“It’s going to hurt the person’s ability to seek re-election.”
That’s from UNBC political science lecturer Jason Morris regarding Mayor Ron Paull’s wife, Pat Morton sharing a controversial book on residential schools.
Reconciliation between Quesnel City Council and surrounding First Nations now hangs in the balance following a heated council meeting on Tuesday.
Morris told Vista Radio while mayors and councillors can find themselves in trouble for breaching confidentiality and conflict of interest – this type of occurrence falls just short of that realm.
“This is more of an opinion expressed or an activity on a public policy matter that would not be an outright reason say for disqualification and it wouldn’t be a reason under the Community Charter to go to court to deal with it.”
“It seems this has enflamed a lot of people in Quesnel where we have seen a lot of people with protests and other events to come. There is nothing stopping the mayor if he wanted to – to step aside.”
Morris added some potential reform the City of Quesnel may want to consider would be to review the Code of Conduct for elected officials, whether or not Mayor Paull met the requirement of his Oath of Office after being sworn in.
There was one other measure the Cariboo city could look at but would involve some leg work at the provincial level as well.
“Maybe people there could consider a provincial solution to consider adding recall to municipal positions. Right now, this is only for provincial politicians.”
Laurey-Anne Roodenburg, Quesnel Council’s Indigenous Relations Liaison stated the incident involving the Mayor has been a step backwards.
“With all the good work we’ve done in our community, coming off the heels of an amazing Lhtako-Quesnel BC Winter Games that highlighted our communities so amazingly to the rest of the province into this, it’s like all that work and it gets blown out of the water with one act, or lack of.”
Fellow councillor Scott Elliott along with Roodenburg and Tony Goulet called on Paull to resign from his post while Mitch Vik, who was the acting Mayor during the meeting, said council passed a motion asking staff to bring forward an article of censure against the Mayor, which will occur at the next meeting.
Either way, the rift between the current Mayor and council is at a critical point, where there may be no clear path to co-exist moving forward.
“Officially, the mayor is like the head and chief executive officer of a municipality. So, they are supposed to provide leadership to the council, communicate with them and even to reflect their will – so this means going forward, a mayor could be tarnished with this situation and may have exercised poor judgement and lacks authority and legitimacy to carry out regular and ordinary business,” added Morris.