Duty as Chair & The Diary of Anne Frank


Duty as Chair & The Diary of Anne Frank

It is a given that the Mayor represents the community.  To me this means the Mayor or Board Chair are in many ways an ambassador and this leads to many ribbon-cuttings and sod-turnings.  I also believe you have to take the good with the bad and that when something goes wrong, you have to step up and ‘take one for the team.’

When a road project went over budget or when a bridge took far too long to complete, I always felt I had to take responsibility and represent the municipality.  Perhaps not with too much enthusiasm, but I believed you can’t take credit when things go well but then point fingers when they don’t.  In the case of the Admirals Road bridge that took months longer than originally announced to complete, I was steaming inside and let staff know that I was extremely upset that the contract allowed this but publicly I agreed to the interviews and provided factually updates.  Nonetheless, I had no interest in a ribbon-cutting and instructed staff to let traffic across the bridge the moment it was safe.  Not only had the delay been a tremendous inconvenience for thousands of residents, it had cost merchants thousands of dollars and I just couldn’t shrug that off.

Some of my more challenging times in representing ‘the team’ was while I was Chair of the Saanich Police Board.  It is one thing to take the good with the bad, but in policing the ‘bad’ can be very, very bad.  Police shootings, murder investigations and aggressive arrests can be the topics of briefings from your Police Chief.  In this case the Board Chair has a duty of oversight and confidentiality so public comments are limited if made at all although I rarely used the ‘no comment’ excuse.  If something had happened on ‘my watch’ then I would at least explain why I shouldn’t comment, describe what role the Board and I may have in the future and refer media or sometimes a citizen to the appropriate source of information.

Early in my time as Police Board Chair, we had a columnist from Vancouver book one of our libraries for a meeting.  Unfortunately this columnist had a reputation of being a holocaust denier.  Today I hope our hate speech laws allow for such rentals to be rejected but in the late 1990’s this didn’t seem to be the case – in fact, I didn’t know about the event until after the fact..

Predictably the event attracted protesters but our police presence was lacking and at the very least, there was some pushing and shoving as attendees entered the building.  The organizers retained a local lawyer who always seemed to represent people with such views and he made a good case that our police department had not properly prepared for the event.

So what to do? The Police Chief had worked out a solution – all it would take to satisfy the organizers and have them withdraw their official police complaint was for them to meet with the Mayor and Police Board Chair and receive an apology.  This was not a solution that I would have chosen and I pushed back at first by suggesting they meet with him and get their apology – after all, this was an operational issue.  But they wanted the apology from ‘The Mayor’ and shutting down this formal complaint was valuable – certainly I didn’t want our organization to be distracted with a public hearing where they were in ‘the right’ and we were in ‘the wrong.’

So a meeting was scheduled and I prepared.  I’m sort of a neat and tidy guy and my desk is always quite organized, at least what you see on top.  But for this meeting I cleared off my calendar, calculator, pens and tire shop memorabilia and had a totally clean, clear wooden desk – except for one thing.  I bought a paperback copy of the Diary of Anne Frank.  The lawyer and his client walked in, sat down, and I stated my brief three sentence apology.  I looked up with just my book between us and asked ‘is there anything else’ – they said ‘no’ and got up and left.

I fulfilled my duty to represent; and I still have that paperback to remind me how I did it.
Check out my website at http://frankleonard.ca/ for information on Local Government and Consulting

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