ERIN – Councillor John Brennan doesn’t think the Town of Erin is secretive and it certainly shouldn’t be shamed for trying to do the right thing.
“I don’t know how to be expected to react,” the Erin councillor said in a phone interview on Feb. 28. “It was a shaming act. I think what’s more important is what we learned going through the process.”
Brennan, who is acting mayor while Mayor Allan Alls is out of the country, was reacting to the town being awarded the national “Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy” in February by four journalism associations.
Erin was chosen in the municipality category because it ignored or refused media interview requests, kept important meetings and decisions quiet from the media and refused for two years to release the amount of severance payments made to staff.
Each year the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Centre for Free Expression (CFE) at Ryerson University, News Media Canada and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression give secrecy awards to government agencies in four categories: municipal, provincial, federal and law enforcement.
The award intends to draw attention to government and public agencies that “put extra effort into denying public access to government information to which the public has a right under access to information legislation,” according to information on CFE website.
James Turk, director of the CFE at Ryerson University, said in an interview that the goal is also to demonstrate that legislation around Freedom of Information is weak.
Erin was nominated by the Wellington Advertiser, which sought to learn the total amounts Erin paid in severance between 2012 and 2017 through a Freedom of Information request.
The same request was made of the other six municipalities within Wellington County, plus the county itself, all of which eventually released the information. Erin refused for two years and paid at least $24,000 in legal fees blocking the request.
Brennan said the Advertiser’s FOI request fell under the purview of the town clerk who turned it down because she thought it could identify individual staff members.
“The clerk was the professional person who would deal with regulatory acts and she made a decision that would not give rise to liability (from the former staffers.) As a council, we believed the argument and didn’t get involved,” he said.
Brennan also said the town was going through tumultuous times during the time period covered by the FOI request.
“We did lose a lot of people during that time,” Brennan said. “We had embarked on the search for a new CAO around that time. We hired a person, and that person turned out to be a disappointment. So, we terminated the contract.
“The majority of council at that time did not have the appetite for another search. So, we promoted the clerk to CAO. But she found the job too stressful to her health and withdrew.”
Also, around that time the town contracted out operations and maintenance of the town’s water and wastewater facilities to the Ontario Clean Water Agency.
“They did nothing wrong,” Brennan said of the workers who lost their jobs. “It was just a change in the direction the town was taking. I think we were generous with them.”
At that time – a time Brennan called “not the funnest of times” – there was an interim CAO and a bit of confusion within town departments as a result of the changes.
When Nathan Hyde, the current CAO, was hired in April of 2017 “the one thing we asked him to do was upgrade the professional level of our staff,” Brennan said.
“We didn’t want wholesale changes, but with development coming, we needed to up the professional level of staff.”
As well, the province required more reporting from municipalities, which also required more professionalism, Brennan said.
In a post on the “Erin Complaints and Compliments” Facebook page, Brennan states that when the commissioner ruled that the information of the FOI request could be released, it was.
“The process uncovered some confusion over records, leading to misstatements over missing or destroyed records. Current staff have and continue to work to ensure that such confusion does not happen again,” he wrote.
