Mayor Tom Sidney has taken a leave of absence for “personal” reasons, which leaves Renfrew with an interim Head of Council in the person of Reeve Peter Emon. As indicated in an earlier article, I wish the mayor the best as he navigates those personal concerns.
From the very beginning of their inception, I’ve commented on the use of Strong Mayor Powers as a theoretical construct, as well as looking at them with some greater detail as they are applied right here in town.
I’d like to know what happens to those powers when a mayor, any mayor, leaves Council under these conditions, to wit the taking of a personal leave of absence?
And honestly, where would I go to ask?
Certainly not here. Asking questions and getting ignored is the gold standard in Renfrew when it comes to administrative staffers and many of the politicians, with the mayor being the absolute worst. It’s one of the key areas of discontent surrounding Town Hall, so I’m not inclined to even waste any effort trying to get any meaningful and genuine assistance on this from anyone in that building.
I do know this much about the powers.
Strong Mayor Powers can not be handed over to an interim Head of Council, other than some delegated authority that would allow the interim chair to make some changes to staffing and staffing structure. I’ll bet no such authority was delegated from the mayor to the reeve, precisely because the mayor may not want to have anyone holding any part of the big stick other than himself. I’ll further bet that the mayor was “counselled” by senior staff to do that very thing and hang on to the totality of his Strong Mayor Powers, rather than risk having the reeve actually make some sort of structural or staffing changes which would challenge both the authority and the breadth of their empires.
Do we really need another civics lesson in democracy? Do these people who rely on an imperfect Municipal Act and shoddy legal advice to buttress their questionable actions not have any kind of appreciation for what democracy is and how it actually works? Or is their siren call more one where they work really hard to make bad legislation, and bad government policy, work.
As in work for them.
In the media release, it was indicated that the mayor was taking a bit of a hike for some form of personal reason, and the word family was tossed out by some, mental health tossed out by others.
If the latter, I can fully appreciate the difficulties and challenges involved with being the mayor of a municipality in Ontario. I can further appreciate how difficult those challenges must be when you’re not very good at your job. Leadership and communication are two areas of profound weakness for our local mayor, and he compounds these challenges by taking ham-handed approaches to things that honestly could be resolved differently and much more amicably. So to a certain extent, it’s absolutely fair to say that any mental stress incurred was brought about entirely by himself and his refusal to do his job as he ought. But he decided long ago to run the town as a triumvirate with the Clerk and the CAO, excluding the entirety of the elected Council in the process and shunting them off to the side.
But now he’s gone, albeit for a couple of months, but the triumvirate remains intact, especially if the mayor brings his bag of special powers home with him.
Here’s another question.
Can the mayor still utilize the Strong Mayor Powers while on leave?
Can he, like, pop in out of the sky and wave his magic stick when it’s convenient for him to do so, or when his bosses tell him to do so? Because if Strong Mayor Powers are an affront to democracy, using them in this manner would be an even bigger affront.
The mayor, himself, is the author of much of his own misfortune when it comes to what’s happening at Town Hall and the level of heat that brings. So to a degree, while I wish him the best, almost all of his political misfortune is entirely self-inflicted, and for the life of me I don’t know why it has to be this way. But instead of taking positive, pro-active measures to make things better, more open, and more accountable, he instead doubles-down and seems to go all-in with the black arts of political subterfuge, mis-direction, and a very thick opacity.
There’s this concept that I have rattling around in my head, and I can’t seem to shake it, and I’m not entirely sure of the author, but it goes something like this:
When you’re on leave, you’re on leave.
There’s no in-between leave, or quasi-leave, or part-time leave. A leave is a leave. It means you’ve left. it’s a pretty simple thing to wrap one’s head around, really. Which means you don’t get to be on leave and then pounce back into the thick of things as it suits, all the while brandishing a difference-maker of a power at your personal convenience. And if that’s the way things do, indeed, work around here, then that’s just plain wrong. And the lawyer you may claim gave you that stellar advice? Well, like anything else, there are good ones, bad ones, and in-between ones in any profession, and lawyers are no different. Maybe the town hires lawyers from the same general discount bin from which they pick engineering and construction companies. if that’s the case, I now understand any potential, so-called legal advice they may have “received” on this, if they actually sought any legal advice at all.
So when you go on leave, you open up that desk drawer and you place in it all the trappings of office you won’t be exercising for the next little while. Things like your favourite pen, coffee mug, your pencil sharpener, and maybe even the chain of office, since I t’s not likely you’ll be needing that, unless it’s part of your Halloween planning. Into that drawer should also go your Strong Mayor Powers, especially since you’re on record as not wanting to use them anyways, as per your letter to the premier and the minister. Mind you, despite not wanting these powers, you’ve still been talked into using them maybe nine times at last count, one of those times being the promotion of a second member of your Politburo to a new dictatorship. Sorry, directorship.
My error.
I have yet to uncover anything specific to leaves of absences and Strong Mayor Powers, which isn’t surprising since neither the people who came up with the justifications in the first place, nor the so-called experts that provide commentary and advice, seem to know what they’re talking about with any comforting degree of certainty.
But man, can they blow smoke.
As a final comment, I took note of how Brampton mayor Patrick Brown recently used his Strong Mayor Powers to direct his staff to release documents to media, particularly the Toronto Star, so that they may better understand the decision-making that went behind a project in that municipality.
Which is kind of refreshing.
Except that in Brampton, the mayor is actually a strong one, in charge of the place and with the staff working for him.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 