Good People Get Bad Reps At City: THE VOTER

How many of staffers at Ottawa City Hall have considered that the longer they stay employed by a municipality that has developed a reputation nation-wide as a place to avoid working, the more likely that they are to get painted with that same brush. A reputation, once gained, is a very hard thing to shake.

It’s not just in the municipal sector that they will become increasingly unemployable. Do they not realize that private employers in Ottawa can see what’s happening at the city? Since the wrongdoers behind the curtain who have worked on all the city’s disasters are rarely identified, other employers will be cautious about hiring anyone who comes out of that environment.

The provincial LRT inquiry clearly identified senior staff and politicians with questionable practices. Those perpetrators had staff members who did the work to create and deliver programs and supported them in the things they were doing.

In the first place, these staff people might have participated in the wrong-doing but the second piece is more insidious. Piled onto this are others in the office who knew or ought to have known that what was happening was wrong and did nothing to stop it regardless of the harm to the city and its residents. Most of them are still with the municipality in some capacity but we don’t know exactly who they are. That means that there’s a shadow hanging over every person who works at the city and most employers are going to think twice before potentially introducing someone with those kinds of character flaws into their workforce.

As another example, wasn’t there a junior lawyer at city hall who wrote the Tewin memorandum of understanding. An anonymous junior lawyer did that – did that person not question the contents of the document? Not knowing which lawyer that was, one would be cautious in dealings with any lawyer at the city and certainly wouldn’t hire one of them. Did nobody other than then-treasurer-now-city-managere Wendy Stephanson in the finance department see the document before it was signed? Or even after it was signed? How about in the planning department?

Yes, people have mortgages and other commitments that might make them think twice about leaving the city’s employ but they’ll still have those issues if the ethical behaviour and wrongdoing at the city blows up and they are a casualty of the fallout.

You think you will have problems finding another job now? Just wait for it.

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