The city politician who loved education too much
Awhile ago I introduced you to a newly elected city councillor in north Edmonton, Jon Dziadyk. Coun. Dziadyk had done something that is nearly impossible, but that it is important for us to think possible: he ran against an incumbent councillor, having a campaign budget of just $5,500, and won because he worked hard and understood the local electorate well. Incumbents are beaten in Edmonton elections maybe once a generation, even when they are extreme duds and their opponents have money. Dziadyk’s victory on a shoestring was an impressive feat indeed. It would have been in any Canadian city.
For Dziadyk, however, this was apparently not an impressive enough accomplishment: he decided he needed to make his re-election even harder. That, at least, seems like the most natural explanation for the controversy he has now blundered into.
In January, Dziadyk announced on his weblog that he was going to enrol in the University of Alberta’s Executive MBA program. He emphasized that “I am completing this degree on my own time,” apparently thinking that this would be Ward 3’s main concern. (The Executive MBA is provided boot-camp-style in monthly four-day chunks.) “In the spirit of transparency,” he added, “I also wanted you to know that I am using some discretionary public dollars, from my Ward account, to finance this degree. As it currently stands, I am paying approximately one-third of the tuition.”
It took a little while for non-executives to catch onto that last part, and to realize that the Executive MBA costs $67,000. When reporters called Dziadyk on Feb. 8, he admitted that the degree was expensive, but insisted that it was a species of legitimate professional development. “It allows me with more confidence and new lenses to critique city decisions with a business perspective,” he told the CBC. “I’m confident that we’ll be saving the city money overall.” Ward budgets (which come to $188,718 a year per councillor) are correctly described as discretionary, and it is agreed that Dziadyk’s use of the money is within the city’s rules.
But. To make a long story short, Dziadyk is now paying back the money, and has apologized for “breaking the trust of his constituents.”
It turns out that a lot of people in Edmonton are funding their own educations, often doing so by absorbing large volumes of student loans, and they weren’t impressed at having to cover the cost of the councillor’s accumulation of human capital. Dziadyk is actually being a little hard on himself in calling it an issue of “trust,” since the only reason anybody knew about the expenditure is that he announced it himself, quite proudly. Surely the concept he was looking for was “terrible judgment.”
Yet the debacle made interesting conversation, precisely because Dziadyk broke no formal rule and may not even have offended any bright-line principles. Who knows, maybe he will be able to use what he learns in the course to save taxpayers millions. But an MBA degree has hard cash value, and Dziadyk, as a fellow still in his 30s, will be able to collect it for the rest of his life. (I suspect the U of A’s marketing materials for the degree emphasize this! Strongly!) There will be only a year or so left in Dziadyk’s first council term when he completes the degree, suggesting that the amount of tuition the city ought to cover, even if professional-development spending of this kind is otherwise legitimate, would be closer to zero per cent than two-thirds.
If it’s the information alone that is useful to Dziadyk in his job, and we rightly refuse to consider any networking or prestige benefits that he might monetize personally, there were cheaper alternatives: Athabasca University’s distance MBA costs under $45,000, and there must be a hundred other universities offering similar programs at various prices. What really strikes one, though, is that a city councillor is not actually an executive, and isn’t elected to be one. City government has executives, administrators and beancounters coming out its ears.
Here is what is still most interesting to me about the Dziadyk controversy, since he put it behind him quickly and was not acting dishonourably. Dziadyk, not too long after being elected to council, found himself insisting in public that a business credential is an important element of doing the job well. This must be something he did not realize when he stood for election. Dziadyk actually came to the job with an undergraduate degree in political science and a master’s in, wait for it, urban planning.
That seems like the kind of education that should prepare you, in theory, to be a city councillor. Anyone who had such a degree would make a big deal of it in running for office. As Dziadyk did. Yet we do have a lot of politicians with theorybased credentials of this sort, as opposed to business educations or experience of operating a business.
Can it be that such educations are not of much practical use, and that an aspiring politician is better off acquiring MBA-type skills at reading balance sheets, learning economics and understanding markets? I don’t live in Ward 3, but if I did, this is what I might ask my councillor.