The smear job continues
Lord above, what a week. We go through it all below, but if you’re just here for a quick injection of healthy skepticism, here’s your hit:
Council begrudgingly admitted that Felice Mazzoni was completely cleared of complaints made against him while he was working for the District. But according to the TC this morning, Jones and DiBattista really want you to blame him for the gargantuan legal bill they'd racked up by the end.
The District made an awfully convenient mistake in a news release on Tuesday.
Don said something stupid six months ago.
Honestly, the behaviour of the majority of council has been so gross during this campaign that, at this point, we'd recommend voting for a rock with googly eyes glued on over the mayoral candidates presently on council. No rocks are on the ballot (this time!) but we do have Felice Mazzoni....who we'd think was the best guy for the job even if the incumbents hadn't been conducting themselves so shamefully.
For the masochists in the crowd, our full coverage of this week’s ethical gymnastics continues below. Don’t forget to stretch!
Do these Bits & Bites taste weird to you?
What is anyone supposed to make of all these bits and pieces coming out of the council chamber over the past few weeks?
It’s a silly question, really. It’s clear what we’re supposed to make of it. We’re supposed to conclude that Felice Mazzoni is the just the absolute worst person ever, and that McConkey, Sanjiv and Marshall are abusive, dictatorial monsters who probably don’t even floss. (Kidding, kidding – no one has impugned their dental hygiene. That would be a step too far.)
It's an old political maxim that you only fight dirty when you can't win it clean. Let's examine the latest splatters from the mud-canon, shall we?
On Monday, the mayor announced a previously-unscheduled special meeting. It was to be held secret (naturally) the very next day. What could be so important that a meeting had to be called the night before advance polls open, and 82 hours before general election day? Surely some great crisis facing the District? We dragged our emergency kits up from the basement and spent the night on the edge of our seats.
On Tuesday evening, after almost four hours of whatever it is they do in there, Council emerged from their Very Important Ultra Urgent Secret Meeting to let us all know that a majority of councillors had voted to…..release yet another dog’s breakfast of previously confidential information which just so happens to make the other guys look bad. (Remember a few weeks ago when the Mayor insisted that there was no campaigning allowed in the council chamber? Ah, but we were all so young back then.)
This time, there were four Very Important Secrets the majority of council wanted you to know about. In keeping with this month’s theme – which we always thought was pumpkin spice, but apparently that’s only in non-election years – three of these announcements consisted of frantic slagging of the people who are running against McClintock, DiBattista and Jones (this trio has been assisted over the past year by the reliable vote of Celia Stock, and we assume that trend continued on Tuesday).
In an amazing coincidence, communications staff were working late, and were able to ensure that the majority’s pot-shots landed in resident inboxes before the advanced voting polls opened the next morning. What luck! The news release went out shortly after 10 PM. (We’ve never received an email from North Saanich after working hours….have you?)
Cause for alarm
Amongst the shrapnel sent flying in this week’s round of character assassination was a statement that an Independent Workplace Investigator had made two recommendations regarding Mazzoni: either keep him around, or fire him “with or without cause”. This was reported far and wide (not even joking – it was in the Trail Times!)
As readers will know, sacking someone “with cause” is a pretty big deal. They’ve got to do something real bad. And as we’ll discuss below, we now know that Mazzoni was cleared of every single complaint made against him, so what gives? Is there something we don’t know??
How embarrassing
Goodness gracious, would you look at that! It turns out the District made a wee oopsies in their news release. There was never any recommendation to fire him with cause, that was complete nonsense. They issued a correction yesterday…. after advance polls closed.
Gosh.
Your entrée, madam
Next, we were served some curated tidbits from an Investigation Report relating to Mazzoni’s time at the District. On those, we have three observations:
There was too much salt.
They released 14 paragraphs from a report that spans at least 367 paragraphs. Two pages’ worth, of a 57 page report. About 3.5% of the document. Getting the sense you’re not hearing the full story? We asked Mazzoni about it, but he couldn’t comment on the rest of the report because – get this – the District won’t show it to him! The District has had this report since the end of June but, despite repeated requests, Tuesday was the first time he’d seen any portion of it! You can’t make this stuff up.
From the snippets we’ve been allowed to see, we know that the Investigator concluded that Mazzoni’s conduct “did not amount to a breach of the Policy or law” (and that’s the Investigator’s underlining, not ours).
What does that mean? According to the wording of the said Policy, it means Mazzoni did not engage in:
Unjustified, persistent and/or excessive criticizing of a person or that person’s work;
incidents that create an uncomfortable environment;
Condescension or patronizing behaviour which undermines self-respect or adversely affects working conditions;
Written or verbal abuse, intimidation, undermining, bullying or threats;
Harassment, intimidation, or discrimination;
Rude, belittling, sarcastic or slanderous comments; or
Falsely accusing anyone else of harassment.
The unredacted bits of the report also say that there were “instances” where Mazzoni was not winning any Communicator of the Year awards. (As you’ll see from the mea culpa further down this post, we can relate.)
Also released for your reading pleasure and/or to improperly sway your vote was a “Departmental Optimization Final Report” which was not particularly glowing and also contained absolutely no evidence that Mazzoni had done anything wrong.
Full investigation for me, straight dismissal for thee!
The last of the Mazzoni-related sniping was a statement which is so rich we have to reproduce it here:
The District would really like you to know they’ve spent over $300K trying to get rid of this guy. Should we parse that out? Twist our rubber arms.
We know now that Mazzoni was cleared of all the complaints against him, so if anyone’s going to take any flak for the cost of the investigation, we humbly suggest it oughta be whomever made all the nonsense complaints in the first place. That’ll never happen, but I think we can all agree the guy who was found to be completely innocent should probably not be the guy you blame for the cost of the trial.
But what of the “investigation initiated by Mr. Mazzoni”? The one regarding a complaint by Mazzoni which some unnamed person was apparently concerned “may have been made in bad faith”? We asked Mazzoni about this, and his answer was so unbelievable that we got in touch with his lawyer to confirm he had the story right (with his permission, of course). And here it is:
Mazzoni made a complaint against someone. He wouldn’t give us the gory details because he thought that would be a shitty thing to do when they couldn’t respond (he has higher standards than the majority of Council, apparently), but he did tell us he was between a rock and a hard place when he made the complaint. Someone apparently raised some “concerns” about the veracity of his complaint, which Mazzoni heard about for the first time – you guessed it – on Tuesday.
So what did the District do? Did they narrow their eyes whilst awaiting the report of the independent investigator, who would unquestionably have delved deeply into this very issue, as the core function of a workplace investigator is to assess the credibility of complaints? No, neighbours. That would have been very inconvenient. Instead, the District unilaterally cancelled the entire investigation. No explanation. That’s it, that’s all.
The very best part of all is the follow-up sentence in the statement from Council, where they solemnly inform us that “the District has an obligation to appropriately respond to and investigate workplace complaints”….but apparently only the ones they like. We don’t have much time for Peter Jones these days, but we were genuinely impressed he read this aloud with a straight face. Ten points to Slytherin.
Of course, it wouldn’t be not-pumpkin-spice season without the vague references to complaints “concerning members of council”. We assume those nebulous allegations will be investigated assiduously until it is no longer politically expedient to do so.
We really couldn't see how any of this massive bill could be blamed on a guy who had no control over any of it. Our only other though was that maybe the District had covered Mazzoni's legal costs in defending himself against these allegations? His answer when we asked: "Not a penny."
So, do we think Mazzoni should shoulder the blame for the utterly gobsmacking legal bill the District ran up? Considering the only complaint he made was the one they didn’t bother investigating, it sounds like all he’s cost them is a few extra units of botox (political frown lines run particularly deep – ask us how we know).
Rural-minded and low-cost….what a guy!
The candidate pot-shots deal with, let’s talk about the final target of Council’s ire.
It’s all Don’s fault
After unceremoniously suspending all the Committees months ago, Council has been under significant pressure to explain why. They have been flailing about for weeks now, unable to produce a single coherent sentence on the topic. Some observers may wonder if the flurry of HR complaints over the past two years may suggest a higher-than-average incidence of insufficient epidermal fortitude at 1620 Mills Road. But that would be a very tricky thing to explain to the electorate, particularly in this midst of this blizzard of legal bills. And you’ve got to admit, it’s pretty convenient to blame it all on one’s political opponents.
This is all wild speculation, of course. Whatever the true story may be, on Tuesday it appeared a majority of Council decided to pin the blame for Committee-gate on a single volunteer: our very own Don Enright.
The news release includes a transcript of an open meeting of the Community Planning Committee that took place on April 7. (Anyone with a fleeting interest could click over to the recording of the meeting and see who’s doing the talking):
MEMBER: I think that the changes that we’re talking about here today and in other places earlier are so extraordinarily massive and are so, you know, unbelievably um important that taking a look at something like this and providing the level of um understanding is is is you’re going to be doing it for the rest of your life because this is this is rat shitting the whole place. Okay? I mean, that’s what’s happening here, right? Is that we’re taking a place that we all loved and we all came to live in, right? And have now in essence abolished it. And where this is going to go ultimately, I don’t know but I would be careful um in public because the people will be carrying guns. So um that’s basically what I have to say.
To quote the other half of SNS directly: “Jesus, Don!!!”
It goes without saying that it is majorly not okay to talk about guns in the context of a community planning meeting. Ever, under any circumstances. This was a big mistake.
Anyone who knows Don knows that, if he’d realized he’d freaked anyone out, he would have apologized profusely and without qualification. But when he heard about this, he was stunned. He had no idea he’d upset anyone, and he feels terrible. He’d like you all to know it sounded like a good joke in his head ….but came out with all the wrong words. (The Chair of the committee made a statement this week confirming that he, too, understood it to be a disastrous attempt at humour. This obviously isn’t a pleasant thing to stick one’s neck out about and it was really decent of him to pipe up.)
But wait a sec
All that now clearly said, we’re scratching our heads a little about how this shook out.
If a committee member makes a comment that could be perceived as threatening, the appropriate step is to take disciplinary action with respect to that member, beginning with a formal rebuke and escalating as necessary to dismissal from the committee.
None of these things happened.
What Council did instead was suspend every single committee. Indefinitely. Over one comment, from one guy. Friends, if you believe that, I’ve got a 12-storey development on Chalet Road I’d love to tell you about.
And then there’s the timing
One might also wonder why we’re only hearing about this now, six months after the remarks were made, many weeks after the suspension of the committees became a hot topic, and only a few short days after Don, by virtue of his involvement in this publication, openly supported a group of incumbents who this year have consistently found themselves in the minority on Council…..oh.
It would be really disgusting to use a long-term resident who has donated literally thousands of hours of his time to this municipality as a political scapegoat. We would really like to think that the majority of council are better than that.
But boy have we been disappointed a lot lately.
Notice how none of this has to do with density?
Rising up for a moment above the swamp these guys have created, have you noticed that the smear jobs have totally overwhelmed any discussion of the actual issues facing North Saanich? You'd think DiBattista and friends would be talking about their vision for the District rather than spending every waking hour trashing their opponent....but we can guess why they're not.
Back tonight with the Candidate Questionnaires. You’ll never guess who stood us up!
The image at the top of the post is a silk scarf by a hilarious man named David Shridgely. You can buy it!
