CHARITY GOLF DAY OPEN TO DOUBTS ABOUT FAIR PLAY
Good intentions, ethical reservations clash in councillor’s collaboration with developer
Unable to squeeze enough funding out of the city budget for two youth programs in his ward, Rideau-Goulbourn Coun. Scott Moffatt turned to the mainstay of politicians trying to raise money for good causes: a developer-sponsored golf tournament.
Scott Moffatt’s Golf4Youth Classic Presented by Caivan Communities was last Friday. Sixty-four golfers and a handful of silent-auction items helped clear about $15,000, he says.
The money from this tournament is for good and important causes: the Richmond Youth Centre and the Youth of Manotick Association, fledgling activity and outreach groups for young people. They’re partial responses to the outbreak of fentanyl abuse among southwest Ottawa teenagers, groups run mainly by local volunteers but underwritten by public money.
“They scratch and claw every single year to make their budgets,” Moffatt says. “I can only do so much to get them funds, as a councillor, out of the city budget.”
This is the trade-off we’ve created: councillors’ seeing hitting up the developers they regulate as the best way to fund youth programs meant to keep children from dying of drug overdoses.
Moffatt was open about this golf tournament, putting his name on the thing even though he’s more a sponsor than an organizer himself. The Canadian Golf and Country Club in Ashton hosted and largely ran the event while the beneficiaries did the marketing. Moffatt says he touched no cash.
The tournament is new and needed all the promoting it could get, he says, though his hope is future editions will eventually all but take care of themselves. If the tournament outlives his own political career, Moffat says, so much the better.
This is unlike, for instance, the “Just Happy” golf tournament that raised money earlier this year for the Queensway Carleton Hospital, a developer-organized and -sponsored affair that succeeded one Barrhaven Coun. Jan Harder stopped running after she became chair of city council’s planning committee. She and other councillors and even staff city planners still go, it’s just not in her name any more. That day raises four times as much money even though it’s organized very quietly for some reason.
“When you get to a point where these things are self-sustaining, it’s almost automatic,” Moffatt says. People know the event is coming and they sign up and you don’t have to make a fuss.
Moffatt personally likes golf: Before politics he managed a golf course and a golfing store. Using his clout to raise private money for a noble purpose in his ward through an activity he enjoys is, from one perspective, an excellent application of Moffatt’s time as a councillor.
“The things that I want to do are the things the ward wants to do, that the residents want to do,” Moffatt says. And yet. Rideau-Goulbourn is a small ward by population but vast in geography. It butts up against Stittsville, south Kanata and Barrhaven, all of which builders would happily expand. Its villages, especially Manotick and Richmond, face existential questions about how they’ll accommodate new people who want to move to them and how people who’ve lived there for years will downsize and live into old age.
The city’s zoning rules and where it builds multimilliondollar roads and water and sewer pipes will answer those questions, and landowners’ fortunes are on the line.
Councillors like Moffatt get a lot of say in these decisions, much of it in behind-the-scenes meetings that determine what plans get brought to public votes. Moffatt has more authority than the average councillor because he’s the chair of city council’s agriculture and rural-affairs committee, which has authority over zoning in rural Ottawa.
Running down the list of sponsors for Scott Moffatt’s Golf4Youth Classic Presented by Caivan Communities, you find Richcraft, Mattamy Homes and Minto — some of Ottawa’s biggest property-development companies — in the first tier. A handful of other local businesses sponsored individual holes. Construction company Tomlinson sponsored wine; engineering and planning consultancy Novatech sponsored bags.
I called chief sponsor Caivan to ask what it gets out of sponsoring such a tournament but didn’t hear back.
Moffatt acknowledges the “optics” risk but says he’s happy to defend having property developers pay for a charity event.
“These are people that have actually been building Richmond over the last few years,” he says. “These are people in the city. It’s in their interest to support the community ... and not just to build their houses, take their profits and walk away.”
Sponsors could just give money to the youth groups, letting their volunteers work on helping the kids instead of planning a golf tournament. The Manotick group cancelled last week’s drop-in for program participants because of the golf, though Moffatt says some of the teens got to play so maybe that evens out.