LIFTING ROCKS AND SHINING A LIGHT UNDER THEM

If there's one thing I've learned it is that "stirring the pot", asking questions and following the process, even the most hopelessly biased and unfair process, will expose the truth or at least more of it. Mayor Shantz's February 2/15 Financial Statement, at first blush looked reasonable. The numbers added up although I quickly realized that without invoices and receipts it was sort of like a blind person differentiating between a ten and a twenty dollar bill sitting on a table in front of them, without even actually touching the bills. Then as I delved deeper I also realized that this whole exercise was similar to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment's "voluntary compliance" program they have with polluters. If the candidate decided to simply not include certain expenses who was going to be the wiser? Provided they didn't have more and bigger signs as Councillor Scot Hahn did and then claim zero for sign expenses as he did, they were essentially home free.

Then as I researched further I understood that this was the reason for the extremely low threshold necessary for a compliance/forensic audit to be ordered by the Compliance Audit Committee (MECAC). The threshold was as simple as a single contravention being reasonably believed by the complainant. The threshold was not ever increasing discoveries of contraventions via each new Financial Statement. It was not some belief that the candidate had necessarily won the election improperly. Those false thresholds were raised repeatedly by MECAC. In their stupidity and or more likely bias they even reverted at the end of the last MECAC hearing to asking the candidate if she believed that there were no longer either major or minor expenses missing. In other words back to voluntary compliance. They attempted to burden myself the complainant with ongoing and ever increasing levels of evidence and proof that yet even more expenses or donations were missing.

Despite that I accomodated them by indeed finding ongoing errors and omissions which they simply ignored. I also advised MECAC that no one could possibly have the complete financial picture as the data was being released by the mayor in dribs and drabs over a period of several months. That said those dribs and drabs continue to slowly clarify and it's not a good picture. As I am currently reviewing my detailed notes taken during the last hearing (October 26/15), I have picked up on a couple of things I missed in the heat of the battle. The biggest one is the mayor's admissions to paying campaign expenses personally during the campaign. That admission came during questions from the panel to mayor Shantz. She freely admitted to buying extra stakes for her signs and instead of paying through her legally mandated campaign account, she paid for them personally. She also apparently did not obtain a receipt for them as she has already advised in writing that she submitted ALL her receipts to MECAC back at the July 2/15 hearing. This is to my knowledge (and her admission) not the only campaign expense she paid personally.

This discrepancy I first noticed when reading the Draft Minutes of the October 26/15 MECAC meeting sent to me two days ago. Interestingly it has not been recorded accurately in those Draft Minutes. Despite the known obvious bias of council and staff in favour of mayor Shantz (contrary to their bias against former mayor Cowan); I would certainly hope that this error similar to others in the Draft Minutes is not intentional. As stated yesterday I will be formally responding to them and pointing out a few crucial errors which coincidentally, in my opinion, all seem to favour the mayor's position.