The salaries and allowances paid to county councillors have figured prominently for decades in discussions of the workings of our county government, and particularly so in the years since amalgamation.
However, the perception of a lucrative career as a county councillor is not a new one. The matter of council compensation reached one of its periodic peaks during the summer of 1924, when a few citizens and several weekly newspaper editors took on county council.
It all started at the June 1924 session of county council. Elora reeve Udney Richardson, who had a reputation as an honest but parsimonious public figure, told his fellow councillors that he had been hearing much criticism over the amounts paid to county councillors for their work on various committees and commissions, and that more transparency was desirable.
Richardson placed a motion that an annual statement be issued, showing the amounts paid to county councillors and the purpose of those payments. Up to that time only the aggregate amount for all of county council appeared in the accounts. For 1923 that amount had exceeded $15,000, and there was widespread grumbling that county council had become a gravy train for county councillors.
To the surprise of many, Richardson’s motion was soundly defeated by a vote of 13 to 8. That was too much for W.O. Mendell of Elora.
Mendell was a foreman at the Mundell Furniture Company in Elora and a very active horticulturist, but he was also involved in local politics as a village councillor and frequent commentator. He had gained something of a reputation as a gadfly, often going against the majority and championing pet causes. In the early 1920s one of those causes was the conduct of county council.
Following the vote at county council, Mendell drafted a letter and sent copies to all the newspapers in Wellington County. He argued that county councillors should not be ashamed to reveal the amounts they received. He stated that he had received information “after enquiry at the county clerk’s office.”
He then published the amounts each county councillor had received in 1923. Leading the list was warden J.A. Thompson. His total compensation ran to $2,487, more than double the wages of a regular wage earner, and far in excess of the amount paid to MPPs, which was $1,500.
The amounts paid to various county councillors varied greatly. After the warden, W.A. Dickieson was at the top, drawing $1,869. Six others, including Richardson, received less than $300. Among the issues brought up by Mendell was the Ontario Good Roads Convention. County council authorized four men, the warden, the roads committee chairman plus the clerk and treasurer, to attend. However, the vouchers showed that another five councillors attended without authorization. Mendell had several other examples to back his arguments of profligate spending.
Mendell’s letter seems to have caught some of the county councillors by surprise and they scrambled to defend themselves. A couple wrote to their local papers explaining that they had voted against Richardson’s motion because it did not go far enough. They claimed that they wanted a more detailed accounting than Richardson’s motion called for.
That reasoning carried little weight. They could easily have added an amendment to Richardson’s motion, or introduced one of their own. Another councillor said that he voted against Richardson’s motion because printing the information would have been an unnecessary expense for the county.
For several years there had been grumbling about the apparent excessive spending practices of county council and the skill of county councillors in feathering their own nests.
Editors of a couple of papers had been among the critics, and Mendell’s letter seemed to encourage them further. Rixon Rafter of the Arthur Enterprise News was one. He pointed out that the inclusion of the printing of councillor’s expenses would cost about $3.50, an expense that could be easily justified in light of the total of $15,000.
The most vocal of the critics was Hugh Templin, then the assistant editor of the Fergus News Record. The Fergus paper was being edited by his father, J.C. Templin, but Hugh Templin had been covering county council for several years, and at least once his comments had resulted in his expulsion from the chamber. He had no admiration for county council and its methods, and was quite prepared to give his opinions plenty of exposure.
Only the Clifford Express refused to print Mendell’s letter and to participate in the debate. The editor of that paper claimed the letter was libelous, even though the amounts quoted by Mendell proved to be accurate to the penny.
The Mount Forest paper delayed printing the letter because its editor was out of town.
Neither the clerk nor treasurer would admit to supplying Mendell with any figures. If neither had not done so, Mendell obviously had a mole somewhere in the county office. No one was able to prove the slightest error in anything he included in his letter, though some councillors claimed it contained lies and misleading figures.
The revelations caught one reeve in a lie. At the nomination meeting at the end of 1923 he told the ratepayers that he was not ashamed to reveal his receipts as a county councillor. He told his electors that the amount was $400. The true figure, it turned out was double what he had claimed.
The actions of reeve T.B. Farrell of Peel were most interesting. His position regarding the revelations changed from week to week. Initially, he stated that printing the gross amounts was misleading, and that the individual items should be listed.
Later, he came out with more aggressive defence, claiming that since Peel represented 10% of the county, his expenses should rightfully be at that level, but were far below it at $836. Farrell did not mention that Peel also had a deputy reeve on county council, and that the deputy’s expenses actually exceeded his own.
Templin devoted his first editorial on the subject to a general review of the issues, noting what the other newspapers were doing in their coverage of the issue.
A week later, Templin came out swinging. He noted the huge amounts paid to the Peel representatives, and pointed out that Peel, Maryborough and Drayton accounted for more that 40% of the payments, exceeding their fair share by any measure. Those three municipalities contributed less than one-seventh of the county budget.
Hugh Templin reserved his strongest words for his fellow editors across the county. With the exception of Rixon Rafter in Arthur, he claimed, the other editors were content to print Mendell’s original letter and to praise his initiative. But they added no comments of their own. Templin pointed out that the other papers rarely sent reporters to cover county council. The Guelph Daily Mercury, he noted, did cover county council meetings, but otherwise showed little interest in county affairs.
Templin suggested that county council pay the mileage expenses for reporters from the county weeklies in order to get better coverage of county affairs.
He found no supporters for that proposal among either councillors nor other editors. He noted that, at present, editors relied on interviews with local reeves for their news of county council, and that reeves were not always thorough in their comments.
Issues related to the expenses of county councillors and the general conduct of county business continued through the summer of 1924. Real reform, though, as W.O. Mendell, Hugh Templin and their followers were discovering, was proving difficult to achieve.
Next week: Criticism of county council continues into late summer of 1924.