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Jeffrey’s snout back in the trough

PiggiesLast Monday The Block snuck a motion into the meeting without putting it on the agenda: to allow Councillor Jeffrey to pursue her personal political goals at taxpayer expense, and chase another seat on the FCM (Federation of Canadian Municipalities) board – even though she failed to win re-election to the board in May, 2017. At the upcoming FCM meeting in Halifax she can wine and dine on your dollar.

Of course The Block didn’t want it publicized beforehand because they knew it would arouse community ire. After all, The Block have raised your taxes THREE times in three years, given themselves a pay hike every time, while handing Jeffrey a free ticket to fly all over the country without even requiring her to report back to the public.

And what did we get after paying all this money? A comedy-duo skit presentation.

Taxpayers are once again paying for her to stick her nose in the trough but when she was on the board, we didn’t received as much as a nod and a wink from FCM. You have to wonder what our councillor was doing on our behalf… aside from wining and dining that is.

At 2:52:12 in the council video, Deputy Mayor Saunderson made a big deal about the town getting grant money from FCM as if she had anything to do with it. That grant came in Dec. 2017 – seven months after she was lost her election bid to stay on the board. And the money wasn’t from FCM – it came from the feds but was distributed by FCM. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, eh, Brian?

But Jeffrey claimed she advocated for it. When and where and why didn’t she speak about it in all that time after she got turfed from the FCM board? Maybe we got the money because she WASN’T on the board! Jeffrey didn’t even know how much the town got! Some advocate.

I’ve written about the Stench of Entitlement around Jeffrey in the past. She’s our own Senator Ruth: deeply concerned about her own entitlements, and whinging about cold camembert. She doesn’t give a damn about the taxpayers who have to pay for her jaunts.

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Show me the documents!

Troll sprayThe trolls and troglodytes on social media are whinging again about allegedly missing documents that relate to the 2012 sale of 50% of Collus. They want you to think there was a conspiracy by the utility staff not to release crucial documents.

There wasn’t. Period.

No matter how many times this gets debunked, no matter how often it gets corrected, it rises again and again amongst the ignorati. This time it was the Block’s bullshit judicial inquiry (aka their campaign platform) that revived this particular zombie – in part because The Block’s few remaining followers (the trolls) want to keep alive their hoax about corruption in town hall last term.

The trolls are passing around emails from town staff demanding the documents, without sharing the responses that indicate when the documents were provided and by whom. Very sneaky, but we’ve come to expect underhanded tactics by The Block’s minions.

Let’s try one more time for the hard-of-thinking who keep this balderdash afloat: everything (I repeat: EVERYTHING) the town asked for from Collus-PowerStream was provided, sometimes two or three times because the town kept demanding the same documents they already had more than once.

EXCEPT: personal/personnel information deemed confidential by the Ontario Corporations Act. Nor should they be revealed because they are CONFIDENTIAL and protected from outside scrutiny. That’s the friggin’ provincial law, and Collus-PowerStream had to pay lawyers to tell this to the town several times. That extra expense was one of the reasons the utility could not pay a dividend to the town last year (which befuddled Councillor Doherty).

However, salary and benefits aggregates were provided that covered the entire staff. PLUS anyone who can read (I know, I know: that lets out The Block and most of their followers) can thumb through the audited financial statements to get this information.

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Block bullies are at it again

Abusive bulliesMay 14’s council agenda (p. 40-49) contained yet more evidence of The Block’s bully-boy tactics and pettiness: a complaint made to the integrity commissioner against our mayor. They damn her no matter what she does.

This complaint was filed by someone who might charitably be called the Block’s pet barnacle for his concreted attachment to them, dragged along by their momentum without any of his own. He’s also nicknamed the “frequent filer” for his habit of filing FOI requests against people he doesn’t like, apparently looking – unsuccessfully – for something evil in their emails he can then share with the Block. And as you might guess, he’s a candidate for council using a tawdry ploy to get his name in the local media before the upcoming municipal election.

At the same time, it is yet one more underhanded smear of a good and honourable woman by The Block bullies again. One wonders who wrote the complaint. Someone lawerly, perhaps? Someone actually literate? Certainly unlikely that the named complainant had the skills to do it himself.

The report notes at the beginning (sec. 2):

The essence of the complaint is that Mayor Sandra Cooper, given her brother’s position as Senior Vice-President of Operations and Business Development with the Clearview Aviation Business Park, had a conflict of interest in that she contravened s.7 “Improper Use of Influence” of the Collingwood Code of Conduct when she voted on the report.

Yet Sections 3 and 4 explain that the mayor “attempted to avoid contravening s. 7, “Improper Use of Influence” by checking with the Director of Public Works and with her brother to ascertain whether CABP had made inquiries about the Airport property…” So no matter what she does, no matter how hard she tries, no matter her efforts to show respect for the will of Council, The Block are out to get her and drag her name into the mud. But rather than attack her themselves – that would have taken a spine – they used a wannabe council candidate who eagerly jumps at the chance to get media attention.

First let’s consider whether the mayor had a conflict of interest – direct or indirect – in the Collingwood Airport Business Park or the airport itself. That requires you to read through the updated Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. And you’ll quickly see she didn’t. She has no pecuniary interest in the development, but because her brother does, she has stepped away from the table during discussions and votes where CABP was involved.

But is her brother really an issue? or just a canard? Section 3 of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act says he isn’t:

Interest of certain persons deemed that of member
3 For the purposes of this Act, the pecuniary interest, direct or indirect, of a parent or the spouse or any child of the member shall, if known to the member, be deemed to be also the pecuniary interest of the member. R.S.O. 1990, c. M.50, s. 3; 1999, c. 6, s. 41 (2); 2005, c. 5, s. 45 (3).

Parent, spouse of child only: siblings are NOT considered for conflict of interest.

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The greening of shaving


But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man. I recall those lines from a Beyond the Fringe sketch first released in 1964 (see below).* And so it was in my family: my brother was the hirsute Esau to my near-hairless Jacob. I didn’t need to shave until my late teens and even then it was iffy. That was in the late 1960s when sideburns and moustaches were the rage. By the time I could grow enough, everyone had gone back to being clean shaven.

Eternally unfashionable, I was, even back then. In another era, I suppose I would have been a clean-shaven Roman when Emperor Hadrian made the beard fashionable.

My grandfather – born in the 1880s – used a straight razor. Aka a “cut throat” razor. I remember seeing it in his bathroom, along with the small ceramic bowl for shaving soap and a badger-hair brush for lathering it on. A well-worn leather strop hung from a wall hook. Dangerous, Jack-the-Ripper sort of thing, that razor; understandably the weapon of choice in many slasher films. Its deceptively sharp blade swung out easily.

It had a bone handle, yellowed, marked with the signs of age and use. It was old, old enough that the handle may even have been ivory. Maybe even older than he was, passed down from his own father, although he never said as much. It had a severe beauty about it, sort of like a moray eel has. I was never tempted to try it – too dangerous, too easy to slip and slice, I thought.

I was surprised to find that, despite its venerable history (the oldest ones date back 3,500 years or so but the steel-bladed version more common today dates from 1680 CE), straight razors are still being manufactured – and used – today.

Safety razorMy father – born in 1914 – used a safety razor – the sort of all-metal device that had a double-edged blade where you unscrewed a knob on the bottom of the razor to open the top where the blade sat. It was first introduced in 1904 with King Camp Gillette’s patent, and hasn’t changed a lot since.

My father’s razor had heft and solidity; the knurled handle felt secure. He’d fill the sink with water and swirl the razor in the soapy water to clean it as he shaved in confident strokes.

I can’t exactly remember when, but I seem to recall him having one with a butterfly head that opened like wings to replace the blade. I remember turning the knob to open and close those wings. It had a satisfying sensation of engineering know-how; the very model of the industrial revolution’s ingenuity.

I did try that type of safety razor, way back when I first started shaving, albeit briefly. Not being terribly coordinated then, I cut myself easily, so I switched to something less likely to draw my blood in spurts.

I – a boomer child of the 1950s – went higher tech when it was my turn: I started with a convenient cartridge (injector) razor, one of those single-edged blades that you pushed from a small metal container into the razor every month or so to easily replace the dulled one. Introduced as the cutting edge – forgive the pun – of shaving tech in the 1920s by Schick, it evolved little by the time I took it up. Plastic handle, little grace in the design, but much utility. Easily purchased in any grocery or drug store, and not expensive. And not quite as likely to slit my throat as other types. (While no longer popular, versions of the injector are still being made by smaller companies)

Years later, I still prefer single blade razors, by the way, although they are rarely seen on drugstore shelves outside of disposable versions. And that disposable notion bothers me, enough to want to change a lifetime of shaving habits. So read on…

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Deception, The Block, and EPCOR

Spy stuffThe Ontario Energy Board (OEB) is currently conducting hearings about the proposed sale of our publicly-owned electrical utility, Collus, to the for-profit, out-of-province corporation, EPCOR. Several documents have already been entered into the record and you can read them here.

Most of them are fairly technical and steeped in opaque legalese, but download and read this one: EPCOR_IRR_SEC_EPCOR Collingwood MAADs_20180503.pdf. There’s some interesting content here and I think it’s stuff that The Block, the town and maybe even EPCOR don’t want you – the public – to know about. After all, The Block and town administration conducted this whole process in secret for three years – why would they want to be open about it now?

To start, turn to page 3. You’ll find a report on the profitability of Collus-PowerStream and its return on equity (ROE). Remember when we were assured by the Blockheads that it was a bad deal, it wasn’t successful, that the “status quo couldn’t continue”? Well look at the REAL numbers:

Please provide the achieved ROE (Return on Equity), calculated on a regulatory basis, for each year from 2013-2017, and file any forecasts of the Applicants that include ROE forecasts for 2018 and beyond.

Year/ Deemed Profitability/ROE:
2012: 8.01% /0.10%
2013: 8.98% /8.40%
2014: 8.98% /11.21%
2015: 8.98% /10.86%
2016: 8.98% /10.03%
Every year they operated as Collus-PowerStream, the utility had an ROE GREATER than 8% and almost 9% for most of those years. The ROE (which was understandably low the first year because it was partial) grew to more than 11% per year! That’s almost as high as the OEB will legally allow a utility’s profits to grow.

Here is what the actual OEB Scorecard for Collus PowerStream says:

Profitability: Regulatory Return on Equity – Deemed (included in rates)
Return on equity (ROE) measures the rate of return on shareholder equity. ROE demonstrates an organization’s profitability or how well a company uses its investments to generate earnings growth. Collus PowerStream’s current distribution rates were approved by the OEB and include an expected (deemed) regulatory return on equity of 8.98%. The OEB allows a distributor to earn within +/- 3% of the expected return on equity. If a distributor performs outside of this range, it may trigger a regulatory review of the distributor’s financial structure by the OEB.
Profitability: Regulatory Return on Equity – Achieved
Collus PowerStream achieved a ROE of 10.03% in 2016, which is within the 8.98% +/-3% range allowed by the OEB (see above paragraph). This is indicative of a healthy financial organization. This trend is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. The 0.10% result for 2012 was an anomaly year with a low net income, which was the result of the additional expenses incurred during the sale of 50% of the company’s shares to PowerStream.

Not profitable? Not successful? Even the sale application document says otherwise:

The 2017 deemed ROE is 8.98% and the 2017 achieved ROE, as filed with the Board in Collus PowerStream Corp.’s April 30, 2018 RRR filing, is 11.65% and remains subject to the Board’s review. The ROE forecast for 2018 and beyond approximates the OEB’s most recently approved ROE.

Would that my sad little RRSP returned half that percentage annually! The financial performance was raised again and again by The Block as a reason for the sale yet here it shows the utility was flourishing. Someone lied to the public about the financial situation. The judicial inquiry has to look into who it was.
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