The Mayor’s Ask - What are The Old Boys Hiding?
Originally published on Facebook October 14 2024
In 1984:
The Ministry of Plenty dealt with scarcity.
The Ministry of Peace carried out permanent war.
The Ministry of Love handled torture, and the Ministry of Truth distributed propaganda.
They’re all backwards. It’s a deliberate mindscrew: It’s Orwellian.
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I’m going to shake my fists at the Heavens right now and make a bold claim: I’m audit-proof. Seriously, come at me, bro.
For starters, I’ve been cash-free nearly five years. Whatever you think about a business choosing to be cashless, it makes any auditor’s job mega-tons easier, and I would be starting off in a position of good will and trust that would be priceless in setting the tone and scope of the audit. I also speak and understand accounting almost fluently, and the auditor will know I could use that to be a total pain in the butt, but instead I will use it to demonstrate deeper empathy. You know what? That empathy will be appreciated, because auditing is a crappy job.
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However an audit gets initiated and whatever the scope is, at some point you have to sit down with hundreds of electronic and paper documents, and actually start auditing. Numbers are worse than words, because it’s easier to infer what an email or memo is really saying, but it’s impossible to prove that a set of numbers tells just one story.
Nonetheless, outside of the public spotlight, the process can work pretty well, because the auditor is only looking to answer the question: “Is this company or organization operating properly? If not, how can we fix it?” These are operational questions, not political ones. Audits rarely end up with someone getting in trouble with the law. Paying some back taxes, yes, but nothing that needs lawyers and judges.
Imagine if a tax officer (or your spouse, or your financial advisor, or your pastor) got ahold of your complete bank records. They might nitpick this or that, but you’d probably come out ok. Nothing to be ashamed of.
But imagine if several anonymous people who hate you on Roast and Toast got ahold of that information. They would go through it line by line, take everything out of context, blow up little things into big things, make wild assumptions and unfairly shame you just out of spite. It would be humiliating, painful and totally unnecessary.
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In his role as Chair of Audit, Darren Hirsch intends only to run the first type of audit on the City of Medicine Hat - an internal audit, focused only on ensuring that things are being done properly. It’s not a witchhunt, and if mistakes are discovered, the auditor is to provide guidance in correcting them, not punish and shame people.
This type of audit is a useful and even necessary part of good governance in a large organization, but only if it is carried out by people who are acting in good faith, people whose motives are trustworthy, people with “clean hands”. Darren Hirsch is not one of those people. As Chair of Audit, councillor Hirsch is in the foremost position to hide financial information, and that is what he is doing.
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I had hoped not to have to revisit this sad drama, but the stubbornness of the mutinous Council members continues to keep us all mired in their muck.
Here we are, good people of Medicine Hat, being forced again by the three Old Boys of Council to do the hard work of democracy. This time it’s going to cost me almost five hundred bucks.
See, back in March when the seven direwraiths first unleashed their attack on the Mayor, it was a struggle for power. Hirsch, Dumanowski and McGrogan assumed victory from the start, because power and privilege is all they’ve ever known. By late August, they had lost.
The battle for power was over, and I had naively assumed that was the only battle there was. It turns out that there is also a battle for Truth.
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Shortly after the mutiny began last spring, Clark requested a long list of financial information from the past few years; it has come to be known as The Mayor’s Ask. I paid it little attention, because I had no intention of going through all those numbers looking for smoking guns. I assumed that some competent people would take that information and produce some objective insights, and I was willing to wait for such feedback. It was also possible that the Mayor did (and still does) know of a glaring scandal or two in those numbers, and that would be juicy and entertaining for all of us. Alternatively, it’s possible that the Mayor is being petty and there’s really nothing to see.
It didn’t matter to me. What I cared about was that the Seven took my vote and threw it in the garbage. This wasn’t about “I like the blue team and you like the red team” kind of political disagreement, because that politics assumes a battle taking place within a democratic system. What our council did was anti-democratic: they threw democracy in the trash when they deposed the Mayor, and that was a foundational threat to democracy itself. That was a power struggle worth engaging in. The ‘Mayor’s Ask’ was a sideshow.
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Unfortunately, due to their continuing incompetence at staging a successful uprising, the Old Boys on council have elevated the Mayor’s Ask to prominence by repeatedly refusing to produce the data. They have been obfuscating, filibustering, ignoring and delaying since March. In Dumanowski’s case, gladly taking the time to write speeches filled with (Hirsch’s words) such ferocity and spite that we now have to ask ourselves: What are these Boys hiding???
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At last week’s council meeting I was amused watching the Chair of Audit squirm as he struggled to find words to say: “It’s uncomfortable that we have to give Mitchell a raise in a public council meeting. The optics make me look corrupt. This is a routine raise, and it’s really important to me that we not do this in public ever again; so let’s take this moment for you to feel sympathy with my current discomfort, and agree that all future raises will be written into Mitchell’s contract and happen automatically, and I will never again have to publicly vote for Ann Mitchell’s raises.”
Sharps had the same problem when she made the motion to give Mitchell the raise, insisting that the motion included a pointless statement that other people were getting raises too.
I agree with both councillors: the optics on that part of the meeting were dreadful. But they are lying in the bed THEY made. The fault for this mess lies with Hirsh, Sharps and the rest of their cohorts. From the day they first cast their wicked spell to depose the mayor, and all the days thereafter when they chose to double down on their treachery, we have been sitting in the mess that they created.
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Councillors, I understand your fear that the info in the Mayor’s Ask will lead to a feeding frenzy on Roast and Toast. I understand that things will be taken out of context, outrage will flare where none is called for, and accusations may be hurled at you that you do not deserve. But again, this is your own fault. We are living in the world you created.
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Fellow citizens: what they are doing now is running out the clock. Hirsh, Dumanowski and McGrogan know they’re cooked. They know that in the future all this information might become transparent. A few years from now City Hall might be posting everything in the Mayor’s Ask on its website for all to see.
Why should the three of them suffer as the final ritual sacrifices of a bygone age of secret handshakes and behind-closed-doors dealmaking? Sure, there might be some shady stuff in those financial documents, but it will all be revealed after these councillors (and Ann Mitchell) are gone, and then new policies and safeguards will be put in place to ensure the transparency this new era of digital disclosure demands. Why embarrass these good men now? Two wrongs don’t make a right, right?
The Old Boys would like us to do the civil thing, and let them slide through the next year. After that, we can run the city how we like.
Here’s the problem: generation after generation, we accept a new batch of Old Boys, and they behave exactly the way we know they will, and we let them off the hook. But we never learn our lesson, and the next batch of Old Boys comes along and does us dirty, and we say “Well, it’s not fair to make this batch suffer, since this is they way things have always been.” And so we do it again. And again.
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Audit is meant to reveal truth. To expose shortcomings. To ensure compliance. To build and maintain trust.
Council has no principle to stand on in refusing to comply with the Mayor’s Ask. They serve only themselves. I wasn’t interested in it before. Now I HAVE to be interested in it just because Council has devoted so much energy, so much (Hirsch’s words) ferocity and spite in keeping this information hidden. So, tomorrow I am going to give Tom and Kelly a personal cheque, not a bakery cheque, for their FOIP request. I resent this expense very much, because the Chair of Audit knows full well that no Hatter, least of all the Mayor, should have to appeal to the Information and Privacy Commissioner to get this information, much less pay for it. The Chair of Audit, assuming he has nothing to hide, should be happy to make this information available for free to anyone who wants it.
That’s how it will be one day, if we can just manage to break the cycle.