Remember The West Wing, the award-winning Aaron Sorkin drama about the inside operations of the White House?
A famous episode from the first season, written by Sorkin himself, is called Take Out The Trash Day. Early in the episode, viewers learn a popular trick used by bureaucrats and elected officials alike at all levels of government to convey bad news to voters.
The trash goes out on Friday, when people are looking ahead to their weekend. By the time Monday rolls around, there will be something else to dominate the news agenda and the garbage the people in power don’t want you to notice is buried.
The external report into the downtown parkade fiasco was a perfectly-executed Friday news dump.
The 21-page densely written legal document was released by email at 10 a.m. last Friday with no advance notice. That was followed by Mayor Lyn Hall making himself available a half-hour later to news media reporters who would have scarcely had time to read the entire document, never mind actually absorb what it said.
And releasing it on the Friday of the week when local and national headlines were dominated by the discovery of the remains of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School?
That’s cynicism beyond measure and political media relations genius all rolled into one.
Reading too much into this?
Hardly.
UNBC conducted a news dump of its own two weeks ago, kicking out a news release at 5:45 p.m. on Friday, May 28 under the bland headline “Changes to UNBC Board of Governors Membership.” Inside the release was the news that the provincial advanced education minister had dismissed Aaron Ekman as the board chair, effective immediately. A statement followed that comments that don’t reflect UNBC’s values won’t be tolerated, with no mention of what Ekman had said – publicly or privately – in violation of those values.
And the final line – “the university will not comment further on the matter” – informed local reporters that even if they decided to dive into this on Monday, the university wouldn’t answer questions.
That’s how it’s done.
Getting back to the parkade report, look at the context of its release.
When the City of Prince George has good news it wants local residents to pay attention to, reporters are invited to a media event days in advance.
If this report really was the good-news-clearing-the-air-getting-all-the-facts-out ball of wonderfulness Mayor Lyn Hall and most of city council would have everyone believe it is, reporters would have known well in advance it was coming. The report would have been released on a Monday or Tuesday, it would have had a one or two-page summary written in English, not lawyer speak, and everyone at the city would have been happy to talk all week about it to anyone who would listen.
Furthermore, the report landed on a Friday with no city council meeting the following Monday, where it might have hijacked the agenda.
Instead, this coming Monday’s city council meeting will be dominated by what city council and the bureaucrats actually want to talk about, which is the Safe Streets Bylaw to crack down on the people living on downtown streets, bust up the George Street encampment and force them into shelters, whether they want to be there or not.
Parkade report? That’s so last week.
A classic Friday news dump.
‘Why did this happen?’
Meanwhile, there’s still the report itself.
There’s little new information in it, which based on the surprisingly candid comments from Hall and Coun. Kyle Sampson, is exactly what city council was hoping for.
"I don't think there was anything particularly new, or (that) caught me off guard," Hall said.
"I was pleased to see I wasn't blindsided by devastating new information," Sampson added.
The report provides a few extra details on the actual contract the city signed with the parkade developer and how that contract came to be but the rest of this complex, sordid tale of how a $12 million underground parking lot ended up costing $34 million was already public knowledge.
Thankfully, not everyone was pleased. The report didn’t go nearly far enough for Coun. Brian Skakun.
"Why was there such an effort to keep this information from the public and from council? Why did this happen?" Skakun asked.
Actually, the report does answer Skakun’s questions but not directly. Rather, it’s written between the lines throughout.
Simply put, senior administration didn’t want to tell city council what was going on with the soaring costs of the parkade project and had the power to choose not to, while mayor and council let it happen right under their noses.
Full marks to Coun. Garth Frizzell, the chair of council’s finance and audit committee, and Coun. Terri McConnachie for at least having the nerve to admit it.
"We didn't ask enough questions. We didn't ask the right questions," he said.
"This happened on my watch,” she added. “It was too much trust, not enough questions."
Now what?
Rather than dwell on the bloody mess, the mayor and most of council would rather cheerfully look to a bright future, stressing the initiatives that they have enacted or are in the process of doing so to prevent such a fiasco from happening again.
More policy.
More oversight.
Sounds great except that the external report clearly explains that the policies already in place were either partially or fully ignored, while the oversight was less than thorough.
In other words, all the policy and oversight procedures in the world make no difference without willing partners – bureaucrats operating by the book and elected officials diving into the details. Problems arise but can be overcome if one of those pieces is missing but when both are, everything falls apart and you have a $22 million cost overrun to show for it.
One of the policies city council vows to work on and adopt is a whistleblower policy. Presumably that means city staff could go past their managers to complain directly to mayor and council about various city hall shenanigans and tomfooleries.
Unfortunately, the history of whistleblowers, in the private and public sector, is sad and tragic. While the public might sing the praises of these brave acts, things rarely end well for the whisteblowers themselves. Whether it’s sexual misconduct in the RCMP or the Canadian military or doping scandals in sports, the people who step forward see their professional and even their personal lives destroyed more often than not.
Applied here, a city staffer making an end run around the bosses to mayor and council would have a permanent target on their back within the bureaucracy. With union protection they might be able to weather the storm, but without it they’d be quietly managed out of a job and a whisper campaign blackballing that individual would hamper their efforts to land work in their field elsewhere.
A whistleblower policy isn’t a sign of transparency and integrity.
Organizations that have transparency and integrity built into the workplace culture have no need for whistleblower policies because secrets and silos are kept to a minimum and the doors to the bosses’ offices are always open.
At the city, a whistleblower policy would only be as good as the willingness of a mayor and council to listen, investigate and act. Considering Mayor Hall referred to the external review of the parkade as a fact-finding exercise, not a fault-finding one, it’d be smarter for city employees to lie low and keep their mouths shut instead of risking their jobs and their careers to call out wrongdoing that will either be ignored or glossed over.
The City of Prince George doesn’t need a whistleblower policy, it needs an overhaul of its workplace culture.
Once a new, permanent city manager is in place, “city hall needs to be turned upside down,” Skakun said.
That’s a lot of responsibility to put on one person and it needs the unanimous, enthusiastic and sustained backing of city council.
At this point, Ian Wells, the current deputy city manager, was an active participant in the parkade project from the very beginning. As for Walter Babicz, the current acting city manager, his previous job was to review purchases, contracts and institutional risk.
The external report makes clear that the usual due diligence where Babicz would have been involved wasn’t followed. But that begs the question of whether Babicz ever sounded the alarm about why the paperwork about the project happening just outside the front steps of city hall hadn’t crossed his desk for review.
Seen in that light, cultural change at city hall is a fantasy.
The trash will keep going to the curb and business as usual will prevail.
