It's All About Ethics - Yours or Mine.

On a television chat I referred to Councillor Doug Holyday of Toronto. I was talking about a complaint filed with the Toronto Integrity Commissioner. Councillors Holyday and Rob Ford had had an official complaint against them because they had NOT made a claim for office expenses. I said it appeared they were both “rich” and had paid their own expenses. I received a friendly correction from one who knows Doug Holyday. He is not rich.

My knowledge of City politicians is what I pick up from the media. My comment would probably never reach Councillor Holyday or matter in the least to him. But just in case, I do want to correct it. And it has made me think.

Councillors in York Region have an allowance for office expenses and administrators. In Markham for instance, an office and a staff person is shared by two ward councillors.. In Aurora,where the whole town is the size of a ward and we have eight councillors, we have a new administrative assistant shared by all councillors and we just refurbished office space complete with a reception area at a cost of almost $60,000.

If the cost of the new facility and staff were to be assigned to councillors who use it, I would not be making a claim for expenses. I have only seen the facility once since it was completed and I have never discovered a need for an administrative assistant. That is not a reflection on the person occupying the position.

I see my role as a personal conduit between residents with a problem and the appropriate town department, to resolve the problem or provide an answer to any query I might have on their behalf. My research means paying attention to what is going on in other municipalities. Councillor Marsh drew my attention to a service on the internet called Munimall. It culls news items about municipalities across Canada.

If I need to know another municipality's experience on a particular issue, I pick up my own phone and call the relevant department in that city. I just say who I am and they treat me like one of their own. Municipal people are always happy to share information. It is the nature of public service.

I make no use of the phone, desk, computer or laptop in the councillors' room. Last term, it was discovered by monitoring that the room was almost never used except for Councillors Morris and Keane, who had separate rooms of their own. I've never thought about that before but I really have no idea what they did there.

In the last budget, we included the cost of refurbishing the councillors' room.and providing an administrative assistant. The budget was not finished until May. It was a tedious process. By the time terms of reference , advertising and selection took place, the job was not filled until the end of the year.For reasons of privacy rights, a person's salary cannot be divulged and I will not do that. But, by the time all factors are considered, space, equipment, benefits and use of other town facilities, . a conservative budget figure for the service would be in the region of $75,000 .Along with re-furbishing the room they werenew budget items and represented an increase in taxes.

The new council committed to it. They had no experience to guide them. But that did not stop them.

With the same absence of experience, they took other things out of the budget. A playground had been listed three years in a row in need of replacement. The cost was $70,000. The councillor who lives in the area said her neighbours would be wondering why we were wasting taxpayers' money that way. On the night we passed the budget, a mother from the neighbourhood came in and asked when so many beautiful things were happening elsewhere in our beautiful town, why could the children in her neighbourhood not have a playground they could safely enjoy?

The councillor promptly pointed at the Leisure Services Director. “You said it was safe” she said.

“It is.”, he said, “because we remove what is unsafe. That's why it is in need of replacement.”

When I started this blog, it was my intention to write about new provincial regulations and the requirement to appoint an “Investigator” to support the regulations. The stated Provincial objective is greater transparency and accountability of municipal politicians.They have their caucuses and party discipline which does not allow elected members to speak except in support of government policy. And they presume to talk about transparency and accountability at the municipal level.

To conform to the new regs,a Code of Conduct will be necessary to give the “Investigator” a standard of measurement against which to judge the behaviour of council or any councillor about whom there may be complaints..The devil is in the details. .

Councillors Ford and Holyday were complained about by colleagues who make claims for office expenses of around $56,000. Ford and Holyday did not claim . They have now been directed by the Integrity Commissioner to reveal their sources of finances which cover their office expenses.

One wonders what might happen if they claim to have paid out of their own pockets or, alternately, don't have office expenses. Will either explanation be accepted or will that also be considered a Breach of the Code?

We have a clause in our Code of Ethics which requires councillors to educate themselves about municipal matters. Maybe , a councillor who doesn't attend the variety of workshops available at commercial rates could be considered in breach of The Code for not educating him or herself

So you think that's just being silly? Well, you have no idea how silly things are.

We have adopted a system to have Investigators available which will cost $600 a year and $1250 a day .. An investigator could quite easily take a day to decide if a complaint is frivolous...or not...and whether or not an investigation is necessary.

Most municipalities are not anticipating complaints. But if Toronto's , East Gwillimbury's, and our experience is a gauge, we will have councillors complaining about councillors on the basis of tit- for- tat or spite, or because they can't handle criticism or all of the above.

How, I wonder, will the public's confidence in elected officials be enhanced under these particular circumstances?The people who designed this monstrous mechanism should not escape being held accountable .The people who exercised their franchise in the last municipal election should be interested in learning how their authority is being circumscribed.