Wilmot Township’s cup of trouble overflows

Wilmot Township just can’t catch a break.

Its mayor and councillors are still trying to clean up the political mess from the controversial decisions, first to display, and later to put away in storage, a collection of statues of Canada’s former prime ministers.

On top of that, there’s now a redhot controversy regarding the Region of Waterloo’s plan to buy farmland for undisclosed industrial purposes near Highway 7 and 8.

But now, to add insult to injury, there’s an official complaint about the behaviour of one of the councillors, Lillianne Dunstall.

It’s a lengthy report from the integrity commissioner that you can read for yourself in the agenda for Monday’s meeting of Wilmot council.

Length and importance, of course, are not the same thing.

This report is not about any leaks of sensitive confidential information, or about harassment of staff, or any of the other issues that truly belong in a code of conduct.

No, this complaint is about the Canada Day celebrations in New Hamburg, who should be in charge of them, and whether Dunstall misbehaved during those conversations.

A very big tempest in a very small teapot.

I have asked the township chief administrative officer and clerk to reveal how much it cost Wilmot residents for Robert Williams, Ph.D, the integrity commissioner, to comb through the evidence of who did what to whom.

I did not receive an answer by my deadline on Thursday afternoon. But based on the amount of detail in the report, I’m guessing that the fee would pay for many months of storage for the statues of those prime ministers.

For many people, Canada Day has been compromised as we learned more about the suffering of Indigenous children in residential schools.

In 2021, after the detection of as many as 215 suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the chair of the Canada Day in Wilmot committee, Angie Hallman, announced that there wouldn’t be Canada Day festivities or fireworks.

Hallman was at that time a township councillor.

“This is the year to pause and reflect. This is the year to listen. And this is the year to allow that grief to happen,” she said in an interview at the time.

But the New Hamburg organizations — service clubs, the board of trade and the Legion — which had always been an important part of that day, said they were excluded from the decision to cancel the event and were “surprised that they heard about it through the media,” Williams wrote.

They also did not participate in the 2022 and 2023 Canada Day event.

In July 2023, Dunstall, who is on the executive of the board of trade, called for a Canada Day task force to rebuild the celebratory event.

She called for the task force to be fully transparent, with financial statements open to public scrutiny, and with no arbitrary decisionmaking.

The complainant, who is never named in the report, said this amounts to disrespect of the previous committee by suggesting that hadn’t happened before.

And it goes on and on like this. In the end, Williams found only one violation: That Dunstall had breached the code of conduct when it came to sitting on the township’s task force to renew the Canada Day celebrations, because she is also a member of organizations that would benefit from the celebrations. That’s a conflict of interest.

He recommended she resign from the task force, and she has agreed.

“I’m going to step back,” she said. “I understand what he’s saying.”

It’s interesting to watch how political strife plays out in a small town.

Hallman did not respond to my request for an interview by my deadline Thursday afternoon, so I wasn’t able to ask her if she was the complainant.

Hallman was voted out of office by Wilmot residents in 2022, in a divisive municipal election that was widely seen as a wish on the part of the township to return to more conservative values.

Dunstall was part of the group who were elected.

What we are seeing now are ripples of that earlier ideological clash. It would be good for everyone if this was the last of it. With the debate to come on the statues, that’s unlikely.

Now, to add insult to injury, there’s an official complaint about the behaviour of one of the councillors, Lillianne Dunstall