In the more than 40 years that I have providing training and workshops for municipal councils, I have never advised heads of council “just sign whatever is placed in front of you; no one expects you to understand it.” If that is the best defence that can be mustered, drunken stupor might be a more persuasive alternative.
The line in the title of this blog is an explanation sometimes offered by students when they don’t submit work on schedule. Over the years mayors have also demonstrated creativity when having to justify their actions. Allan Lamport, mayor of Toronto in the early 1950s, was famous for his malapropisms. He apparently once repudiated a charge by responding “I deny the allegations and I defy the alligators” – although that quote has also been attributed to others. A very recent mayor of Toronto had a highly unusual explanation when evidence was presented of something that he had denied doing. It must have happened when he was in a drunken stupor, he responded. The lawyer for the former mayor of Brampton has also come up with a novel explanation for the fact that in 2014 she denied knowing of a payment from the city to a development company even though in 2011 she signed just such an agreement. She didn’t know what she was doing is essentially the argument being made. According to her lawyer, it would be unreasonable to expect the mayor to make a detailed review of legal documents before signing them when they have already been reviewed by city staff. One might have expected a payment of close to half a million dollars to catch her eye. As for the alleged complexity of the issue, it provided for the city to pay $480,000 to a developer to acquire an option on land that the company was supposed to secure on its own as part of a half billion dollar construction project. That doesn’t seem like an overly complicated or confusing transaction.
In the more than 40 years that I have providing training and workshops for municipal councils, I have never advised heads of council “just sign whatever is placed in front of you; no one expects you to understand it.” If that is the best defence that can be mustered, drunken stupor might be a more persuasive alternative.
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AuthorC. Richard Tindal, Ph.D is a retired Professor of Government. He taught for 30 years at St. Lawrence College, Kingston and was an occasional Visiting Professor at Queen's University. He has also written and consulted extensively about government. Archives
October 2023
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