Political strife threatens to tear apart town
Mayor and councillors in open rebellion
A New Brunswick town council is verging on chaos, with nearly half its councillors walking off the job in recent months, citing stress and strife at City Hall.
Since the 2016 municipal election elevated a toughtalking retired school principal to the mayor’s office in Tracadie, N.B., the town council has fractured into two bitterly opposed camps: those who like the new mayor and those who don’t.
The mayor’s detractors cast him as something of a tyrant, unjustly vilifying veteran councillors and endeavouring to have police investigate them for corruption. The mayor himself, political neophyte Denis Losier, says he is beset by subterfuge by bitter councillors upset that he has publicly outed them for allegedly taking kickbacks and spending public funds on lavish office snack stockpiles and Christmas parties.
“I have always said I’m never going to be a puppet for the council,” Losier told the Post in an interview. “If there are things that the people need to know, I’m going to reveal them.”
Now, this municipality of 16,000 on the Frenchspeaking Acadian Peninsula is left with heavy deficits, little money to spend on infrastructure, and a skeletal team of feuding councillors that can’t agree on the right way forward.
As Losier tells the story, his fate was practically sealed before he was elected in May 2016, ousting incumbent Aldéoda Losier (a very distant relation). Many of the sitting councillors had sworn allegiance to the former mayor, Losier said, and wouldn’t give him the time of day.
The situation worsened once the newly elected Losier started taking a look at the municipality’s finances and accused the previous administration — which includes several sitting councillors — of misspending public funds. In August 2017, he went public with a series of allegations about expenses he deemed excessive, including a $14,000 staff Christmas party and $20,000 spent on coffee, snacks and meals at City Hall. Last February, he accused councillors of conflict of interest for accepting theatre tickets from a production company that did work for the city — a charge the councillors deny — and suggested the RCMP should investigate.
The council’s biweekly meetings have become the biggest spectacle in town, CBC News has reported, with people cramming into chambers to hear the mayor’s latest searing report on city affairs.
At the same time, Losier has been grappling with what appear to be major problems at the municipality’s finance department, which was unable to deliver financial statements for 2016. In September 2017, the council voted to hire an external accounting firm to try to get the town’s affairs in order. The firm has since calculated that Tracadie, whose budget is roughly $12 million, ran deficits of $111,000 in 2016 and $439,000 in 2017.
Last month, the firm completed a report for the council that listed a number of problems with the municipality’s accounting, including double payments on bills, five different pay systems, and an inability to prepare financial reports for the council.
Amid the municipality’s financial woes, the mood on council has continued to sour. Veteran councillors say the mayor has unleashed a torrent of online abuse and intimidation, to the point that one councillor couldn’t go to the grocery store without her husband, according to Radio-Canada.
Since the spring, four city councillors have resigned, including two in the last week, all claiming the constant squabbling had started to affect their health.
“He’s not a leader,” said Raymonde Robichaud, the latest to resign, in an interview with CBC News. “How many times did we get insulted during meetings? … It’s not just us that’s the problem. The big problem is the mayor, and he needs to resign.”
Councillors said commenters on the mayor’s public Facebook page had dubbed the mayor’s opponents on council as “a gang of seven dwarves,” calling them “venomous snakes” and “rotting apples,” RadioCanada reported. The mayor distanced himself from the comments and took down the Facebook page.
Losier and his supporters say the other councillors simply don’t want to see any of their perks cut, and would rather raise taxes than cut spending to balance the books.
Norma McGraw, a former councillor who resigned in June, said she left because she felt other councillors were trying to undermine her and Losier by holding secret meetings and going to the media to air their grievances. “They didn’t want to make the tough decisions,” she said. “They just want to go along and do what they always do.”
As it stands today, the council has just seven remaining members, with six needed to make quorum. A byelection to fill the vacancies won’t take place until May, meaning a couple of absentees over the winter could paralyze the municipal government.
Back in February, Losier mused publicly that he himself might resign. But he insists quitting isn’t in the cards now, claiming it would be “impossible” for his opponents to get him to step down. Today, he’s even considering running again in the next municipal election in 2020, something he says he wouldn’t have contemplated six months ago.