Council business this week included a contentious vote about the fate of a very particular property plus the 2025 budget, but there was one item that should have been noted by anyone that cares about good governance in Guelph.
That’s topic’s been making all kinds of news lately: We’ve seen one Sarnia city councillor go on a profanity-laden tirade about a budget motion, and Hamilton city council voted to end public advisory committees. When we see these things, one might take some small comfort that while Guelph city council sometimes has its disagreements, it’s not a dysfunctional mess. When you see the integrity commissioner roll up to council, he’s usually there to say everything is fine.
This wasn’t one of those times.
At issue was Mayor Cam Guthrie’s role in the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy. Guthrie is the North American director on the group’s board and has been to several of their events around the world, including, most recently, a meeting in Paris this past summer. The GCoM, which is funded by the European Union, paid for Guthrie’s travel, which the integrity commissioner determined was a personal benefit to the mayor.
John Mascarin wrote in his report to council that while “the Mayor’s connection to GCoM and his directorship on the North American Board of Directors of GCoM are inextricably linked to his office”, he was “not entitled to accept payment or free arrangements for travel, accommodation and meals related to GCoM meetings in accordance with Section 5 of the Code [of Conduct]”.
In other words, Guthrie broke the rules.
Now, to the mayor’s credit, he had outed himself. He had heard of a similar determination being made about the Mayor of New Westminster, B.C., and then went to Guelph’s integrity commissioner to get feedback. To quote Mascarin, he sought advice, received advice, followed that advice, and had taken “remedial steps” to address the procedural oversight, so because of that Mascarin said he was not recommending any penalty.
Now this is not a call to punish Guthrie. He worried that he might have screwed up, asked the ethical oversight arm of council if he screwed up, and when he found out that he had, it was presented to council in a formal report and aired in public with the mayor himself acknowledging the screw up. These are all good things.
Now let’s talk about why this doesn’t go far enough.
First, this report was attached to the amended agenda and not the draft agenda released the week before. Now that may have been a matter of timing, both in terms of when the report was received and how expeditiously council wanted to table it, but putting this in the agenda the Friday before the meeting has the feeling of burying it, whether that’s unfair or not.
Second, the subsequent motion that was tabled to allow Guthrie to continue with the GCoM was too broad, as some members of council tried to warn about. To now carve out an exemption to the Code of Conduct to allow third parties to cover travel costs for “attendance at events which are target to a municipal governance audience” almost reads as gibberish. How is an event “targeted”? What is a “municipal governance audience”?
And then there’s the nebulousness of “third party”. If Children’s Health Defense, the organization run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr that promotes vaccine hesitancy, wanted to cover the cost of bringing city councillors to a conference in Washington to talk about public health concerns, would that be okay? I mean, it checks all the boxes considering three city councillors sit on the local Board of Health.
That comparison is interesting because we live in a strange era of conspiracies and distrust, which is the first and most fundamental problem that this entire situation presents. In such an era, no can just say “Trust me”, especially if they’re in the government. This is what Coun. Dominique O’Rourke, I think, was trying to warn her council colleagues about when she tried to ensure that anything like this in the future comes back for council approval first.
It may seem like no big deal, and yes, I think we can agree that Guthrie’s involvement with the GCoM has paid literal and reputational dividends to Guelph, but not everyone sees it that way. Even in Guelph there’s a cadre of people, fuelled by half-cocked conspiracy theories, that believe friendly and folksy Mayor Cam is a Deep State puppet bought and paid for by a nefarious global cabal.
One of the groups that intersect with the Global Covenant of Mayors is the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, or ICLEI, which I had heard referenced more than a few times at various anti-vaccine and anti-COVID mandate protests. You can say that it’s not the mayor’s responsibility to account for the hobgoblins in some people’s heads, but distrust is a process, and it often starts from the smallest of slights.
Council frequently discounts this. When you think about things that happen in closed session, or when you hear about emails being traded with influencers that form decisions before they’re debated in council chambers, those of us who are sufficiently paranoid and suspicious of power get our antennas raised. To borrow an often-used phrase in meetings, it’s not personal, because if we we’re meant to trust power implicitly, government wouldn’t have need for checks and balances.
The fact that Guthrie “turned himself in”, to use a more Law & Order turn of phrase, counts for something, but shaking it off like it’s a bother and annoyance to have to declare who’s paying to send our mayor around the world in our names on Guelph business is kind of insulting too. We don’t need to know the thread count of the sheets the mayor sleeps on, but it’s not unreasonable to know who’s footing the hotel bill.
City hall routinely favours a sunny disposition and some kind words instead of an eruption of animus and suspicion, even when that’s exactly what’s called for. Democracy is messy, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that there’s occasionally a mess that needs to be made. It’s okay for council to be messy with these things, and it might even engender some trust for them to occasionally let the mask slip.
And if we can get more advanced notice next time, that would be great!
