Crimes and Misdemeanours

The word "malfeasance" is an umbrella term. Deliberately so. It means bad faith, treachery,exploitation, bribery and corruption and everything else peculiar to a position of trust and authority.

I believe it's the operative word in the Oath of Office.

Being elected is not the determinate to taking office. A successful candidate is not a member of council until he or she has sworn the Oath of Office before a Justice of the Peace or a Commissioner of Oaths.

It is a binding contract. Break it if you dare.

Some assume being elected and taking the Oath of Office is a warranty of intelligence and integrity.

It isn't.

Warranty lies in numbers of people taking office. Nine independent minded persons on a council provides a reasonable assumption of responsible conduct.The odds are reduced with a gelatinous majority.

This week the R.C.M.P announced no charges will be laid in Toronto's computer leasing scandal of five years ago.

Whatever the reason, this much is true.

The Bellamy Inquiry cost the taxpayers of Toronto in the area of thirteen million dollars. Every stone was upturned. Disgusting and degrading aspects of human behaviour were uncovered.

Hundreds of thousands of tax dollars were shown to have flowed from the treasury without measurable return.

An elected representative, supposed to be minding the store, wasn't. He was living a life style
without obvious means to support it.

An appointed official was wined, dined, transported and bedded by a contract operator who became rich without obvious intellectual ability.

Names will undoubtedly be remembered. Reputations are destroyed.

My guess is, there is no prosecution because of the need not to further undermine public confidence in the ability of government to manage their affairs.

It is no small consideration.

Until now, Mayor David Miller has somehow managed to escape blame in the computer leasing scandal. Why was that?

Is the Mayor of Toronto so far removed, he could not have picked up on what was going on? Is there no scuttlebutt in Toronto City Hall?

How could that affair have flourished so long, so openly, so brazenly, before the whistle was blown.?

What about timing of the announcement of the police decision not to prosecute?

It's an election year. David Miller will not be a candidate. Adam Gambrione was. Will Mayoralty candidates pick up on the issue?

Will incumbents be called to account for failure to notice or sound the alarm?

How could that happen?

I can offer one possibility.

Toronto is a massive city.They have, I think, forty five Councillors. The city is divided into wards. Councillors have offices in their wards. In a ward system, they are responsible only for their wards. They will be re-elected or not, in their wards , on the basis of how the ward was served.

Will corruption - at- the- core matter to ward electors? Will ward councillors be held accountable for crimes and misdemeanours at city hall?

Toronto's election will be interesting to watch. The circumstances are a barometer on the merits or otherwise of a ward system.

Yet, considering the size of the city, they have no alternative.

In Aurora, the current population is fifty-three thousand people. It's not even the size of a city ward.

We do have an alternative.

A computer leasing scandal with thousands of tax dollars flowing out of the treasury without measurable return could not happen here. No Treasury official, male or female, could be wined dined, bedded and transported for months without somebody noticing

Trust me .... scuttlebutt would be sufficiently rampant. One person could not claim ignorance let alone nine.

Everybody would be accountable to all of the electors.