'Why are we so scared to talk?' asks Charlottetown councillor who challenged CAO in 2019

Charlottetown councillor Bob Doiron insists he was reprimanded for speaking out, after a former City of Charlottetown senior employee raised 18 issues of concern with councillors back in 2019.

That employee, deputy chief administrative officer Scott Messervey, had just been fired by his boss, chief administrative officer Peter Kelly. (Read our story from Sunday here.)

What the public record shows is that rather than scrutinize the issues raised by Messervey, a majority of council voted to sanction the one councillor who repeatedly raised some of those issues in public meetings and called on the city to improve its financial oversight.

That was Doiron.

"There's no question," he told CBC News in an interview this weekend. "I pushed for answers and apparently I pushed too hard… I didn't think that I did anything wrong. I just wanted questions that I wasn't getting the answers for."

At a council meeting on March 11, 2019, Doiron brought forward a motion calling for an external audit and review of the city's finance department.

The council majority voted to remove the item from the agenda.

In August of that year, Doiron raised concerns around $1 million in paving costs that hadn't been part of the city's original paving tender package.

While he acknowledged that the paving contracts the city had awarded allowed for then-unspecified streets to be added, he said the extra spending had to be authorized by council. Instead, he said, the authorization was provided only by the three members of the public works committee and the CAO.

Doiron called Kelly's conduct on the file "a major breach of city policy" as well as "a major breach of council's trust." He contended Kelly had exceeded his power by authorizing the spending, which Doiron regarded as "a clear breach of the responsibilities of the CAO."

That was not how the chair of council's finance committee saw the situation. Terry Bernard said councillors had already approved $3 million in spending on paving in the city's capital budget, but only $2 million worth had been tendered for when the vote happened. Thus, he said, the extra spending had indeed been authorized by council. 

Doiron believes his speaking out is what led to a code of conduct investigation after Kelly filed a complaint against Doiron under the city's harassment policy.

Private investigator hired

To conduct the review, the city hired a private investigator, who was provided access to Doiron's city emails. Doiron was told by the city to provide copies of his private emails in response to a freedom of information request, which he did. The cost of the investigation and associated legal fees, as of March 2020, was $26,000.

Other than Doiron, council members were never provided with copies of the investigator's report. They all received notice the day before to attend a special closed-door meeting on Saturday, March 7, 2020. Some councillors have told CBC they were not allowed to take notes at that meeting, or even use their phones.

Two weeks later, in a vote that only the six councillors who had attended that Saturday meeting were allowed to participate in, all six voted to suspend Doiron's salary for 90 days for violating the city's code of conduct bylaw and harassment policy. That cost their fellow councillor roughly $10,000.

While the city's code of conduct bylaw allows for a councillor's pay to be suspended for up to 90 days, the province's Municipal Government Act stipulates the maximum fine for misconduct under municipal codes of conduct is $500. 

City wouldn't explain sanction

Publicly, the city provided no details about why Doiron was sanctioned, saying it was a confidential personnel matter.

Doiron today says he believes that $10,000 penalty has had a chilling effect on other councillors. In recent weeks several council members have told CBC News they could not provide interviews for fear of being sanctioned.

"Why are we so scared to talk?" Doiron said. "I got elected to represent the people in my area where I grew up… I was voted in to speak my mind, ask questions that have to be asked."

The other councillors... they're very reluctant to speak out, which is wrong. You're a public figure, you were voted in to take [up] the residents' interests to the best of your ability.- Councillor Bob Doiron

"The other councillors, after seeing myself fined, councillor [Mitchell] Tweel fined, they're very reluctant to speak out, which is wrong. You're a public figure, you were voted in to take [up] the residents' interests to the best of your ability."

At a special meeting planned for Monday evening, council is expected to discuss a plan to conduct a performance review of Kelly, though the item does not appear on the meeting agenda posted here.

If you have information about this story, or a news tip to share with CBC Prince Edward Island, please email kerry.campbell@cbc.ca or compass@cbc.ca.

Under the city's human resources bylaw, performance reviews of all staff are required to be conducted at least once a year.

In media interviews over the past two weeks, Mayor Philip Brown has said council has decided reviews of the chief administrative officer should be conducted every two years.

Kelly's last review was conducted in 2019.