A personal email and a request to “expunge” its existence became the subject of a cross examination at the Collingwood Judicial Inquiry hearing this morning.
The email exchange was between former Collingwood CAO John Brown and John Mascarin, a lawyer at Aird and Berlis, which was the firm hired by the town for legal representation at the time.
The thread began with a note from Mascarin to Brown’s personal account explaining he had found documents he was keeping for Brown.
Brown testified yesterday the email referred to documents from a “sensitive” matter at another municipality and were unrelated to Collingwood.
Later, Brown writes to Mascarin in the same email thread saying “we” received Mascarin’s most recent bill, and asking him to split up the $11,000 invoice “so that we do not have a single bill for $11,000, which will make it notable and require explanation.”
Brown testified he was referring to a bill to the town, and he recalled the invoice included billing for “more than one inquiry.” He said he was asking Mascarin to divide the bill to reflect the costs for each individual inquiry.
Brown then asks Mascarin to send advice Brown previously requested about the “role of the CAO and entitlement to information.” Brown asked for the advice to be sent to his personal email address.
The final email included in the thread comes from Brown asking Mascarin to “please expunge this email thread.”
Paul Bonwick, a participant in the inquiry for his role as a consultant for PowerStream and his relationship as then-mayor Sandra Cooper’s brother, grilled Brown on the email and Brown’s request to have it deleted during cross-examination today.
Bonwick asked whether Brown considered the email a breach of the town’s code of conduct.
“I’m suggesting it completely flies in the face of transparency,” said Bonwick.
After some back-and-forth, Brown acknowledged he shouldn’t have sent the email.
“In hindsight it was something I shouldn’t have done and won’t do it again,” said Brown. “The issue you’re raising is a real one and if anybody said to me, ‘Do you think that was wise to do that?’ I would say no … I lapsed into something that should more appropriately be done on the town’s email and that was it.”
Yesterday, Brown testified he asked Mascarin to expunge the email due to the personal matter earlier in the thread. The email was not “expunged” and was provided to the inquiry by Aird and Berlis.
He said he asked for the town legal bills to be separated because the mayor (Sandra Cooper) signed the cheques and when a cheque was being authorized for “legal advice” the mayor would dig into the backup statements and ask questions about the reason for the bill.
“I didn’t really want to tell the mayor that I was asking for legal advice with respect to my ability to obtain information,” said Brown, referring to his attempt to gather information about the Collus sale.
He said some of his questions “directly involved” then-mayor Cooper.
“I didn’t want to have to disclose a lot of information that was of concern to me, which really proved nothing to me,” he said. “I didn’t want to say … ‘I suspect this, that, or the other’ because I’m not an investigator … I was doing something that I was very uncomfortable doing, but I believed I needed to do it.”
Brown went on to reference what he called the “circumstances of the day,” suggesting he was caught off guard by the “difficulty” in obtaining information from Collus PowerStream about not only the sale but the existing agreement under which Collus PowerStream was billing the town for water, wastewater, and IT services.
“I was dealing with a situation, really, that I never ever could have imagined,” said Brown. “The questions that I had to ask, who I asked them to, and why, I couldn’t imagine. So under those circumstances, I thought the best way to do it was to make sure I wasn’t making a big mistake by starting to ask questions about an issue that, frankly … was the cause of this inquiry.”
Brown referred to his tenure as interim CAO of Collingwood as the “most difficult job of his career.”
Brown concluded his testimony this afternoon.
One day of hearings remains in this first phase of the Collingwood Judicial Inquiry, and a single witness, Kevin Lloyd will be called to testify.
The hearing begins at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning (June 28) in the town hall council chambers.
