With all of the finger-pointing in the Star's latest installment on the Toronto District School Board's questionable relationship with Jimmy Hazel and his Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council, I think it is safe to infer that all involved parties have truly entered the digital age.
While hardly surprising, the decision of TDSB chair, Chris Bolton, to have a facilities committee look into The Star's embarrassing revelations about its inappropriate and very costly relationship with Jimmy Hazel's Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council is wholly inadequate.
As today's Star editorial tartly observes, It was exactly what taxpayers have learned to expect from politicians facing embarrassing revelations.
Yet another indication of an organization in deep decline.
What is the priority of organizations that are mired in embarrassing public revelations about fraudulent spending of taxpayers' money? The development of a good PR plan.
At least that is what I gleaned from Part Three of The Star's investigation of the Toronto District School Board and its relationship with the Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council run by Jimmy Hazel.
While the story details the cozy relationship that exists between Hazel and the board, including ordering his members to campaign for and donate money to the trustees and the provincial Liberals during elections, (with real consequences for those who refuse,) the most interesting aspect to me is the reaction of both the board and Hazel's organization.
At a private meeting Wednesday of school board trustees, where the Star’s investigation was discussed, [trustee Sheila] Ward told those in attendance that “trustees should be muzzled” until the TDSB has a solid communications plan in place to deal with the Star stories. Note that the response is to deal with the stories, not the problems the stories uncovered.
Not to be outdone, Jimmy Hazel appears to be following the same strategy:
Hazel, who initially unleashed a profanity-filled tirade on a Star reporter, has hired Ross Parry, a former official in the Liberal government. Hazel said Parry is helping him fine-tune his responses to the media. Parry, who was also the TDSB communications chief in the late 1990s, is helping Hazel put “all the information we collected into prose.”
None of this is the least bit surprising to me, given the cynicism I have expressed about organizational behaviour in this blog and my other one many times over the years. What does surprise me, however, is their openness in detailing how they plan to deal with the messenger, not the message.
And the wheel goes round....
Unless the Toronto District School Board is staffed by a raft of incompetents, it has to have known what is going on.
As I wrote in my blog post yesterday, an investigation by The Toronto Star has revealed theft on a massive scale in the form of grossly inflated charges to the board for even the simplest of routine maintenance tasks by employees under the exclusive contract enjoyed by the Maintenance & Construction Skilled Trades Council headed by Jimmy Hazel.
In Part 2 of that investigation, the newspaper reports a number of interesting aspects to this scandal, the most interesting to me being the reaction of top board officials Director Chris Spence and school superintendents and deputy operations director Penny Mustin, both of whom refused to offer any comment on this massive waste of tax dollars.
The school board is also refusing to release a copy of its internal tracking database that contains details of the annual 1.8 million hours of work the board’s electricians, carpenters, plumbers and other trades claim they perform.
Based upon my 30-year career as a teacher, having been witnesses to much cowardly political behaviour on the part of administrators, my guess is that database will never be made public, the feeble citing of 'privacy concerns' being the likely justification.
My own experience in education taught me that the last thing administrators want to do, afflicted as they are with an unquenchable thirst for advancement, is to rock the boat. It is far easier, (and certainly more politically expedient unless the truth is revealed by a crusading newspaper) to conceal or simply accept things crying out for redress. That way it doesn't get messy, and one's career-path usually continues unimpeded. (Oh, the tales I could tell.)
And so I shall end as I began. The TDSB had to have known what was going on. Wait for the next installment of this sad saga, as those in power all establish their poses of 'plausible deniability.'
I would it were otherwise.
One of the Atkinson Principles guiding The Toronto Star is to champion the rights of working people; to my ongoing delight and gratification, however, this tenet does not mean the paper gives a free ride to labour and unions.
Today's edition is ample testament to that fact. Another of its excellent investigations has uncovered what many would say are corrupt and extortionate practices on the part of the Maintenance & Construction Skilled Trades Council headed by Jimmy Hazel.
As outlined in the story, the Council, which has an exclusive contract with the Toronto District School Board, has been charging exorbitant amounts to the cash-strapped board, one example being the installation of a pencil sharpener at a cost of $143, another the placing of an electrical outlet in a school library for $3000.
Perhaps one of the article's most disturbing revelations is the fear of retaliation rampant amongst both tradespeople and principals if they make a fuss about these pratices. Added to the fact that Council President Hazel initially met the Star's inquiries with a stream of profanities, followed up later with patently contrived excuses of 'clerical errors' in the billing suggests yet another example of wrongdoing crying out for remediation.
As I have said before in this blog, while I strongly believe in supporting unions, that support can never be uncritical, unquestioning, and unconditional.
