Sean Devine Can’t Take A Compliment

Published 07/11/2024 · Updated 07/11/2024

devine.testy

First of all, thank you for reading The Bulldog and joining our 186,000 page views a week.

We hear it has become standard fare at Ottawa City Hall. God bless them all.

Well I guess in explanation, though it is voluntary unlike the Vacant Unit Tax, no one is saying you are running for mayor.

But the people who wrote the tweet in question are quite reputable people. They want you to run for mayor, They aren’t maintaining that you are … though you might … or might not. That’s up to you and circumstances are fluid.

Now there was time when someone saying you’d make a good mayor was perceived as a compliment. That might have changed given current circumstances at the horribly dysfunctional Ottawa City Hall. They throw around hundreds of millions like they are nickels and those nickels go to their supporters for projects we don’t need. They can’t fix the $6.4-billion LRT mess and don’t have a plan to do so. They just throw axles and bearings at it at such a rate that initially city hall types feared they could not get enough parts to keep the train rolling. God knows how much we’re spending on that.

That is the biggest project in Ottawa municipal history and it doesn’t work.

So being mayor is rather thankless (unless the thanks comes from your supporters), impossible and dispiriting. Maybe being touted for mayor is not the compliment it once was.

We liked your line of questioning on the Tewin conflict-of-interest but this tweet shows the effectiveness and danger of X. It’s easy to communicate with the world. Unfortunately there’s no editor between you and the world. And a good editor and maybe even a political advisor would say that tweet is not a good idea.

But it kind of looks like you flew off the handle on this one and let your fingers move before your mind and caution engaged. That’s not the kind of thing you want to see in a mayor, or councillor for that matter.

You got mad and you got it wrong. Good people want you to run for mayor but after this, they might not. And that’s a shame.

A suspicious person might think you were angry at this but you picked the wrong hill to die on.

As usual, we’d be happy to publish your response to this in the interests of fair play. No space restrictions but short is usually better than long. A column is generally somewhere in the 800-word range. It is subject to editing and the usual rules of journalism though it is unlikely you’ll find it especially constricting.

Anyway, it’s a very illuminating tweet.

Ken Gray