Last Friday, Pelham Town Councillor Marianne Stewart, on behalf of her fellow frequent voting bloc members Lisa Haun, Bob Hildebrandt, and Ron Kore, sent a very cranky letter to this newspaper. The missive’s 1,200 words of grievance included a veritable laundry list of linen that the Gang of Four preferred not have been laid out in our pages, from a reference to Councillor Haun’s house sale, to a bizarre claim that the paper has received “confidential closed session information” (we have received no such thing), to the appellation “Gang of Four” itself—a nickname that “is strongly associated with organized criminality.” Well, only among the criminally unaware, given that in the political sphere the term refers more to Boss Mao than Boss Capone (but in this case, it's just a number.)
After reaming us out for essentially criticizing them too much, the letter closes with an assurance that—conveniently overlooking the fact that half of them recently attempted to kill Town cooperation with the Voice—the group is truly, very much, supportive of a free press, and looking forward to establishing “a new baseline of more respectful interaction.”
We couldn’t be happier to hear it. Could this please start with answering comment requests? This was the first time we’ve heard boo from Councillors Kore and Haun for going on two years.
The whole thing had a vaguely sulphuric, lawyerly whiff about it, typical of such demand letters, as they are known in the trade, but given the typos and evident misunderstanding as to what does and does not constitute defamation under Canadian law, if legal beagles were involved they were more likely legal beagle paralegals.
Speaking of Better Call Saul, here’s a plot twist you might find unexpected: the Gang is correct on one point.
In last week’s editorial, for reasons that will be reiterated in a moment, we wrote:
Councillors Haun, Hildebrandt, Stewart and Kore are clearly communicating with each other outside of the council chamber, then acting in a coordinated fashion within the chamber, without so much as a single syllable of reasoning. At best this violates the spirit of Ontario’s open meeting law.
On this assertion, the four councillors respond: “We deny having violated either the letter or spirit of the Municipal Act. We hold this newspaper to proof of this allegation, failing which we demand an apology.”
On the slender technical issue of quorum, the Gang is absolutely correct. We do not have a private email-trail of smoking-gun discussion copied to all four simultaneously. There is no leaked security video of the quartet huddled in the cereal aisle at Councillor Kore’s grocery store, methodically plotting next to the Frosted Flakes how to torpedo hundreds of hours of staff labour on a draft bylaw which they themselves had requested. There is no John Dean eyewitness testimony as to how many were in the room and who knew what and when.
In our effort to deduce a credible explanation for the incredible, we used imprecise and inaccurate phrasing, and for this we unreservedly and, in the most fitting sense of the term, fulsomely apologize to the Gang of Four, and to any reader inadvertently misled into assuming any of the four councillors engaged in illegal behaviour—which, to be clear, was not our assertion then nor is it now.
Here’s how we should have phrased it:
To a reasonable eye, Councillors Haun, Hildebrandt, Stewart and Kore give every appearance of seeming to communicate with each other outside of the council chamber, then acting in a coordinated fashion within the chamber, without so much as a single syllable of reasoning. At best this violates the spirit of Ontario’s open meeting law.
In other words, we can’t prove they’re (legally) yakking outside council, but the preponderance of evidence logically suggests it.
Let’s pause for a quick recap.
Among other of their poor decisions, last week’s editorial referenced council’s April 19th 4-3 vote to kill a new Procedural Bylaw—the four no votes being, of course, Haun, Hildebrandt, Kore, and Stewart. At council’s request before the pandemic, staff went to work on updating the old Bylaw, which governs how council functions. Four staffers spent three months, hundreds of hours, and likely tens of thousands of dollars in opportunity cost preparing the 32-page document.
At the council meeting, none of the four made a single remark about the Bylaw’s contents upon being invited to do so by Mayor Junkin, as is customary before a vote.
As the Mayor commented in last week’s news story: “I had spoken in advance with our Clerk, Ms. Willford, and she had not heard any negative comments from any council members, so she was optimistic that after some debate, and perhaps one or two amendments, the report would pass.”
In any rational universe, the absence of debate before a vote indicates that all councillors are in agreement, have no issues, are not, in fact, about to drop a neutron bomb on Town Hall.
Without uttering a word other than nyet, all four voted to reject all 22 important elements of the Bylaw, en masse. Baby out with the bathwater. Asked almost beseechingly by the Mayor, the CAO, and Councillor John Wink to reconsider their vote—to go through the Bylaw line-by-line, if necessary, to determine their specific objections—the tight-lipped four wouldn’t budge. Common sense concludes that their position was understood beforehand. There was no need for them to debate, because the Gang had no need to convince the other three council members. They knew they had their own votes.
Here’s the thing. It is not illegal for councillors to communicate with each other about Town business outside council chambers. Councillors are free to call, text, email, Skype, Zoom, or smoke-signal one another any time they wish, inside Town Hall or out.
What is illegal, however, is to do so with a majority of councillors at the same time. That’s called a quorum. On Pelham’s seven-member council, four members constitute a majority, or quorum. If one councillor emails another councillor, no problem. But if one councillor emails three or more councillors, that’s a quorum, and that’s definitely a problem. We did not state last week, nor do we state now, that the four held an outside meeting, physically or otherwise, that constituted a quorum. Yet they were perfectly free to email or call one another one-on-one, and one-on-two.
It is our contention that such communication—if and when engaged in even if technically legal—nonetheless violates the spirit of Ontario’s open meeting provisions, which call for public business to be conducted in public view.
Here comes another plot twist, this one by Stephen King. It turns out that the four admit they largely are on the same page and can foresee how their votes will go. Why? In so many abbreviations: E.S.P.
“We have worked alongside each other for more than three years now,” they state in their letter, “and in that time have spent hundreds of hours together (virtually or otherwise).... As a result of this shared experience, we have each gained considerable insight into how each other thinks, and what each is likely to value and prioritize. It would in fact be surprising if we had not developed such insight. There is no need for us to hold legally prohibited meetings to discuss council business — we understand each other, we understand the community’s needs, and frequently we are in accord with each other.”
So there you have it—the Gang of Four are on a special wavelength, a quartet of David Copperfields, effectively reading each other’s minds. To reject every single one of 22 unique elements in a 32-page bylaw, they had no need for mortal communication. Or to share their rationale with their colleagues and Town staff before, during, or after said mind-meld.
A last tidbit.
Five days before last week’s paper was published, we reached out to Councillors Haun, Hildebrandt, Kore, and Stewart with a request to help the public understand their unexplained decision to kill the Bylaw. One of the questions we asked was this:
At any time prior to Tuesday's meeting, did you and any of the other three council members who voted against it discuss, in any way—orally or in writing—how you would vote?
None of the four had the courtesy to acknowledge our request, let alone answer it, and—E.S.P. claims notwithstanding—they still haven’t. ◆
