting and I didn’t get to the bottom of the first page of the thing before I saw something that made my political radar start to ping.
A certain Ian McFarlane will be making a deputation at the beginning of the meeting, and for ten minutes or less he’ll be speaking on something having to do with the procurement of IT services for the town.
At an earlier meeting back in December, a staff recommendation to give a tendered contract to OnServe was shot down by council since, as councillor Kyle Cybulski said, “I don’t know what it is that I’m voting for.”
So, as is the case for most things that are of high interest, it was resolved that the whole thing would be hashed out in-camera, behind the closed doors they love get behind when there’s any chance that somebody might end up looking stupid or appear to have done something not exactly according to Hoyle.
Mr. McFarlane is an IT specialist of some repute and strikes me as somebody who would have tendered a bid for that contract, one that took the town’s IT services from somewhere in the twenty thousands of dollars and danced it all the way up into the $80,000 range. It’s the kind of jump that catches peoples’ attention.
If McFarlane is there to speak, and if he did tender a proposal, I would think it’s safe to guess that he didn’t get the job. And if that’s the case, what reason would he have to be making a deputation? Perhaps I’m reading way too much into this, but as I said, the radar is returning a contact, and to me, that means there’s something out there that needs to be identified as friend or foe. And until it’s properly classified, I’m going to have to pay attention to that radar screen.
It makes me wonder what happened behind those closed doors. Of course, I always wonder what happens behind those closed doors, since they’re behind them an awful lot, and nobody seems to challenge the grounds they use as their rationale for doing so.
We have an integrity commissioner, somebody who is paid by the town, from a company that has to apply in a competition for that service contract, which is a built-in systemic conflict right there. And even when the integrity commissioner renders a decision, Council can and will just ignore it, at least from what I’ve seen so far.
If this is the case, then the best word that I can come up with to adequately address the town’s commitment to openness and transparency would be thus:
Bullshit.
Pure and unmitigated.
So here we go again. At the very least, it gets the Tuesday meeting jumping right from the get-go, so there’s that.
I believe the awarding of that IT contract to OnServe has been confirmed behind those closed doors. So what was it that ranked as being so sensitive that the peasants in the gallery couldn’t be trusted to handle it? Whatever it was, apparently it was resolved to the point where Council ( “we don’t know what we’re voting for” ) is now okay with whatever it is that they were voting for. So I’m just wondering, what exactly was it that they were voting for, after all?
It’s stuff like this that brings the operations of staff and Council into the possibility of disrepute, a state of affairs that seems to waft over the place in seeming perpetuity. And this, or the secrecy around it, just adds more fuel to the argument that things need to change, and for the better, and for the appropriate.
Sometimes when things change, the people around those things need to change as well.
There will be no Third-Party Report on competence and appropriateness generally and irrespective of Ma-Te-Way. But there will be illumination, awareness, and judgement exercised by another body.
An energized and educated electorate will be just the start.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 