Mount Allison Politics Professor Geoff Martin. Photo contributed

A Mt. A. professor who studies municipal politics is questioning the town’s continuing refusal to release information that could help residents understand what went wrong inside Sackville Fire & Rescue and why former Chief Craig Bowser is no longer with the department.

Geoff Martin says, for example, residents should know the terms of any possible financial settlement with Bowser so they could judge to what extent he was or was not to blame for the continuing turmoil that brought the number of volunteer firefighters this year to only 18 out of a full departmental complement of 43.

“I think the reason any settlement needs to become public is that it would allow people to gauge if the town had cause to dismiss him as chief,” Martin said during a telephone interview.

He added that if Bowser received only a small financial settlement, it could indicate he was largely to blame for the ongoing fire department crisis, while a bigger settlement would suggest the town could not win a lawsuit for wrongful dismissal.

“Was this individual supervised properly and assuming he was evaluated every two years, did he ever get an unsatisfactory performance rating?” Martin asked.

“Was a case ever built, so that legally speaking, he could be fired for minimal cost in terms of legal fees?”

Martin said that without knowing the terms of any settlement, the public will never know.

Public’s right to know

Martin referred to a previous case that occurred after he was elected to Sackville town council in 1998.

“There is that past precedent in the Dennis Egyedy case where Sackville council provided an incentive for him to resign as CAO,” he said.

“I was chair of the finance committee and may also have been chair of the personnel committee and a majority of council agreed, this is the people’s money and so we told the public the financial settlement was $47,500,” he said.

“And if the council has to take lumps for having done this, then so be it, right? The people need to know how their money is being spent.”

Martin says these days there’s a tendency to treat a municipality not as a democracy where citizens have a right to know, but more as a pseudo-corporation where the shareholders are seen as a nuisance.

Blanket secrecy

He also questions the secrecy around the findings of the VanBuskirk law firm’s investigation into workplace turmoil within Sackville Fire & Rescue.

“I think some kind of summary of the VanBuskirk report would help the whole community move on,” he says, adding that the recruitment of more volunteer firefighters has obviously been a problem.

“When you just get bland assurances from management telling you, ‘Oh, you know we’ve got a plan,’ well, tell us what the plan is and how it relates to what the investigators found,” he says.

“Tantramar is a very diverse town, and one thing you could ask yourself is, ‘Well, are we trying to recruit non-traditional people to the department and making sure that they feel welcome,’ i.e., like how many women in the department? That’s more than half the population,” he says.

“We’re increasingly, especially among young people, this is an increasingly racialized community. So what about racialized people in the department?

“So I think, you know, those are questions too and it’s harder to ask those questions when you really don’t know what the investigation found.”

This is the first of a two-part series. Next, the flaws in the town’s case for keeping HR matters secret.