NOTL councillor wants to clear ‘smoke’ around CAO hiring

A Niagara-on-the-Lake town councillor wants to know if the hiring process for the municipality’s chief administrative officer in 2016 was compromised by a leak of confidential information.

Coun. Jamie King said he will ask town council to seek further information from Toronto lawyer Marvin Huberman of the firm ADR Chambers about his report to Niagara Region which said confidential information about candidates for the job were given to embattled Region CAO Carmen D’Angelo in 2016.

“There is a lot of smoke around certain people,” King said Thursday. “I am not making any accusations here, but I think we need Mr. Huberman to clarify what he said in his report and we need to take a look at our hiring process.”

Huberman was hired by regional council to investigate D’Angelo’s 2016 hiring as CAO. His probe was triggered by a Standard expose which found that D’Angelo obtained a memo, written by Regional Chair Alan Caslin’s policy director Robert

D’Amboise, containing confidential information about other candidates in contravention to privacy rules that guiding the hiring process.

The Standard since has learned D’Angelo downloaded two additional documents written by D’Amboise, which contained further candidate information and interview questions. D’Angelo also downloaded a memo written by Jason Tamming, then Caslin’s communications director and now head of communications for the Region, which contained answers to questions D’Angelo had to submit in writing to the hiring committee.

All the documents were downloaded by D’Angelo before his final interview for the regional CAO job.

In his report, Huberman said there was nothing wrong with the regional CAO hiring process. However, Huberman did not obtain digital evidence and relied on testimony from D’Amboise about a printed copy of the memo and statements from D’Angelo the lawyer said were “improbable” but still credible.

It is one of those improbable statements that has King’s attention.

In his report, Huberman said D’Angelo could not remember if he received the first D’Amboise memo because his phone was stolen in October 2016 and was applying for the Niagara-on-the-Lake job and “received a lot of documents including … biographies of candidates” for the position.

In July, D’Angelo denied he had access to confidential candidate information about the Niagara-the-on-Lake CAO hiring process when asked about the report by The Standard. D’Angelo did not explain why Huberman said he did.

Huberman would not discuss the discrepancy between his report and D’Angelo’s statement to the newspaper, saying it would be “inappropriate for me to comment after the fact on something (D’Angelo) just told you.”

King, who was part of the Niagara-on-the-Lake CAO hiring committee, said information was kept so confidential he felt like he wasn’t being trusted with it.

“I actually complained about it at the time because they would not even forward me any of the forms. Nothing could leave the room,” King said of the recruiting firm Odgers Berndtson that ran the hiring process for the town.

Without a full explanation from Huberman about what D’Angelo told him during his investigation, a cloud hangs over the hiring process, King said

Lord Mayor Patrick Darte said Thursday that he, too, would like to get some clarity from Huberman about his report. Like King, Darte was a member of the town’s CAO selection committee and also complained abut how tightly controlled information was during the process.

King, who is not seeking reelection, said he intends to bring the issue to town council at the Aug. 13 meeting.