Recognizing the dozens of years of public sector work under his belt, we found meeting investigator Norm Gamble’s observations about untrusting citizens both telling and foreboding.
Given the choice of the straight goods or a yarn, many folks buy into nonsense over fact, making it difficult for council, staff and the public to keep the issues straight.
Gamble was called in to deal with a complaint about alleged closed session council improprieties regarding the Murray gravel pit proposal in Inverhaugh. Long story short, he made some recommendations about better ways to report council business to citizens.
For the projected price tag of about $3,000, there was no knockout punch and no smoking gun as far as Centre Wellington council’s actions were concerned.
So, as happens someplace every day in this country, the rights of individuals to protest and force an investigation of unsubstantiated claims of impropriety on the public dime took precedence over the choice of the majority in terms of where tax dollars are spent.
Some people strongly oppose such activism, for lack of a better word. Still, it is not entirely fair to come down hard on any citizen for using a perfectly legal avenue such as a third party assessment when chances are that somewhere, somebody is playing fast and loose with procedures to avoid the inconveniences associated with local government.
After all, blatant abuses of municipal procedure, and conversely the good graces of citizens, is basically why meeting inspectors were mandated by the provincial government in the first place.
We didn’t get here because the system was perfect. One need only spend a little time in a coffee shop to understand the depth of ignorance and utter contempt some ratepayers have for their local councils and municipal staff.
A similar disregard exists for provincial and federal offices too, but local politicians are far handier to slander and malign. The courts being what they are and the cost of justice being what it is means most offenders of common decency go unchecked and uncorrected. The right to an opinion seems to have come into conflict with the notion that facts should play a role in the forming of said opinions.
As Gamble noted, some people refuse to believe the truth. That, too, is not a new phenomenon and we suggest it is getting worse.
A number of years ago at a barbecue at a friend’s house, one of those lulls in the action caused a semi-private conversation to become mainstream across the yard. An older fellow mused about his dalliance with public life – having stolen an election using outright lies and innuendo door to door in the preceding months.
There in his grasp was a relative newcomer to town curiously wondering about his interest in office and why he ever decided to run. His response, fired off like a round of caps discharged from a toy gun was “I didn’t agree with it.” She pressed once more as to the motivating factor and he offered the same, “I didn’t agree with it.” As she gave up trying to get an intelligible answer, the volume picked up and the rest of the company in attendance started back into their own conversations.
To this day we don’t know what “it” was. What we suspect is that “it” was many factors, most notably change and how some people can’t stand anything but the status quo – which hitherto was probably not right either.
It is no great surprise to us that intrigue and suspense play a role in local politics, but for the sake of individual communities in our coverage area, we hope that people on the receiving end of the campaign jargon will take it with a grain of salt and wonder what the motivation is for offering up salacious nonsense as a means to get elected.
