Knox — Mayor should be leader of the pack, not a lone wolf

Jack Knox is a former Kamloops newspaper editor who writes for the Victoria Times Colonist. This week, he’s been busy trying to keep up with the controversies swirling around Saanich mayor Richard Atwell.

COLUMN — It’s not as though Saanich’s is the first local council to veer into the ditch.

In 2012, things got so bad in North Saanich that the municipality had to hire a mediator to help councillors play nicely together.

Sometimes individuals just can’t work with the others. Back in 1985, Colwood’s first council had only been in office six weeks when Conrad Adams — father of rock star Bryan — stomped off in protest, declaring: “I quit through sheer frustration.” Colwood is also where mayor Beth Gibson spent a fractious three years at odds with the rest of council after being elected in 1999.

But most of the time politicians learn to get along even when they do not, in fact, get along. Mayor Barb Desjardins didn’t exactly endear herself to her Victoria counterpart, Dean Fortin, or city cops when Esquimalt tried (unsuccessfully) to divorce VicPD and marry the Mounties instead, but she still managed to hang in as co-chair of the Victoria Police Board. (In any B.C. community with a municipal force, the mayor automatically heads its board.)

That brings us to Thursday, when the four other members of the Saanich Police Board persuaded Mayor Richard Atwell to step aside while they asked Justice Minister Suzanne Anton to “conduct an investigation into recent activities by Mayor Atwell that the board believes puts its members in an untenable position.”

They were apparently referring to two complaints about his own police department that Atwell took to B.C.’s Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner this week. He wants the OPCC to determine whether it was the Saanich police who told the Times Colonist about a 911 call he made from the home of a campaign worker, and whether there was a conflict of interest when the police department found no criminal wrongdoing when it investigated his complaint that spyware had been installed on his city hall computer. Atwell has also implied that he has been unfairly targeted by cops from the regional traffic unit.

Anton wouldn’t bite on the police board’s request, saying in a statement that she saw nothing wrong with the mayor going to the OPCC. “I am aware of the request for an investigation, but for the kinds of allegations the mayor has made, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner is the appropriate avenue for him — or any member of the public — to pursue complaints about police conduct.”

Anton could still have offered to help the police board members — unpaid volunteers appointed by her own provincial government — resolve a tricky situation, but instead backed away from this mess as though someone had left it on her front porch in a flaming paper bag. Nobody’s volunteering to wade into this tar pit.

The fact is that the police board is just the latest group to find itself at odds with Atwell, its leader. Whether or not the mayor is the victim of a conspiracy by some Saanich old boys’ club, as his supporters like to think, his suspicions have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, isolating him from the people he has to work with.

He alienated his fellow councillors by effectively firing the municipality’s chief administrator on his own before he was even sworn into office. He alienated Saanich staff by reading something sinister into a pre-election management briefing on council candidates’ platforms — a practice that other councillors called a standard planning exercise.

He has alienated the police by twice asking the OPCC to investigate them, and by throwing the integrity of the traffic cops into question. He won’t work on his city hall computer. He might argue that he’s only being ethical in renting his own facilities when he wants to talk to the media about personal matters, but that still reinforces the impression of a mayor who is isolated from and mistrusts those around him.

Anti-Atwell conspiracy? Certainly there has been a level of piling on. Every politician has opponents and it can be a nasty game. But this one is doing fine fostering divisions on his own, too.

To survive, Atwell has to show he’s capable of being part of a team. A mayor needs to be the leader of the pack, not a lone wolf.

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