Props and bravo to John McDonald.
The Renfrew councillor introduced a motion whereby town staff is to identify and and provide all relevant documentation outlining the relationship existing between the Town of Renfrew and the Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation, especially as it pertains to the BAFN presence at Ma-Te-Way.
This is one of two items I requested information on last October, but was told to go stuff myself by Clerk Carolynn Errett and former Acting CAO Kelly Latendresse on the grounds that the request was “political” in nature. And staff doesn’t do political. They told me to direct the question to Council instead. Which was really cool because that was the very body that refused to even acknowledge my request in the first place, much less respond to it.
But now, after eight months, a real live councillor, John McDonald, is going to take a crack at it.
I wonder how successful he’ll be at cracking the perimeter defences, traversing the moat, and breaking down the wall of intransigent silence that the senior staff has erected for themselves, to shield themselves from having any of their embarrassing decisions made public and potentially causing a loss of professional face.
Are they going to comply, or will they make one of their own councillors submit an FOI — freedom of information — request? Would they be that bold? Are they even allowed? Is there some dark corner of the Municipal Act that gives senior staff the right to tell an elected councillor to go blow smoke?
Will they attempt to bullshit him, an elected councillor? Give him the runaround? Lead him down blind alleys? Will they flat-out ignore him?
And if they do any or all of these things, what recourse will he have?
It appears Councillor McDonald is doing exactly what a councillor is supposed to do, and that is to listen to community concerns, and politely take those concerns to council, and by extension staff. But a lot of this current staff, especially the CAO, Director/Clerk, and former Acting CAO, don’t like people poking around in the backroom where all these too-sensitive-for-human-eyes documents are stored, likely in a water-damaged cardboard box. These are The Big Three, or Les Trois Grand for our French friends. It is they who run the place, who wear the boots that need kissing. But I would assume that even they would have to comply with a councillor’s request, especially after it was adopted and passed as a motion before Council.
But I’ll bet they’re not all that happy over there behind the curtain at Fort Renfrew.
I suspect that any release of relevant information may well cast an unfavourable shadow upon some former staff members, perhaps even upon current ones, but they’ll be making their own long shadows if they make any effort at subterfuge or of attempting to deflect and/or divert the councillor’s request. We must remind ourselves that these are master political operators, Machiavellian in scope, and they run circles around the rest of us, no doubt enjoying knee-slapping belly laughs behind the scenes, congratulating themselves on their political cleverness and what they must assume to be the abject stupidity of everyone else.
We’ll see how this goes, but I, for one, will be clamouring for a good seat, since this is a win-win. They either stonewall the councillor, which is a story in its own right, or they actually cough up some information, another story.
But what will really happen is they will insist on going into closed session, the other time-honoured way to keep a lid on embarrassing information and preventing it from getting out. Such an inevitable decision must face an immediate integrity challenge, not because it’ll do any good, but because it registers the challenge on the books. That will require even more chicanery on their part, since they’d have to endure an integrity investigation, and then afterwords, completely ignore it, meaning another axis of criticism will be created. Eventually the light of scrutiny and the weight of their shenanigans might well be too much for them to bear, and information could then flow.
Thank you Councillor McDonald for your calm, deliberate, and effective execution of your responsibilities. Now we wait and see if others will faithfully execute theirs.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 