Former Sackville Town Councillor Ken Hicks says he hasn’t heard yet whether Tantramar will release the 2021 Montana Report on the turmoil within Sackville’s fire department.
Hicks wrote to town council and CAO Jennifer Borne on January 21st formally requesting the release of the report after a dozen firefighters turned in their pagers on January 5th taking themselves off active duty.
That brought the number available to respond to emergencies to about 18, well under half the department’s full complement of 43.
Sackville commissioned the Montana Consulting Group to conduct a workplace assessment after Warktimes reported in April 2021 that about 17 volunteer firefighters had resigned over a five year period and that their resignation letters complained about persistent bullying, favouritism, harassment, sexism and safety violations in Sackville Fire & Rescue.
Public statements
Hicks also posted two public statements on his Facebook page, one of them, an open letter addressed to the mayor, council and administration, calling for the immediate suspension of Sackville’s fire chief pending the results of an investigation being conducted by a law firm in Saint John.
The town announced on January 16th that it had hired VanBuskirk Law to investigate the fire department workplace:
Hicks says he worries that the investigator will only be looking into breaches of the Workplace Harassment and Violence Policy of 2023 and that therefore, the investigation might be too narrow to deal with issues in the years before that policy was adopted.
In his Facebook posts, he accuses the town of failing to act on recommendations in the Montana report. The report itself and its 20 recommendations have never been made public on the grounds that New Brunswick’s right to information law prohibits the release of records and recommendations made by an investigator “in relation to a harassment investigation or a personnel investigation.”
New Brunswick’s Ombud and a Court of King’s Bench judge both agreed the town was right to withhold the report and its recommendations.
“We already paid for a workplace audit in 2021, and we already had the roadmap to fix this,” Hicks wrote, adding that Mayor Black now says that the Montana Consulting Group did not conduct a full-scale investigation in 2021 only a workplace assessment.
“The decision to start an actual investigation only now, after losing twelve firefighters, points to a catastrophic delay in leadership and a failure to act on known information,” Hicks writes.
In his open letter, Hicks says town council needs to play a more direct role in overseeing the fire department.
“I suggest a council led fire service oversight committee made up of three councillors and a firefighter representative to track and ensure implementation of the outstanding [Montana] recommendations,” he writes.
More managers
“Adding more management layers and ‘People and Culture’ managers now is just an expensive way to build a wall of protection around the Fire Chief and the CAO,” Hicks says, referring to the town’s announcement on January 13th that it had added a new position called Tantramar Fire Service Manager of People & Culture to its management ranks and would be recruiting a Director of Protective Services to oversee Tantramar’s three fire departments.
“We don’t need more six-figure salaries, we need accountability for the individuals who poisoned the well in the first place,” Hicks writes.
“The 12 firefighters are the solution, not the problem. These firefighters didn’t step away because they stopped caring about their neighbours, they stepped away because the toxicity at the top made it impossible to do their jobs safely.”
To read Ken Hicks’s open letter to mayor, council and administration, click here.
This is the first in a series on the crisis within Sackville Fire & Rescue. Next, what we do know about the Montana recommendations.
This is an excellent article.
The mayor is a complete failure as a leader, on every level. Everyone just needs to remember that at the next election.
This is an Excellent article Bruce! Ken Hicks also wrote an excellent letter! ( Not just saying that because he’s a Hicks.. honestly) the level of frustration in the community on this one is palpable. Sadly good councillors may pay the price on this one at election time. No more studies. Take action folks now before hiatus becomes permanent for good firefighters and recruiting in the future becomes impossible! Why is this lingering???
I’d love to see Chief Bowser make a public statement on what is really going on behind the scenes at the Sackville Fire Hall .. because to me he seems to have a lot of SELF CONTROL despite all the bullying by the community including Town Councillor Bruce Phinney who seems convinced that his job is make sure Chief Bowser gets fired from his job. Pity.
Come election time this year I hope that people think long and hard about what they value in our town. Chief Bowser always exhibits a lot of integrity and the ongoing witchhunt of him by the “court of public opinion” is highly disturbing. It’s obvious something else is going on with the staffing at the Fire Hall.. but no one has the courage to talk about it and that is a big problem. I already spoke about this problem with Town Councillor Bruce Phinney but he has refused to address the issues that I raised with him about the “drama” going on and why it has not been disclosed to the unwitting public who seem to have their own theories on the truth of the matter.
This will be the first year I do not vote for Bruce Phinney. Accountability and truth matter a lot and without them we are all put at risk in this town.
I totally agree with you. I have talked to some members and it’s the opposite of what is being told on Facebook……
The way the town has handled this demonstrates why the province is projecting a $1.3 billion dollar deficit this year despite still being unable to fix things like health care: because both provincial and municipal governments, and staff, don’t see their role being to understand and resolve problems in a transparent way. They see it as their job to collect the salaries and benefits of their offices but hire private consultants to do their jobs for them, and keep the process behind closed doors where the public can’t see anything.
We didn’t elect Montana Consulting Group or VanBuskirt Law. If council and staff can’t run a town and deal with the problems involved, they don’t belong in municipal government. If there are going to be new managerial positions, those people need to do something more than use public money to hire consultants to do work that town staff should be doing.
It’s true that the Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act is a valid reason for a court to concur with the town in refusing to release personnel investigations.
Councillor Phinney argued that the information was about management of the fire department, not a personnel investigation. As Bruce has pointed out in the past, it’s arguable that the withheld information is not limited to personnel investigation, but a broader issue of managing a public safety service.
If a case were brought to the Court of King’s Bench today, after two more years of the fire department deteriorating and the town failing to fix the problem, a better argument would be public interest.
The fire department is a critical service that lives depend upon, and by mismanaging it the town is putting citizens’ lives in danger, as well as the lives of fire fighters who have to do their jobs short-staffed. Public interest potentially trumps the provincial RTIPPA legislation, as it does in other cases. A case could be made that there is a public interest in the full details of the problem being known so that it can be expeditiously resolved and potentially fatal dangers averted.
There are so many unanswered questions, I feel what is needed is an old fashioned question and answer meeting with the CAO, Mayor and Council on stage and ready to answer questions posed to them by concerned people and tax payers from our Tantramar area. This meeting could be set up so that the questions would be presented by mikes and answered by the person it was addressed to. We haave been left in the dark WAAAAY TOO LONG. We as many are tax payers and concered about the way our caring past and present Fire Figfhters have been abused and as well as the safety of our property. It is time the public has an opportunity to have this dirty mess brought out and things back to a proper functioning Fire Department and the retired and (fired) members be offered the chance to return to the Sackville Department.