WATCHDOG RULING
Darouze should apologize
City hall’s independent integrity watchdog has found that Osgoode Coun. George Darouze broke council’s code of conduct when he bullied constituents after a Facebook dust-up last year.
Darouze will keep his job and isn’t likely to suffer financial penalties, but integrity commissioner Robert Marleau is recommending that the councillor apologize.
There are two Osgoode-based complainants in the conduct case: a woman and her husband, who is an Ottawa Police Services officer. They aren’t identified in the investigative report.
The integrity commissioner received the complaint on March 12, 2019 and, while he offered to resolve the issue informally, the complainants wanted a full investigation.
An investigator hired by the integrity commissioner collected sworn evidence from eight witnesses after beginning the probe on May 1.
The report, which is on the agenda of a meeting of council Wednesday, lays out the information collected during the investigation.
Interactions between Darouze and the complainants date back to March 2016 when they were trying to resolve a problem that had people dumping things on an adjacent property. According to the report, the talks led to a satisfactory result for the complainants, but Darouze came away believing they “had acted unreasonably in questioning actions and decisions of city land use officials.”
The report says the female complainant, using her maiden name, was posting on an Osgoode-specific Facebook group about emergency services and safety in the community. She was particularly interested in police deployment in her community. Her husband didn’t participate in social media communication, didn’t have a social media profile and his wife didn’t seek approval for any of her posts, the report says.
The report says police response times in Osgoode increased with a change in the deployment model in 2017. Community police officers were no longer in the village.
Darouze in one Facebook group post accused the female complainant of “spreading fears and misleading our community,” the report says. The councillor alleged she had an “inside source” family member and he offered to meet them.
“There is never an appropriate forum to spread incorrect information about Ottawa Police Service or police operations, (especially Facebook) but I’m sure your husband could misinform you of that too,” Darouze wrote in the group, the report says.
Twelve hours later, on Sept. 21, 2018, about a month before the municipal election, Darouze emailed Charles Bordeleau, the police chief at the time. Darouze flagged an “issue” with an Osgoode resident “who happens to be the wife of an OPS officer.” Darouze wrote that he was concerned police operations were being discussed in social media “in such a negative perspective” by police family members.
Darouze grumbled to the chief that the female complainant was spreading false information about deployment changes.
“If the information that has been relayed to me since these changes is incorrect, or if her husband is relaying incorrect information to her to scare the public, I think it would be best to resolve this once and for all so we are all on the same page,” Darouze wrote to the chief.
The chief forwarded the letter to an inspector and, with a staff sergeant, determined the female’s Facebook post was accurate. They decided to notify the woman’s husband, who at that point saw his wife’s posts for the first time, and assured him no action would be taken by the police force. While Darouze claimed there was a surge in communications with residents about police deployment after the Facebook posts, the conduct investigator found no proof.
In fact, the investigator didn’t find Darouze credible during the investigation.
“On a balance of probabilities, I find that the major motivation of the councillor was to bully and intimidate the complainants and each of them in the hope that female complainant might cease her critical Facebook commentary of him,” the investigative report says.
While the integrity commissioner investigated Darouze under two sections of the code of conduct — one about using confidential information and the other about bullying and harassment — the integrity commissioner found Darouze violated only the bullying section.
The integrity commissioner wants council to force Darouze to produce a “sincere written apology” to the complainants.
Council should direct Darouze to email interim police chief Steve Bell to make the top cop aware of the integrity findings and to request that the councillor’s Sept. 21, 2018 email to Bordeleau be removed from the file of the officer complainant.
The integrity commissioner also wants council to reprimand Darouze.