How to Lay Low in #LdnOnt

The day that Mayor Brown and Councillor Cassidy announced that they’d had an affair feels like a lifetime ago, I know. Our kids changed grades since then. We’ve been on vacations. Opened new businesses. Binge-watched whole series on Netflix. Summer swallowed that scandal in one big gulp.

Now it seems tacky and tawdry to talk about it, which is great for all parties involved. But there remains one aspect of all this that has never been properly answered for: the conflict of interest. It’s easy to lay low and let things blow over in London, but maybe sometimes we shouldn’t allow that to happen.

We’ve never heard real answers about at least two council votes the mayor probably shouldn’t have participated in, or thousands of dollars from the mayor’s expense account, plus the professional and personal development opportunities for Cassidy that came with a number of decisions the mayor made.

I won’t contest whether Cassidy was qualified to be the beneficiary of all these choices, but I do contend that her romantic relationship with the mayor should have disqualified her from most of them. Yet just this week, she still insisted that there was never a professional conflict.

Had two single councillors struck up a perfectly monogamous relationship, we’d have no problem openly discussing the ethics of a boyfriend’s votes and decisions that benefited his girlfriend. But Brown and Cassidy highlight the illicit nature of their affair so they can chide people who speak up for casting the first stone. They hide their professional mistakes behind their personal woes, and use their families as shields for their political careers.

They’re riding out the ridiculously short statute of limitations on a Municipal Conflict of Interest Act application, knowing there is nothing else that can touch them, but that an unfavourable MCIA ruling carries one uncompromising consequence: removal from a seat.

That’s why when the Integrity Commissioner responded to my formal complaint to tell me I might consider filing under the MCIA, I deemed it a last resort since it’s expensive and uncertain, and all I really want is to be assured that our mayor recognizes his professional error. I just want to know that he has the understanding required to avoid acting with a conflict of interest in the future.

So I wrote a letter to him instead. I told him I wish him well but want reassurance that I can still trust him. I waited a week before messaging his communications advisor to ask if she could look into whether he’d received it. She asked me to forward the email to another address. I did. I waited another two weeks. Then after a thorough review of my spam folder, I sent another message. No reply.

Duck, deny, and cover. It’s good advice if you want to keep your job through an error like this, but not terribly inspiring form for leaders. I would have more respect for the Mayor if he addressed this head on, and said “with regards to those votes and those decisions, I do not feel I did anything wrong” than I do while he buries his head in the sand.

We elect human beings, and I like it that way. I’m 100% okay with having representatives who make mistakes, including occasional errors in professional judgement.

But I’m not okay with having elected officials who don’t know it — even in hindsight — when they’ve made one. Who either really don’t understand how conflict of interest works, or are thumbing their noses at us all, knowing there’s little we can do.

I’m not okay with having elected officials who run away from their problems after being very clear that they intend to face them head on.

Even I give up eventually, and perhaps I have little choice but to move on now since nobody can compel the mayor to answer to our concerns. But neither can we be compelled to forget.

We’ll remember that this is a mayor who does not respect conflict of interest rules. We’ll remember that this is a mayor who talked a big game about transparency and openness, but couldn’t be bothered to reply to citizens on an important issue of ethics. We’ll remember that this is a mayor who sticks his head in the sand when the going gets tough, ignoring the people he vowed to represent with integrity.

For the next two years, we’ll remember it every time he participates in a vote, every time a report comes out of his office, and every time he speaks on an issue. And if he doesn’t address these things soon, most importantly, we’ll remember it in 2018.