Shaun Newman Podcast - #616 - Jeff Colvin & Selena Paley

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

Jeff Colvin is the former mayor of Chestermere Alberta who was dismissed from his job on December 4th 2023, along with three councillors, when a province-ordered municipal inspection found the city was managed in an irregular, improper and improvident manner. Jeff is here to share his side of the story and is joined by Selena Paley, a citizen journalist who has been digging into the Chestermere municipal inspection. SNP Presents returns April 27th Tickets Below: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone/ Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text: [phone] – and be sure to let them know you’re an SNP listener.

This is Tom Luwango. This is Alex Kraner. This is Franco Tarzano. I'm Dr. Peter McCulloch. This is Joshua Allen, the cowboy preacher, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's it going today? Happy Wednesday.

Hope everybody's week is moving along. The sun is shining. We didn't die because I'm an eclipse. And I feel like, you know, maybe there's some positive days ahead of us. Maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? Okay. We'll start here.

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Somehow, I was talking. Something in my mouth. Oh, I get this. Oh, boy. Here's Wednesday for you. Okay. Well, Silver Gold Bowl, while they're going, what was that in the ad read?

Well, welcome to podcasting. They offer, I don't even know where I was at. I think they ship metal discreetly, fully insured and with tracking straight to you. I apologize. I can't believe that happened right now. Live on air. Things that fly in.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. Text or email Graham for more details. Silvergoldbowl.ca, if you've never been, if you've never ordered anything to your doorstep and held it in your hand, really, really cool. If you're just, hey, a listener and you want to help support the podcast, well, text Graham and just say,

hey, thanks for supporting independent media. Thanks for supporting Sean Newman podcast, whatever you want to say. Just fire them off a text. That would be greatly beneficial on this side. All of it helps. And appreciate Silver Gold Bowl and all of you. Caleb, Taves, Renegate Acres, they got the community spotlight, and this week's community spotlight is going to SMP, well, no, wait a second.

I'm jumping, I'm jumping here. How about this? For the kids' sake, this Friday, April 12th, 7 p.m. at the Kinsman Hall here in Lloydminster. That's 562250th Ave, Kinsman Hall, Lloyd Minster, April Hutchinson, three-time Team Cana powerlifter, North American Deadlift record holder, and grateful recovering alcoholic. And then the other side coming with her, Linda Blade, former Canadian track and field champion in 1986. Full scholarship NCAA All-American in 1984 in track and field. She's a chartered professional coach, chartered professional coach, not accountant. Welcome to Wednesday.

Author unsporting how trans activism and science denial are destroying sport. They're going to be talking Friday 7 p.m. once again, and they're advocating for safety and fairness for female athletes and female sports. That is going to be Friday night here in Lloyd Minster. So if you are interested in seeing April Hutchinson or Linda Blade, both who've been on the podcast

before here in Lloyd Minster, that should be an interesting night. That should be a really interesting night. Got a lot of time for Linda. She came into the studio and then of course April, I mean, who can't gravitate to her story and what's been going on there. Also, SMP presents

returns April 27th here in Lloydminster. We've had a change. Mikkel Thorup had his third kid and won't be making it. Dave Bradley taking his place with Bitcoin, Chuck Prodnick, Curtis Stone, Chris Sims, Alex trainer, Tom Luongo, Martin Armstrong coming in virtually. You got lunch, you got supper, you got some light entertainment, and there is 17 tickets left.

So if you want to grab a ticket, I don't know what you're waiting for. I would suggest you hop down in the show notes, click on the link and we'll hope to see you April 27th. On April 28th, you heard Cowboy Preacher introducing the episode today, while the Cowboy Preacher, Cam Milliken and Tanner and a Day are going to be on stage at the Moose Lodge Sunday, April 28th at 9 a.m. the next morning. Kids are welcome. Christian Science Academy is going to be downstairs doing some kids' activities.

So bring the entire family. There will be things for the kids and then for the adults. and we're going to have a miniature S&P presents, if you would, Sunday service style. They're going to be talking about Cornerstone, the Bible, Jesus. We'll kind of let them take it where they want, but they're going to have, you know, short timeframes of you get 15 minutes, 15 minutes, 15 minutes, and a little bit of discussion at the end.

We're not going to go too long, but we're going to have a little bit of fun on a Sunday morning, something that's been, I don't know, I've been interested to do now for a little bit, and we'll see how that goes. So that's April 27th, April 28th, and we got this Friday coming up. We have, for the kids' sake, April Hutchinson and Linda Blade in town. So all that being said,

we'll get Erickson Agro Incorporated. I should move on with the ad read. One more ad read. Erickson Agro Incorporated, Irma Alberta, Kent and Tosh Erickson, family farm raising four kids, growing food for our community, and this great country.

I don't know if I got anything else to bring up. I think that's, there's a lot going on, folks. There is a lot going on. Okay, let's get on to that. Tale of the tape. The first is the former mayor of Chestermear, the second, a citizen journalist. I'm talking about Jeff Colvin and Selena Paley. So buckle up, here we go.

Well, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Jeff Colvin and Selena Paley. Thanks for making the trip out this way and coming to talk. I've read about this story and I've kind of, you know, it happening in Alberta has peaked a lot of people's interests and some more so than others. I'm thankful, I showed out to Kurt for bringing you in

and then thinking of me to have you guys in studio and making a little bit of time for it and appreciate that. Now, before we, well, I mean, as we get going here, I guess I just want to let the audience, I mean, easy when it's my voice and then a man and a woman, but at the same time,

just introduce yourselves and give them a little bit of your backstory, Then let's get into the actual story of what's been going on. But first, let's just give a little background on each via so that people can get a feel for who they're listening to. My name's Jeff Colvin. I'm from the city of Chestermear. I grew up in Calgary. I was born there.

And my grandpa actually came to Calgary back in 1905. So we've been in Alberta, our family forever from Scotland. And so Chestermear has been home for about 25 years. And I've fortunately had three daughters that are still, one is at university right now, the other two at home still. So it's been a beautiful place to live. And it's just been amazing. And our background, my background is business in real estate development and in utilities,

water and sewer development and operations. And so what I wanted to do is I was in semi-retirement is I was noticing that there was challenges that were happening in our city. Our city is growing quite a bit, and we're just on the edge of Calgary, just on the east side. Literally our borders are actually touching. And so I noticed there was challenges and problems with some of the construction projects, and I wanted to try and offer my time. And so I actually came to the previous mayor and the CAO and gave there some ideas about

where I thought they might be getting taken advantage of by the construction companies they were dealing with. And it was received okay, but what I was. surprised with is that they didn't weren't really concerned about the fact that the numbers were massively off and I thought that was a little odd and so then I just started what year what's what year is this so this is in 2020 and 2021 and so I ran for election in in 2021 October 18th I won and we were in office for just over two years and then minister Rick McIver removed myself and three other counselors and three CAOs on December 4th, 2023, so just relatively recently.

And so we had been operating the city for just over two years. And in that time period, we had, we had some big goals. We, similar to all four of us in the sense of the counselors, we ran on platforms of cleaning up corruption and we also ran on platforms of trying to look at ways to lower taxes and be more efficient with the spending of taxpayers money. And that led us in a very specific direction quickly, which is obviously around finances and numbers and trying to get to the bottom of things quickly. At the same time, we were trying to focus on,

Chestermere is very much more feeling like a lifestyle resort kind of place with the lake. And so we wanted to focus on that idea and to continue to add projects that would fulfill that kind of I guess that kind of storyline. And things like, you know, boardwalks along the lake and restaurants on the lake and, you know, different kinds of activities with different themes for our residents so they could enjoy life with their families in different locations and have different excuses why they could go meet people, you know.

And it was very well received by our public. And I won our election by just over 65 percent to a second person who was an incumbent counselor. And so we were, you know, we were very critical of some of the past decisions that had been made after we started looking into things when we were in the election period. One of the things that we were kind of frustrated with is our council at the time, before we got in, and the administration were very resistant on giving information. And so we had asked information, for example, we had a water and sewer utility that had been rolled out of the city of Calgary. sorry, out of the city of Chestermer. And they set up a private corporation for that. And that in itself is nothing wrong with that.

However, what they had done is made some mistakes when they did that. And so we were trying to get information about that. And they would tell us that we can't get access to anything because it's a private company. We said, well, wait a second. It's owned 100% by the city, which is then, of course, your taxpayers are your people that you should be reporting to. So they would still, they would block us, wouldn't give us any. information. So that was one of the frustrating things and that was one of the biggest contentious items in our city was this utility. In 2016 we had just over 5,500 residents. And at the time,

that was pretty much everybody that was over 18 voting age. And they signed a petition to have the council investigated and to have the utility investigated because our- The town did. The residents did. In 2016? In 2016. So in 2016, there's a petition signed saying, hey, something isn't right within our city. There's already an issue. Yeah. And it had our taxes actually just before that, and this is surprising. And it speaks to some of the apathy that, and I admit, I had it as well towards government.

I never felt that, you know, whatever I would say would matter. And I just wanted to get back to work and deal with my family. And so before that, our taxes between 2010 and 2014 had tripled. Now, some of that was part of education tax increases, but I'd never heard of something like that before. I always thought it was maybe 5%, 3%. My taxes went from $34 to just under $12,000 a year. And so what was disappointing about that is $3,400 to $12,000. Yeah.

Pretty shocked. Pretty shocking. And what was most disappointing when I saw is I was kind of like, okay, guys, what is everybody going to do about this? You know, and back then, not that long ago, but back then there wasn't as much social media. And people were not really connected like that. 2016, I hadn't even listened to my first podcast yet, right? And then now, you know, obviously you stepped into the studio and you see exactly what's, what's, I don't know, cooking here, I guess, right? So the landscape. has very much changed. If I can, I'm just going to, I don't know if I want to do this. I just want to pause for a really quick sec, because I want to allow people to get to know who Selena is as well. And then I want to just shift right back into this because I find this,

well, I mean, that's why we're here, right, to talk about what's going on in Chestermear. Selena, just for the audience, a little bit of your background and who you are so they can get a feel who's chiming in from time to time or looking at, you got some paperwork there. If you have some facts or things you want people, they can kind of know who you are. Yeah, I'm all about the facts. You know, I hate talking about myself, to be honest. I like talking about other people.

But my background, you know, I got a, my education is in human resource management with an emphasis on human rights law. So, or human resource law, rather, focused on human rights. I did a lot of that in my career with human resources. So helping, you know, employers ensure that their policies, weren't in contravention of the rights, you know, the rights come before the policies, so I already knew this. And then when COVID hit, I know I was rather bothered by the policies taking priority over things such as like human rights. And, you know, with the vaccine and the discrimination

aspect to that really concern me. And so I just started asking questions, which then led to delving into social media because I found that the narrative on social media wasn't accurate. I knew the facts. I knew the laws. And so I started challenging people on Twitter on social media and questioning a lot of things. I also noticed that the MSM was delivering a message that was not true. It was very one-sided. It was encouraging, you know, implementation of policy.

surrounding a vaccine. You know, now we're talking about people not really having a choice. Now we're talking about coercion. Now we're talking about all these things. I think that we need to just have a discussion, right? And so I just felt like we were really up against a mammoth beast there. I took to social media. I started delivering correct information about our laws and how they apply and how you can, you know, challenge these mandates because they're not laws.

And then I, um, I. started a social media company, went on the convoy, gained about 175,000 followers, and made a difference and started helping people with the wording that they needed to use in their employment, places of employment, things that they could say to challenge, you know, the severity of the situation that they found themselves in, you get this shot or you have to go. You know, that was essentially what a lot of people were up against. And so that led into, where I am today, which is just advocating for human rights, essentially the charter, Bill of Rights, Human Rights, Law.

You know, a lot of these, most, and not all of these things, come before your employer policy, right? That's how it was designed in Canada. So the charter sits at the top, you know, the bill of rights, and then, like, you have your employer policy way down here. And so there was just too many discrepancies over what they were trying to get their employees to do and the rights of those employees that can. came first before them needing to do something to save or keep their employment, right?

And so after the convoy, we started delving into challenging a lot of these policies, these mandates. And, you know, I just developed some really good connections and networks with folks that were displaced by these policies, essentially, or the mismanagement of these policies. So I have a keen interest in, you know, the courts right now what's in the courts, especially as it pertains to the implementation and administration of these policies and how they negatively and adversely affected Canadians all across the country from, you know, B.C. to Newfoundland. Essentially, it's affected everybody and not in a positive way. And so we're just trying to, I think, you know, as a nation, reestablish the, you know, the priority of our rights, the value that we put on those rights, the importance, you know, and the strength of those rights when it comes to defending ourselves when we're up against, you know, the MSM, the government, the health agencies, like, it just seemed a little surreal.

So that's where I come in here. Yeah, I heard about Jeff's story. I feel like, you know, some rights were abused in the process. They no longer are in their elected. position. So I think the question is, you know, can it like, does the minister have the ability to just arbitrarily fire elected officials? Like, this is the answer that I'm looking for. Yeah. It is from, and once again, you know, like my background, you know, I start, you, you can see the, the studio. It started out as, you know, like, um, I says over and over again. It started out as interviewing like, you know, just regular folk in my community who'd have gone on to majority NHL or or what have you. And, you know, and then it graduated into different characters, you know,

the most notably probably guys like Glenn Say, they're Don Cherry, Ron McLean, different things like that. Cool. So anytime we talk about politics and policy, I'm about like, I'm probably like everybody else trying to catch up a little bit and be like, what does this actually mean, you know? And so to have somebody on who gets laid up by that is, uh, is rather cool to have on the side of team freedom, I would say, right? I would say so too.

You know, we've got two versions out there, right? I'm trying to help everybody understand what's the correct one. Well, everybody's pulling in their own direction, and that's super cool. Now, before we go any further, you know, you see me scrambling. I always laugh to the people who come into the studio and then see me bounce around in here. Some days I've got to just going on, and I'm so set up. And other days I'm like, oh, yeah, I've got to do this before we move on. Anyone who comes in the studio, here's a gift for you each for making your way this way.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so Silver Gold Bowl is, um, um, um, one of my major sponsors. And so one of the things we do to any guest that makes their way to Lloyd Minster, specifically to sit in studio, is we give a silver ounce, one ounce silver coin to them and as a little like, well, one thank you.

And then on top of it, if you're in this crowd, you get the significance of having a little bit of silver in your pocket. And I don't know. Do either of you own silver as the first time? Sometimes people walk in, and you don't need to divulge that. But sometimes people have walked in and like,

I've never, this is pretty cool. Others of like, I'm just going to slide it in the old bag, you know? Thank you. That is beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that's, thank you for making some time for us.

And it's the least we can do. And shout out to Silvergold Bowl. If anyone hasn't gone to silvergoldbill.com and tried, you know, their hand at it. We got a text line where people can text them directly. So if nothing else, folks, you can just text them and say, hey, thanks for supporting independent media and allowing conversations like this to happen. Now, okay, I bounced this all over the place because I wanted to make sure both voices got heard so people could understand who they're listening to. Before you get involved in your politics, city politics, were you a politician before that?

No. Or you were far from it. Far from it. No, and that's, as I was saying before, that's some of the apathy towards government. I was definitely one of those people. And, you know, I had, I definitely voted, but that was really the extent. And, you know, I've lived in Calgary for my entire life. And, you know, I really haven't gotten involved in politics, you know, at all.

I thought when Ralph Klein was in, I thought that he definitely approached it in a much more novel way that I could identify a bit with. And from that perspective, what I was impressed with was the idea of cost control. an idea of if you don't have the money, well, don't spend it. And I said, well, that's pretty much the way we have to live. So why wouldn't the government kind of act in the same fashion, barring, you know, an emergency. But that struck home with me. And, you know, again, I'd never been in politics before. And I kind of don't even kind of consider myself a politician.

But obviously I am. I did win the election in 2021. And just so I keep with the timeline, just so my work. Brains got this right. 2016, going back to it, there is a petition filed saying, we need to look into this private company because something's off here when it comes to this. That doesn't make any sense. Petition goes through, does anything happen?

Because that's five more years until you run. That's right. Yeah, no, unfortunately there wasn't, except the council at the time, not one of them ran again. And most of them moved out of the city. Nothing to see here. Okay. And so there's a whole bunch of allegations that were going on along around that time period about what was going on. But really what it comes down to is that I'm a normal business person and simply looking at how do I give back to my community.

And from a volunteering perspective, I mean, I guess I can help in a variety of ways. But what I enjoy is business principles and infrastructure stuff. and being in the construction and pipelines and whatnot business, that stuff is rather interesting to me and how to make things more efficient for our neighbors and of course our citizens. I don't know, maybe you said this, and maybe it's just my brain today.

Did you say, what were you doing before you ran for politics? So I was involved with land development, so all the way from raw land development, farmland, all the way up to community sidewalks, roads, deep, shallow services, just everything you see once the community's done. as well as home construction, condominium construction, office building construction, and full development. And so you get familiar with everything it takes to what you see in a city, basically. And then on top of that, I was involved in utilities, so water and sewer.

And so from the laying of pipelines and underneath roads, et cetera, through ditches, into rivers, and as well as building and designing the actual treatment facilities and how they're going to interact with, you know, you always have challenges. Nothing's easy. So, you know, those things really apply to how you're going to make something from scratch. And so that's what we did because initially we were developing inside the cities and the land was so expensive. And so we ended up looking and developing outside the cities.

The challenge with that is that you have to build your own infrastructure. So you're looking at everything from, from, roads and turn lanes to water and sewer lines and then how they're going to be dealt with and whether you're going to treat it, whether you're going to connect with other pipelines, licenses, water licenses. So that's a whole other topic. We got involved with water licenses long before the moratorium that came in for southern Alberta. And, you know, so it's a very interesting area, but that's what led me to, okay, well, our city

is growing like crazy. We had a pipeline that our city was going to build around the south end of our lake. and the quotes that we heard of were $200 million. And you're like, that's not even possible. Like, it's two kilometers. You can't spend that much money in two kilometers. You know, it's typically a million dollars a mile in pipelines. And so it's just utter nonsense.

And that was one of the conversations I had with the mayor, actually. And I said, you realize that's not even close to being in reality. And he wasn't super faced by it. And I said, you know, that's kind of weird. I thought that you'd be, like, upset that you're, engineering people are telling you this, your consultants or whoever's telling you this garbage. And we had, they had a second study that they had done that ended up being around 80 million or something for something similar. And we had gotten in. And one of the things that we had said

is that we noticed we did an annexation, I think in 2009, the city did. And they annexed a bunch of acreage owners and some farmland. And we noticed that the city had promised them that they would get access to infrastructure. And there's always the misconception of what that means. So access being, oh, you're going to put it in and you're going to turn it on and install it. So I turn on my tap and it all works. Or access in the sense that it'll be available and you have to pay for it. And when you start running pipelines, they add up.

And so depending on the density that you're running these pipelines to, and again, they left it in the citizen's hands. and the people aren't skilled in this, so what are they going to do? Go hire a consultant, go hire, you know, and these are normal folks that live on different size acreages and whatnot. So they had been left in the lurch for about 15 years, and they were very upset.

They had tried to get the city to help them, and what the city had done is they'd come back with a massive densification plan on the entire area where they were, and it really scared the people. And what comes with that is the conversation, about if there's massive densification, then there's massive infrastructure. And with that is a huge bill. And so they told the people, well, you guys figured out amongst yourself and, you know,

you're going to need to bring together about $40 million. And they're like, you know, this is 160, 200 acres, right, and of people on four acres, five acre parcels, right? So that's just not fathomable. What do you mean we're going to do that? And so they were forcing massive density, eight plus units per acre. So that is the standard that the city of Calgary is trying to push. The city of Edmund or city of Chestermere is nowhere near that density.

Right. So you're like, why are you pushing so much densification? Like this is, and this is over the last 10 years. So we approached them and said, you know, we're not interested in doing that. But if you're interested in getting services, why don't we talk about that? Because there's lots of ways to do things from a creative perspective rather than a massive densification perspective. because then you're talking about major pipelines, major sewer, and it's just you guys won't hit it.

You can't do it. And it's really difficult to get a developer who wants to deal with a whole bunch of people. They want to deal with one landowner, farmer, and negotiate a deal and take down the land as they can. So they were left alone. And so what we basically did is we said, well, we came to our staff and we said, okay, have you guys done your analysis on your existing infrastructure?

What are the numbers? and they said, what do you mean? We've been told that, or sorry, the other is no capacity. And I said, what do you mean by that statement? Because as soon as they say something like that, I'm like, are you talking about at prime time? Or are you talking about after prime time? They're like, well, what do you mean by that? I said, when people get up in the morning, seven o'clock, when they come home at night, seven o'clock,

They're using a lot of the water and sewer, you know, having showers, the dishwasher is running, the washer and dryer running, you name it. So that's your peak time. So are you talking on peak or off peak that your services, your infrastructure is maxed? Anyways, long story short, they didn't know. And I said, well, that's the first step we should do is an analysis on the infrastructure to determine if there's excess capacity. And I said, we can become creative with smart valves and whatnot to create, let these people accomplish, what they're looking for without huge money. Anyways, long story short, we realized that there was at least 3,000 more houses could hook up

to our existing systems. And our city for the last 15 years has been telling them that we don't have the capacity. But they didn't even understand how to even look for it, which was shocking. In the sense that are they apathetic towards the taxpayer? Absolutely. We found that out shockingly. Do they have the knowledge based even consider looking in that direction? It's not that these engineers aren't good at what they do, but they don't deal with that type of situation often.

And so they're not really there to try and help out the taxpayer. And I said, well, that's what we're hired for? What are you talking about? We're not hired for the new taxpayer coming. We're hired for the existing taxpayer. And so, long story short, we had some really good results from that. And our people were very happy, the landowners in these areas. And finally, you know, they had resolutions within a year.

And unfortunately, when we were removed, now they've been told that it's back back to being on hold again. And so it's- So you get elected. Yeah. Frustrating. Once the end. I don't know if it's me today. It could be very much me, so welcome to my world.

2016, petition filed. Something's going on. Then you go and approach the then-mayor in roughly 2020. Yep. Saying like, someone's a little off here. Meanwhile, this has been off for four-plus years. Yeah. You run an election, you get elected.

You win by a clear majority. And then you resolve a big issue, which is they're saying these group of acreage owners who fall under the annex of what the city of Chesmere had done. So now they're a part of the city and they have to find ways to give them the key infrastructure. Yeah. And they're saying, oh, by the way, it's going to cost all you lovely landowners $40 million. Big dollars, yeah. And once again, I'm just making sure that I'm hearing this correctly. And you walk in and go, well, wait a second, A, that doesn't make any sense because you're

background. Yeah. And you start digging into it and find resolution in that, actually, they can all hook up to what we have, you know, the cost. And once again, is on the city or the tax owner or, or, because you mentioned in there as well, that people when they say, well, we have access, that's two different things. So when you say that, you're saying, oh, it actually is way less, but you still have to pay, like, walk me through this.

So there is lots of ways to make things affordable for when you're when you're not a massive developer. You want to develop gradually. And so we kind of term the phrase gradual densification. And so as a homeowner, you never know, or as a landowner, you never know what kind of density you're going to be successful at. And so one of the things cities do, and I've talked to numerous counselors about this in mostly rural areas, is that you're creating massive barriers to entry for, your land base, which is your customers, your taxpayers. And what I mean by that is when a city, when a person wants to subdivide their property, a city charges them a heck of a lot of money.

And they say, you're going to pay all of these fees up front. And the landowner says, well, I don't even know if it's going to be successful. I don't even know if I'm going to be able to sell this. I want to do two acre lots. I want to do five acre lots. And the community or the municipality doesn't care. They just say, well, too bad. That's your risk, not ours.

pay it all up front. And what we've said is that, you know, that doesn't make any sense. We don't need any more money from you until there's more service needed to be provided. And so if you don't, you can subdivide this area, more lots are drawn on a page. They're not actually on the land. Now, if something happens and you end up selling a lot or you end up building another house on that land or something like that, okay, well, that's an activity. So we want you to pay us then. And so that philosophy is something that we've,

been pushing that narrative that you know we don't want to block development we don't have hamper development by being too expensive up front okay where do you come under the scrutiny of somebody else saying because what I'm hearing so far I'm like honestly Jeff I'm like okay I'm sitting there going like that sounds actually pretty reasonable and if you're in Chesterner you're going you know we've been very frustrated for a series of time to the point where we we got a petition signed and it should have, you know, really pushed on the people to do something. Forgive me, what was the number of people, and I don't know if you mentioned it, that signed

the petition. I feel like you dropped that. Just over 5,500. And what's the population back? At that time, that was pretty much all of our population that was over 18. So the entire city signed a petition saying we need to look into this. Okay. So now you've done your due diligence.

You're doing all these great things. Yeah. I'm confused. Yeah. Because I'm like, you know, if you've been doing shady things and they signed another petition for the government to come in, then now I'm like, okay. But at this point, I'm like, I don't understand. So if you're looking at me going, something doesn't add up here, I'm sure you get that look often. Something doesn't add up.

When do they come in and why do they come in? And who comes in? Well, and we were doing a lot of that work, that normal work, that trying to help our constituents, our taxpayers, how to resolve various issues that they'd had, right? obviously, as part of our solution that government needs to work with people and help them cross the finish line, not say no, and you go figure it out. So what happened is that we had a lot of resistance against us from the existing staff, and I say existing senior staff when we were running during the campaign and the previous council, because we were calling out shady stuff that was happening right when we were going through our election. So they knew we were coming in,

and there was like, for example, they put in a, they put in a, civil discourse policy, which limited the freedoms of, limited the right free speech with citizens. And if they, they could come after and attack you. And we said that that's wrong. As much as, you know, you love having your citizens say negative things about you when you're a politician, they still have a right to, right? And they put in a policy that citizens weren't allowed to do that?

Yeah. One of our counselors, Stephen Hanley, who was successful, who was removed, very, very smart fellow on the financial and accounting side, just a guru, was given a cease and desist in regards to the civil discourse policy to not discuss any of the financial matters that he had found during the election, not to tell the public the truth about what he had found. And the ombudsman of Alberta had admitted that he was right and that the city of Chestermear was wrong about what he was saying that it was about they had, they had, they had, they had had indicated that taxes had gone down and they hadn't and he had shown them the math around

and he said you guys have made a mistake and he kept it quiet he kept it respectful he did it behind closed doors he went and talked to them and just said I think you guys might have missed something and uh you know then they kind of turned around and attacked him it's like wow this is just fantastic so the the the what was against you the forces that were against you weren't the actual population it was the the full-time bureaucrats running the city behind because you're an elected official at this point but There's people whose job it is in the city and that's and the old guard. That's what you're talking about.

That was right before we were elected. And then when we were elected, so I walked into my office and my office was crystal spick and span. There wasn't a paper clip, a piece of pen, a paper, a file. Everything had been taken and deleted. There wasn't an electronic file. There wasn't an email from the previous mayor's files. Nothing.

It had all been deleted. And, you know, it's pretty shocking because those, that is the city's property. That's not a person's property, right? Because you have to have continuity of service. Have you ever asked a different, sorry, I don't know the answer to us. Like, have you asked a different mayor when he took over? Was it the same thing?

Or, or? It's unusual to do that. Yeah, it's very unusual. I would agree. I'm just, you know, I'm like no succession plan for the taxpayers and Chestermear, just going to come in and just. No paper clips sitting in. How bad or.

I get a tidy office. But like. Start from scratch. Like our city is not one day old, right? It's been around for quite a while. Sorry, I keep interrupting. It's okay. Can I add some context?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just add some context because I think I didn't know this in the beginning, but Stephen Hanley's role is quite crucial here. It's very vital to the story because, you know, he is that chief financial officer, with CNRail 44 years, super smart guy when it comes to finances. His story is that some concerned residents in Chestermear brought these anomalies, these irregularities, financial regularities to his attention prior to being

elected. So the current administration at the time during the election when when Jeff and the other guys ran, they already knew what they were coming in to do. They knew they were going to come in and look at things and analyze things. And so, you know, I don't think that they thought you were going to get elected. They tried really hard to not make that happen. Needless to say, you know, they got in, there was nothing there for them to analyze or to, yeah. So it's already looking speculative. And that was That was part of the challenges that we wanted to, you know, move quickly because we're from all of us that were elected, we're from a business background of a variety of nature. And we wanted to offer every skill we had to try and help the city, you know, get in a better position.

Did you know the other people that, how many of you were elected together? So there was seven of us that, sorry, well, no, there were seven of us that were elected. Two were incumbents, two were incumbent counselors. And then, and then obviously five of us. I was the mayor and then there was, you know, the counselors that were released were Stephen Hanley, Blaine Funk, and Mel Fote. I had been on a board back in 2015 with our community association, and they had had a major challenge with another municipality, Rocky View, that was owned the land that the community center was on.

And the previous board was being accused of some fraudulent activity. And so nobody was willing to go on that board. And so I said, well, you know, I can help with that. And so I talked to some other business people that decided to go on the board. And we said, you know, if there's any financial irregularities, then we'll clean it up. And what we did is we walked in and we were completely transparent with Rocky View County. And we said, here you go. Because they wouldn't show them the books and whatnot.

They were being kind of silly. And so I said, this is a public entity. so like in the sense of a community association. And we said, here, come take a look at everything you want. What book would you like to see? All the financial statements, everything you'd like to see. If somebody's done something wrong, then they need to get in trouble. And this gets interesting.

So we did a forensic audit, and I shouldn't say quite forensic, but we did an inexpensive forensic audit on 2015. And while we were doing that audit, we were going to do the audit for the year before. And we had a person from the community, a very notable person, that approached a president of the community association and told him that he will pay him $100,000 cash to not complete the forensic audit.

Oh, boy. No boy. And so it was kind of, well, hmm, that's interesting. Now that was... That isn't interesting. that's like, you know. Trying to hide. Well, I get me.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, right? That isn't this. That doesn't, please don't look into that. There's like, here's a hundred grand. Look the other way. Yeah.

And so it was, you know, there's always been this air of, of illegal or irregular activity going on in Chestermere. And, you know, when you take a look, you can see from the outside very easily. If you take a look at, if you got rid of the lake, chestermere's got a 50-year-old. rec center and nothing else when you look at cities like Okotokes for example beautiful city right it's got tons of recreation decent amount of commercial and it's designed you know quite nicely it's around a around a river but you know it's just a beautiful little city and you look at all of that that's happened and developed in that area and then you look at Cheshmer and it's like well we've

kind of grown on the same path similar size what's what's the difference we've had a lot of this money which seems to have been diverted away. And that's the problem. And that's where we were saying, you know, I've been part of the construction industry. I was taken advantage of when I was newer to the construction industry and had kickbacks gone against me by my own staff. And, you know, it's hard to find out.

And at the time, you know, we were running our own company so we didn't have the checks and balances that the city must have because we were running our pool of capital. The city is running somebody else's pool of capital, and you cannot be the payer and the person receiving the money, managing the pool. That's just way too much opportunity to mess around. And so what we first did when we got in is that we stopped construction projects by the city. And you can't do that forever. But the point was is that we want this whole process of quoting to be redone, redesigned, and set up new protocols.

And people were like, what are you talking about? And we said the city, we started asking them questions and say, well, you tell us what you're doing. We noticed very quickly that they were banking developers. And I said, well, why the heck would you do that? I said, I never received a check when I was developing, I wish, from a municipality. And so that's a cash flow issue. Okay, now is there corruption with that? The problem is the city going in and building infrastructure ahead of the developers for the developers,

and then waiting two years to recover the money in an offsite levy, why would you do that? Like you're two years ahead. Are you earning 30%? Nope. So the problem with that is that developers aren't a part of the process. And developers have the experience and the expertise. And they're the payer. So anytime you're the payer of your money, you're pretty concerned how your money is being spent. And so what we changed is that process. We brought the developer into the process, into the design of the infrastructure, the procurement of the infrastructure, the quoting of the infrastructure, and they're good also with the contract language so that you don't get as many change orders, so that the scope is done properly. Like all these real positive things. And we ended up with,

we did an analysis on our offsite levies and we said, you know what? We think that the numbers are low. Our developers aren't paying enough. And people said, well, you're a developer, you're an ex-developer, so you're going to be on their side. I said, no, I'm not. I'm on your side. This is our town. So we raised the offsite levies by 35% in which one of our developers, that was $20 million. So it was, we weren't popular because we made those decisions, but we said, listen, we want you to be part of the party that's going to review everything as we go forward. And they're like, oh, we don't get that opportunity. You're kidding. Why would we not want you? You guys have not unlimited access, but your bench strength with the firms you deal with are the biggest and the best. And so why wouldn't we want your guys at the

table helping us go through this process. And guess who pays for that? Not us. The developer does. So we want that bent strength to come in and design better things. And quite frankly, or one of our first projects, they came in. They saved $5 million off of a $17 million project. And it's like, well, there we go. And everybody was quite happy about that concept. And so this is stuff that we had shared with municipal affairs, Rick McIver, of course, while we were going through this. And we had accolades from our developers about what we were doing and looking at ways to made more efficient and all these kinds of things. And you're like, how could Rick McIver think anything negative of us,

which was what was surprising? And we were bringing forth things that were coming across our table that were irregular. And so we had a developer approach us about a kickback scheme for $6 million that had happened a few years before that us. And he had brought us a foot of paperwork and showed us all the quotes and he was willing to sign an affidavit and whatnot about it and go to court. And it was about how the city changed the quotes they'd received, and then all of a sudden they changed the cost of the bridge to a $10 million from $4 million.

And why these guys were concerned is they were concerned that they would have to pay it because the off-site levies for infrastructure is supposed to be paid by developers. That's the way it's supposed to. But why would you want to bank them, right? You want that money up front. I don't want to use my cash flow. And so long story short is that when the developer comes to the table two years later, if they don't agree, they can challenge that offsite levy and they can take the city to court. But what happens when you do that?

All of a sudden, your permits are slower. Your approvals don't happen. And time is money. A developer who's in mid-development of a large community, they're spending $500 to a million a month on servicing costs, interest costs, et cetera. And you just can't afford to stand still. Like you're already desperately hoping to get your approvals through. So they're very nervous about coming forward and talking about this, but we were a vastly different culture.

And we were putting forward all these different initiatives about how do we move things forward faster that makes sense. It didn't mean that developers could be outside the lines, if you will. They had to stay within the lines, of course, and make sure our community benefited. But we brought all of these concerns to municipal affairs. we brought concerns of our lift station 13. This was our main lift station for sewer

that pushes all 100% of our sewer out of our city to the city of Calgary. They treat our sewer. We get our water from the city of Calgary. So we don't actually have treatment plants in the city of Chestermere, which means it's very much cheaper. And yet our expenses are not very much cheaper, wildly.

So when it ends up happening with those stations 13 is the initial quote was around $8.5 million and ends up finishing it just over 23 million. And you're like, well, that's pretty crazy. And what was really surprising about that is that today, the max capacity we use is 4%. Now, utility is not very good design-wise or operational-wise at 4%.

They need to be 65, 75, 85%, 85% in use. And it's so bad that we actually pump a million dollars worth of pure oxygen into the pipeline so that the H2S gas doesn't concentrate enough to explode. And, you know, what a waste of money. And that's every single year we've been doing this and have to continue to build this, do this. What happens is, like, our smallest pump is 450 liters a second. So these are big pumps.

What's crazy is our city produces under 50 liters a second. So we can't even turn the pump on and leave it on. So what ends up happening is that sewer lines and systems are not designed to have a reservoir in it, like underground or something like that, because that would mean it would automatically start to settle. And the last thing you want is solid settling, because now you've got to figure out how you're going to get in there and clean that up. You want them moving, and you want them heading on down to Calgary and deal with it. Thank you very much. Your problem. So because we don't have that, how do you hold your sewer to wait until you can turn the pump on for half an hour?

What ends up happening is Chestermer has to hold it in their pipelines until they almost max out and then they let them go. And so what ends up happening in people around Rainbow Road in Chestermere would understand that when you have sewer sitting, the bacteria that comes with sewer starts breaking it down naturally, which is a good thing. But with that, it becomes very smelly. And in Round Chestermere on Rainbow Road,

down at the end, it becomes very smelly in, chestermere, which residents complain about and whatnot. And it's a massive design flaw by the engineers that did this. And just so we're clear, and any engineer would know this, you're not allowed to design a system that is that inefficient. You're absolutely not allowed to do it. You cannot build something. It's only going to operate at 4%. You're not allowed to do it. Anyways, we have that. And yet it got done. And yet it got done three times the price and all these kinds of things. And so it's really odd some of these things, you know, that happened. And what ended of happening, like we had that utility company that was rolled out. And you go, okay, well, why was it

rolled out? It's not unheard of. But the reasons behind it was so that the city could get access to more debt. And that's where you start going, well, what do you need more debt for? And so the MGA and the provincial government, a sign, well, not a sign, have a formula to allow a city to have a certain type of debt limit, okay, based on debt service. So it basically comes down to how much can you afford based on the revenue bring in, okay? So it's hopefully made so that your city doesn't get over too much debt so that you basically go bankrupt as a city. And that's the position Chesimir was in, is that when we started, we were told that we were broke. And we believed it, too, because we had been very critical of the amount of debt we had per population as well. And so

what really ends up happening is that they move it out so that they can double the debt. And you're like, okay, guys, I think there was some thought here as to why you don't want high debt in a city, or at least a certain amount of manageable debt. So you guys just willy-nilly deciding to move it out. And then all of a sudden the MGA doesn't apply to a private company, even though it's owned by the city. And so they ended up getting a lot of debt. And that's where I believe is where the corruption occurred, is that it's very, very hard to take money from a city. I mean, what are you going to do?

There's no suitcases of money lying around. You're not going to write yourself a check because, one, they don't really do that anymore. It's all electronic funds transfers. But you'd have to get multiple signatures on that. And so, and if you did, well, they're going to track that money to your bank account. That's your fastest trip to the to the who's cow if you ever wanted. So that's not the way they would do it. A way you do it is that you've got a pool of wealth, pool of money,

and as soon as that money moves, that's the way that people take advantage of it. And so you want to set up these programs so that you're doing a construction project and it's twice the price. It's 50% more. It's a million dollars more. Nobody's going to miss it. It's three times the price. You're like, well, somebody's going to miss that. And we have so many examples of that in Chestermere where that's happened.

And that's some of the stuff that we kept bringing to Rick McIver as these are things that need to be looked into. Because our job is not to investigate and be an adjudicator. We're not an adjudicator. Our job is to grab that information and pass it off to the authorities. And so when we pass it off to municipal affairs, they were interested in looking at it. And we said, you know, guys, I'm respectfully, what do you do? Like we're a municipality that is saying there's a bunch of really questionable stuff here. And they weren't interested in it at all.

And how crazy this gets is within the first month, okay, of us being there October 18th. So within November, we had let go of the current CAO, who's the head of the operational company of the city. We let single person, we let him go because he had been a bit of a bully and been. Well, you have your reasons. Yeah, monitoring, I guess, or I guess restricting information to counsel. And we were like, no, you can't do that to counsel. They need all the information. So we had let him go.

We had an interim CAO. And this interim CAO came to us one day at a boardroom table similar to the size of yours, not very, not very big, and said to myself, Councillor Hanley and Deputy Mayor Fote, and said, I need to talk to you guys. And we said, okay, go ahead. We're here for you. And he said, I want to know your thoughts on amoeia copa. And I said, what's amoeia copa? Like, what are you talking about? And I said, are you talking about like where you forgive somebody for some kind of criminal activity or something?

something? And he says, yes, yes. If staff were to come forward with knowledge of criminal activity, either participating it or knowledge of, would you forgive the action or the whatever the legal outside of it was? And I said, well, no. I said, I'm not a judge. I mean, it is my first month here. I don't exactly know all of our duties here, but I'm pretty sure that's not one of them. And I said that I think we should be bringing in the RCMP. And I said, if somebody's coming forward, I think they would probably get a lesser sentence if they would come forward, you know, depending on what the issue is. And so he was a little taken back with that. And we were like, okay.

And then he wanted to ask us another question. And we said, okay, here we go. The next question was, okay, I've got some hush money that I want to pay out. And I was like, really? You're serious. You're serious. You want to pay out some hush money. I said, no.

What are you talking about? We ran on a platform of getting rid of corruption and transparency. You're saying in a meeting, he used those words, hush money. And I was like, he wanted to give you hush money. He wanted to know if he could pay out hush money to a staffer. And I said, so you're saying there's somebody that wants, you're worried about talking about something negative that's gone on in the past, because we just got there. And you don't want them to talk and you have to pay them to keep them quiet. And we said, no, they can go on top of the building and yell out whatever the heck they've got to say.

And actually, we want to talk to them. And he was very taken back with that. Because it's like, no, no, no. Who the heck was getting elected that that would be? Okay. Great question. Isn't that an interesting? Like, can you imagine uttering the, can I just go pay them hush money?

What? So where this story gets really good is the previous administration that this keeps circling back to. But it's two previous. administrations right just even the previous one the mayor Marshall Chalmers was the is the brother-in-law to Rick McIver the minister of municipal affairs yeah so some of these irregularities that we were looking into related to that term of that administration and you know in the beginning we didn't know that and in the beginning we were just trying to move forward very quickly on how we restructure the city because again we were told it was broke and a hundred percent

agreed with that too. But one of the things we were told when we first got in there is we were broke and we want to add five million dollars to the budget, which is in our city, is a 25% tax increase to our residents. He said, you know, as much as we had a 300% increase, I'd not interested in living through that again. What are you talking about? And I said, we've got to start talking about what you mean by that and why. And so what we had found when we had gotten to any of these orientation meetings and anything they were discussing any finance, it was massively lacking. And we were used to being on boards. I had been on numerous boards before, obviously of different companies that invested in various

companies, and you're always reading financial statements. You're always trying to find out what's going on. And Stephen Hanley, much, much more than myself, understood this immensely. And again, every time they spoke, it was like they weren't wanting to tell us stuff. And you can hear that. You can understand that when you understand what they're saying. And you're like, you're not telling us the whole story. Like, why are you?

And it was, we would say this to our counselors after. And we would say, you know, they were holding back. You could hear what they weren't saying. And they were like, well, what was it? And so we would explain that, you know, when they're talking about these things, we need to get more of that information. And so we tried to get more information. And then the staff was blocking us.

The senior administration was blocking us very aggressively. They actually went and got a legal opinion to see if they could, get a lawyer to say they wouldn't have to share anything with us on the financial side. And fortunately, that lawyer at the time had indicated that, no, they have to share with us. Now, they never told us that for two months. We found out accidentally from our provider for the software company when we were on a phone call with them. And we said, you know, we need to get access to this. And we're hoping to get that soon.

And he goes, what do you mean? You guys were told that you were two months ago. And we said, no, we weren't. At what point do you realize you've stepped into a quagmire? Like this is, this is, this is larger than what, just we're broke. This is like, because it feels like it's, it's a culture of like, I don't know, I can speculate and you two can tell me where I'm wrong and what you found and everything. But it just feels like everybody was, here's an envelope over here and here's that and we're going to make this over here. It was like a way where everybody seems like they were complicit.

in something very, very large. And then you tack on that there's family relation and everything else with the minister, right, that comes after you. Well, and that's kind of where it gets a bit speculative and concerning because, you know, if you're the minister municipal affairs and there are allegations,

I mean, that's really all they are still right now, but if there's allegations of this nature and you know that they involve your brother-in-law, you know, would it not be prudent to remove yourself from the equation, you know, when it comes to an investigation of this nature? It's a microcosm of the world we're living in specifically in Canada because it's just like, oh, you know, like me and twos do our show. You walked in as we were finishing. And like literally this is what's in the news, right? It's just, it's just like you should see conflict of interest in any world where I'm a part of where, you know, like I can see the relationship of what's going on.

I have to remove myself from that because of, well, there's probably bias involved. It's simple. Everybody understands this. And the way Canada operates is completely opposite. Our politicians don't do any of that. They're like, oh, I know. I didn't see anything there. And when you go to the smallest version of this being city politics, it's like, it just feels

like I'm like, oh, man, this is like, this is like, rate all, you know, like this is what we see with the liberal government right now. Or NDP or on and on. There's a whole bunch of different versions. And this feels like it's Alberta's version. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities, a lot of overlap, a lot of, but, you know, that's, I have to say, I commend these guys after learning their story on what they did because, you know,

every time you see your taxes go up, you grumble and, you know, what are we going to do about it? Oh, there's nothing we can do about it. So we go back to work and we get a second job just to cover the expenses that are, you know, being imposed on us illegally, you know, but they went and they got elected. They did the work. And then when they got elected, they got in there, they started to do the work. They realized that, I guess they were. or just like right smack dab in the middle of a racketeering operation or something of that nature, you know.

So now it's a matter of dissecting, you know, getting the shovel out and getting down to the bottom of multi-layered corruption and cover-up involving the highest politicians in Alberta government. At any point, like I'm, I guess, you know, like I've read it, you know, but hearing it firsthand is a little different. And sitting across from you, I might add. One of the things that I enjoy is sitting across somebody. It doesn't mean I'm bang on. I'm sure listeners will have their thoughts on you and how you sound and everything else. But you kind of get a feel for someone sitting across from them, right? I'm like, you know, maybe he's a shyster.

I don't feel like that, folks. Maybe I'm wrong, hey. But, you know, you go on and on. Okay. So at any point, do your taxpayers that you represent come in you and say, we are unhappy with you? Well, you always have people that didn't vote for us. Sure, sure, sure. You know, you've always got that.

We're talking about a petition in 2016 where 5,500 people signed the bloody thing. I'm talking, I get it. There's going to be 100 people that are angry. Or at any point, is there like, sir, we're not happy with what you're doing here. And I don't mean from a couple of loud people. This podcast gets people that are loud and upset

about what I'm doing. But the majority of people are very happy. And so, you know, like, you know, to fix things, to talk about controversial topics, you're going to break some eggs. That's just the nature of what it is. So I don't mean, well, a couple people are angry. I mean, was a petition signed for 5,500 people saying you need to be gone, and they're going to the federal government, or sorry, provincial government, going,

like, this needs to change. These people are crux. No, and there wasn't even, you know, there is that recall legislation for a recall petition. So there was never even a recall petition started, let alone get any traction. So it really speaks loudly to the situation. And financially, we were really doing well. You know, we were cutting our spending left, right and center. We found, you know, visa cards that had been abused, that weren't being reconciled.

You know, the staff first told us they were. We had 60 visa cards, which we had 120 staff. And we said, what? And we asked if they were reconciled. And they said, fantastic. Bring them over here. You get a visa card. And you get a visa card.

That's right. And we said, I'm just like, I tell Tuesdays us all the time. I'm telling you to use this all the time. We're like, we're in the wrong business. We've got to go work for the CBC and get free government handouts. We've got to go work for chest alerts. We've got a visa card and everything else. Honestly, we've got a group of guys here who are trying to do good.

They're trying to bring transparency back. I love it. I think that it's a great model to use across every municipality in Alberta. We have to get some accountability back. I think that is the theme for 2024. If nothing else is bringing accountability back, especially with people who are in charge of other people's money. You know, when that happens, people have a tendency not to put as much value on the dollar.

That's what I'm finding, you know, or they start to look for ways, loopholes and hiding things and giving the friend the contract and, you know, maybe raising the estimation just a little bit so that friend gets a little bit more. You know, like there's all these things that go on in other municipalities. these guys just went to the nth degree and located the evidence, I guess, if you will. Yeah. Speak to me about, like, why are you terminated? What reason did they use to walk?

Because, you know, from, you know, I live in a city. Yeah. And I have my thoughts on city council. And I'm sure Lloydminster does in general. And there's some things that, you know, like people are paying attention to and on and on. And I don't think that's any, you know, seems pretty reasonable. I go, okay, so all this is going on,

why does the provincial government get involved? You've mentioned that you've gone to them several times and said, like, something's really wrong here. Like, you need to look at in this. They don't do anything. So then what happens? Like, how does it get to the point? It escalated very quickly.

That's the one I'm looking for. Where all of a sudden they're like, by the way, you're out of your job. Oh, wait, we're going to put one person in charge of that. Do you know how hard it is to get elected? Yeah. It's not easy.

I want to know that, like, I guess, walk me through this. So we have the title of having the fastest inspection in the history of Alberta started on a city. And that was technically the review started in actually two months. So after two months after elected, which we had started in the first two weeks to complain to, well, show these irregularities and alleged corruption to municipal affairs. And so really what it came down to was that they didn't want us to talk about this corruption stuff. They didn't want us looking into this stuff.

They wanted to cover it up. And, you know, we were kind of shocked with that because we said, well, why would you do that? This is our taxpayers that have had their funds wasted. And, you know, so they started manufacturing this idea of us doing things wrong. And you're like, well, we just got here. What do you mean doing things wrong? When you're elected 2021? So October 18th, 2021.

Okay. And when does the investigation start? So the first review was in, um, was in mid January to the first week of February. 2020. 2020. And then the actual. The review by the provincial government. Yeah.

Because by this point, they have discovered. They took them a while to get, you know, discovery, right? Yeah. But you've been in the job for like less than three months. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it was, it was shockingly fast. And we were moving very quickly in the sense of, you know, we stopped a fieldhouse project that was massively over, over budgeted. 40 million dollars for something that should have been about 10 to 15 million. And, you know, this was what we believed to be something that was very nefarious. And quite frankly, nefarious or not, the city couldn't afford it. And the city was going to go take out all debt for it. And you're like, why would you do something like that? The development, need to pay. And, you know, you, why are you guys not understanding how this works? And that was, you know, we so we pushed back on that very quickly. And again, you'd think that's something that Rick McIver would support in the sense of being fiscally responsible. You know, we, we're shutting things down that were total wastes of money. Like we had 300 phones, cell phones that we were paying for. We only had 120 staff and only 40 of them needed the cell phone. So there was, there was a lot of these little things. that add up to big things that started saving us a lot of money. And we found a lot of savings in the budget itself.

Like we cut the budget, the $5 million that they wanted us to put in. We took that out. We cut it another $4 million. And then we put another $5 million of council initiatives into that new council initiatives. So we funded RCMP. We funded RCMP back bay. We funded new firefighters. And then we had money for a splash park and we had money for some other initiatives.

And remember, we were broke. and we never had a dime, right? And we had to raise all this money, and you're like, and we found some really crazy stuff. Like, one of the things that in the government is they have something called a restricted surplus account, and you're like, what the heck is that? That is not in the private world. That's why you've never heard of that.

And what does it do? It allows you to adjust your budget. It allows you to adjust your financial statements at the end of the year. Well, CRA wouldn't let you do that. If you had extra money or if you made money, you got to pay taxes on. That's the way it works. Well, not in the city. the city is not taxable, obviously.

But where it gets scary is that they adjust the, they can make an in and and out on the restricted surplus account that makes it look like they, they had no surplus. And so the city goes, okay, you had no surplus. Now, what if they do it too much? And they make it, oh, you had a loss. Oh, we need to raise taxes. What was scary about this restricted surplus account

is they weren't governed by the council. and some of these things added up to over $10 million. And so our administration had the right to do whatever they wanted with that without council approval. That's not the way government works. We approve a budget. That becomes law. And the administration must follow that budget. Now, the CAO can spend up to $75,000 for a situation that comes up without counsel's approval relative to the massive budget you've got.

That's reasonable. But if it's over that, you must. to come to counsel for permission because you're spending taxpayers money and we're the stewards of that and so that makes total sense what was so surprising about is that um that same interim CAO that approached us for hush money he was removed about 20 days later okay because this was just before christmas 2021 when he told us this and then um in January 15th I think or 16th he was removed he was let go days after that we found out he paid out $600,000 to two people as hush money. An ex-CFO that had actually resigned before that he offered this money, which is obviously wrong,

and an ex-director of HR. And he paid the CFO just under $400,000, and he paid the HR girl just over $200,000. And so by all accounts, that's 100% illegal. Okay, there was no contract that had severance of some crazy. you pay out or something like that. There was none of that to be had. And this person, by law, had to come to counsel. And he was an experienced person.

But that's the person that asked us for the Miyacopa for crimes and for paying out of hush money to keep people quiet. And he paid out a lot of hush. So there was no document at all saying, we'll give you this money. You keep your mouth shut. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Shocking. No, I mean, they did have an NC&D with her, but not as,

nefarious as you might imagine. But there's got to be some financial transaction proof, right? Well, and this is where it gets really weird because you look at, you look at Mr. McIver, who is supposed to be an honest politician, who's doing a job for citizens, municipalities, etc. And this person was given evidence that this, we told him that this person paid this and we're like, this is criminal and you need to handle it. Not interested. You're like, it just happened. What do you mean you're not interested? So we told him that this had been paid out, how to have been paid out. We gave them the evidence of it.

So we gave them our bank statements, our city's bank statement. We gave them our journal entries, etc., that showed how it got paid out. And so in the inspection report, we gave this to the inspector as well. In the inspection report, which McIver oversaw as well as the inspector, they wrote in there that the mayor signed two checks for the $400 and for the $200,000. And it was an absolute flagrant lie. This was done by electronic funds transfer, which is what we told them and showed them is that this was a manual payroll entry done by this CAO. And it never came to counsel. You would have counsel record if it came to counsel. We have to make, I've heard people, you know, they make stuff up. They say, you can make decisions in camera. Okay, that's where we do things behind closed

doors. You cannot make decisions in camera. You must come out of camera and make a decision in public. and it's recorded and it's live and all these things. So you can never do that and make a decision in camera. That idea is false. So there was never any legal decision. So this was absolute theft, 100%. We started a lawsuit against these people to recover it and to recover it from those three people

plus an IT manager for the destruction of all the city's property and hard drives and all this kind of stuff. And the second days after we were removed, Rick McIver and Doug LaGore canceled that lawsuit. He's canceled every law. He's canceled every investigation, every law. They had other investigations into some of these irregularities that we had, that we wanted to get done. And Rick McIver installed what they call an official administrator within 20 hours of us releasing this to the public that we were investigating collusion and corruption and collusion between the RCMP and our,

and some of our rogue counselors, as well as collusion with municipal affairs. Within 20 hours of us bringing this out to the public, and we were sending it off to a third-party investigator, not us. He installed an official administrator who had the power to cancel our motions and cancel that. And he actually forced us to take down the video, proving it, because everything in public counsel has to be unrecorded, and as well, he disallowed the motion to release it to the public. thinking that that basically stops the public from knowing anything.

And, you know, we responded that we object to this, you know, rewriting history. I mean, this is crazy. You know, it happened whether you disagree with it. That's, you know, you're entitled to do whatever you're allowed to do. But you can't rewrite history. It happened. Anyways.

So fortunately, some people had downloaded it and it's on the internet and it's on YouTube and whatnot. And we don't have control of it. But, of course, we have copies of it as well. but that just goes to show you the craziness. And that was one report. And the administrator admitted in writing that he never even read the report, the investigation, never even read its validity, nothing. He just canceled it.

And then there was other investigation reports that we had exactly the same thing that we canceled. And one of the big things that you might have heard down in Medicine Hat, there was a council that censored their mayor. Okay, we had similar legislation in ours, but it was much stronger for the mayor, okay, that the mayor was allowed to go after its counselors and whatnot and enter the code of conduct. And in our first two months is when we read that as we were gradually figuring out what everything was saying, and we read that and I said, well, that's not fair. That's not right.

I should not have the power of adjudication over somebody because it can be an emotional decision. This needs to go to an independent third party. that's the way court works. Now, you're not in court per se, but you get a independent third party that's qualified to be the investigator adjudicator for that. And we ended up choosing Reynolds Murth out of Evanton,

which is a law firm, large law firm. And so, you know, everything you do has to be fair, has to be above board, has to be transparent. And so this is the kind of stuff that we pushed forward and we were very good at what we were doing. You know, we cut our taxes 30% in two years.

And we actually were online to cutting it another 25 to 30% when we got removed because we were setting up for our next budget. And unfortunately, so as I was saying before, we showed you how we do not bank developers, for one reason, it kills our cash flow. Two, that's how corruption happens because you're managing the pool

and now you're picking who's doing what. And you're not letting anybody see anything for two years or more. That's totally wrong. Well, guess what? within us leaving, they also approved a construction or the project for a new fire hall for $17 million. And I'm like, that's ridiculous the price of it.

Secondly, we already had it negotiated with our developers. They were paying for it. Why would you use the money that we had accumulated for savings in the last two years, which is huge for our town? And when our developers had already agreed, they need it. Okay, like we said to our developers is that anything. you need touch or effect, you're paying for. That's the way it works.

So they built a community, fantastic. You have all these people coming. That's great. You need a firehole. Well, we're not paying for it off the backs of the other residents that are here already for the last 30 years. Why would it be their fault? You have new people that need that. So it needs to be in your financial model of your entire community of thousands and thousands of people.

And so they, of course, agreed, of course. And they come to a point. If you don't, if you're not within, there's roughly a 10 minute window from a fire station for the fire truck to get to your place. It either stops your building construction or it massively changes your insurance. And so the developers are becoming very nervous. They wanted this fire hole. And so we of course knew that and it's not a game. It's just that, okay, then we've got to design.

We've got to find a place for it. So we help that. And we pick areas that make sense from time travel and all those kind of the reasons. And incredibly, they totally reversed what we did. And now they're paying for it. And the developers don't have to pay for this for, you know, time period. We're putting out our $17 million. And that money was for a new pool and partial payment for a new Hockey rink that our city desperately needed.

And we were very close to moving forward on those projects. And it's just mind-boggling how lack of, it's either negligent and lack of understanding about how they should be. do things or it's intentional. And they're intending, they love these construction projects because that's how you take money. And so for me, it's massively disappointing what they've done to our citizens because we would have benefited from that money ourselves. We don't need to fund developers. And then they, you know, they just do things.

They did a lot of things out of spite. I mean, they canceled every project that we had underway and we had feasibility studies on and whatnot. And some of it was even safety things. We had an acceleration lane on Highway 1 coming off our rainbow road so that people could accelerate properly and not get into accidents. And they canceled that. And you're like, what are you doing? That's a safety thing.

Like, why would you do that? And it's not a hugely expensive thing. It's reasonably affordable. You know, but it's just a silly little game that we're having with Rick McCover. What did they remove you for? Like, what does it say? What did you do wrong that they're like, this is why you're no longer the acting mayor? So in that inspection report, they identify what they believe that we would have done wrong.

Okay. Now, one of the criticisms of the inspection report is they provide no evidence. They provide hearsay. And everything needs to be based on evidence. And so one of the things that we did is they gave us, well, before the inspection report was done, we gave them tons of evidence. And we showed them evidence of all of this corruption and all this going on, plus how our counselors were acting way offside. Oddly, predictably, none of that made it into the inspection report. And we have the actual evidence.

So we're the actual ones that know what we're talking about because we have it. And so what was weird is that they intentionally did not include any of that. All it was was a targeted attack against us. And again, with no evidence. And when you're looking at procedural fairness and natural justice, which is what our justice system is based on, we didn't get any of that because that kind of the definition behind that is that you need to be told and shown what you're being accused of and you have a right to face your accuser and stand up and say hey that's not accurate and here's why so what do they accused you of okay so basically minor stuff is that so they say oh you're you're talking to staff you're um you need you can't go around the CAO so even if we did every single thing they said that is not reason to remove people

And again, it's not, not you're stealing money or something silly like that. But you show up, what date does this go? And this is just what's up for debate. Sorry to interrupt you. Finish your thought. No, and you, you can hop in at any time. Like, I should have mentioned that right up to hop. You don't, you, don't, you hop in whenever you feel.

I mean, it's like, you roll into work. What day do you get the letter? And it's just like, how long goes this? When, well, December 4th, we removed 2023. So December 4th, you walk in and you're given a letter and it says, you did X or, you know, What they say is they use these general words, like, and it's improper, irregular, and improvident. And, you know, so that's it. And so what's irregular and improvident and proper mean?

Okay. So you're like, well, wait a second. We put in something called a tri-CIO model, okay? And instead of having one gatekeeper, which is how you get corruption, democracy is all about multiple people looking. We brought in three people, three experts in their fields. So massively different than one person who believes. they know everything.

And in a city, you need that because the city is a big. You need checks and balances. Well, but you need people that are in the planning and engineering world. So an engineer, you need somebody that's in the blue-collar world that deals with public services, so roads and fleet. And then somebody on the internal side is more of the accounting, marketing, communications type person. So very different professionals. And we pay them way less.

We pay them between 120 and 160 a year. C-A-O gets between 300 and 500,000. in a year. And if you've ever seen their backgrounds, they don't have the depth of what these people have. You're like, well, where's your 30 years experience in engineering or where's your 30 years experience in this? And that's what's very shocking. And then what we've been told, we've had CIOs reach out to us now because we've been saying this stuff online now. And they've said, we actually support the tri-CIAO because we're getting burned out. CIOs are getting fired on average every three years. Some cities, they'll have them for a turn.

or they'll have them for a term and a half. But that is a very bad career choice because you're getting fired and you have to move. Well, who wants to move to some small town or someplace? You want to live in a certain city, whatever. So it's very hard to get that. And the number of CEOs available if you put up an ad might be three, four. When you put up an ad for an accountant, how many CFO, how many you get, 300? You know, and that's my point.

You can choose from people that are absolutely educated with 20 years experience, all this kind of stuff. to who's going to fit your organization best, your culture best, and help enhance your team, your staff team. With the CAO, you have so much less choice. How are you going to make that accurately? And if you do it wrong, guess what? They want one year or two year severance. You've typically got to pay a moving bonus because they're coming from wherever.

And they want to make sure they don't get fired right away. So they've got some kind of a clause in there that says they get all of this money. And you're like, what a decision that a council that is new or only been there. for a little bit of time depending on they make this decision. And it's a terrible model. And that's the problem is that, you know, Ontario has moved away from that. So we're younger than Ontario, right? They've much more experienced in the governance world.

And so they've moved away from this model of this single person because, one, you're getting too burnt out. Because imagine you've got to deal with seven counselors, all different people every four years. And what a nightmare. All the different personalities. And plus you've got to run the city. That's your job. So three people are more proficient at what they do.

So when you talk to somebody that knows what they're talking about, it's a decent conversation. It doesn't mean you can't disagree with something. But you're like, huh, you actually know what you're talking about. You know, and I'm like, good. You'll do most your stuff properly. And that I think would calm a lot of councils down because they're like, well, do you know what you're talking about?

Are you trying to hide something from us? You know, what's going on? You want people that are very good at what they're doing and then instill confidence in the people that are listening to them. oh, you really know what you're talking about. Wow. I'm pretty excited to actually work with you. Because, again, when you've got all the checks and balances around the corruption and you've got all the people looking in on things,

none of that extracurricular stuff is happening. And now you're back to basic business. How do we get this product accomplished for our taxpayers, which are like shareholders, how do we do a good job for them? And how do we make sure we don't waste taxpayers money? And what we were most surprised, well, not, geez, we were surprised every day. But what we were surprised was the apathy of the towards the taxpayer of the staff. And we were like, wow, apathy is contagious everywhere.

But it's like, why do you not, these people are who hire you, really? They're the shareholders, right? They're the ones that are making this all work. And government officials too. You know, as soon as you get elected, boom, now you've got a power trip. And it's like, no, that's not how it's supposed to work. You have a job to do. Where's your KPIs?

Where's your targets? How are we going to evaluate? what you've done and we went to municipal affairs and we said this is really hard you guys don't have KPIs and you don't have comparables that we can see with other cities and we said to them why don't you have standardized accounting with all the municipalities so that everybody is doing it the same way and they said nope never going to happen and we said are you kidding and they wouldn't entertain it and so that's one of the things that I think is like out of everything we're going to talk about it's like okay so it's really bad okay every place is really bad

but it is fixable. And that's the message that we're trying to say is that by some of these, by putting these protocols in place, which shine light on the quoting processes, which is the spending of the pool of wealth. You got to do that. And getting the standardized accounting, well,

now people that aren't experts in business and financial accounting can go, oh, okay, well, I'm going to look at a city I like. And it doesn't matter what size because all the numbers are normalized. So they're all down to an equal, an equal ratio. And you're like,

well, they're spending this much on snow removal. they're spending this much on how their parks are done, or they're spending, and it gives a counselor, here's the average, here's the best, here's the lowest, where do we fit? And now I can have a decent conversation with my CAO, hopefully more than one, and say, you guys are doing a great job. Wow, I didn't know, you know, and or, hey, is there a reason we're way more? And sometimes there might be, like you might say as a city, we want to spend more money on recreation. We love the idea. It helps crime. It helps keep kids busy. Helps all these kinds of things. And we agree to

spend double. Well, that's a conscious decision is totally fine. But you're explaining it. You're able to talk about it. And what happens, I think, with most counselors is that they don't understand the government world. And of course, I can't say that I did when I came in. But everything is relatable, right? Like business is business. So people say sometimes that, oh, you can't run government like a business. It's like, what are you talking about? You don't want to get the best price on pens. You don't want to get a good price on a copier. You don't want to get a good price on a truck. Like, what are you talking about when you say that? We want to make sure that the taxpayer's money is stretched as far as possible.

That's the goal. And we want to make good decisions. There are commercial decisions. So you're not buying junk. You have to buy commercial product, commercial processes. It's all quality. You've got to do that. And that costs money.

And so, but you want to not waste whatever money you've got because it's obviously precious because these are the citizens. You live there too. We pay taxes too. And so you want to make sure that you're, treating your taxpayers with with with with more affirmation that you know whatever they're saying does matter and that's going to guide you as you're going but that doesn't happen that's not the way it works and that's what we were trying

to do is to push this directive and trying to you know come back with you know our taxpayers have said all about recreation because chestomere's you know not even though we have a lake I mean it's a gorgeous lake it's fantastic to do there it's just off of the other than that and then we were trying to create ways to enjoy the lake better for people that lived off of the lake and create boardwalks and restaurants on the water and all these activities and a kilometer

worth of beaches. I mean, there was all these things that we were trying to do that. Free visa cards. You know, that you don't waste money. Like, we had a dog park. This is, and this is one of the things is we had a dog park that had the city had been trying, or people had been trying to do it for years, trying to get a dog park in Chestermear.

They had one that was on the lake, but they wanted to do another one. And so we had asked the, the procurement people to get do the quotes and go get us one they came back with one for four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars now this is nothing more than black chain link fence on the field okay so you're like wow that's expensive how big is this dog park and this was our response as we said okay well how and being in the business of development i've put in a lot of black chain link fence kilometers of it and i said so what is the linear feet that you're putting in and they said this and i said

because for the last 15 or so years, it's been $19 to $21 a linear foot installed forever. It doesn't matter to the prices, changes of steel, you name it. It's that price. And I just did it. So I know the prices are still those numbers. What are you paying? Like 80?

What's going on? So long story short, we took a look at the process. It made no sense the way they did things. But we were able to get that RFP redone, and we ended up doing it for $75,000. for the exact same thing. So we saved $400,000 of taxpayers' money because, one, we had the questions,

we asked the questions, didn't feel stupid about asking the questions, which is a lot of the times some of the CAAs do, not all of them, some of the Cajos make the counselors feel bad about asking questions. How dare you ask me a question? What are you insinuating, our staff is doing something wrong? No, I was just not understanding. I wanted to ask a question.

So they make you feel bad for asking a question. So for us, well, we don't feel bad asking questions. Plus you know it way too well. We know what we're talking about. So we said, well, this is roughly what it should be. Why isn't it then? So you've stepped on a giant landmine is all I look at, right? And now you've, where does it sit today?

Like December 4th, you're walked out of the office? Well, let's talk still a little bit more about that because I don't know if you quite answered why you were dismissed. But I think what it comes down to, and of course you'll correct me if I'm wrong is the CAO business. And the CAO, as described in the Municipal Government Act, it's the chief administrative officer, and it sort of applies to like one role, one person throughout the act. But what Jeff is saying is like, hey, we're way more efficient with three. What's the big deal?

What the big deal was is that Jeff and the three CAAs formed sort of a more one-sided approach when it came to voting on things within the council, the other two counselors, the rogue counselors, as they're now being referred to, didn't like that because what they were voting for, there was only two of them. And then you had Jeff, Mel, Blaine, and Stephen, who seemed to be in lockstep with a lot of things that were going on. And they felt that that was improper or whatever word that we're using. That was the basis, I think, the majority of the basis for Rick's decision. We have to mention, though, it's crucial we mentioned that, you know, they did discover a letter from Brownlee, L.L.

addressed to municipal affairs, and the subject line is ministerial authority to remove a counselor from office. So Gary Sandberg, who is the deputy minister. To Rick McIver, had questioned how do we remove a counselor from office. This was dated November 8th, 2021, just after they got in. Just after they got in. And one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, the statements made by the lawyer here, I have to say is that while he says, while the minister has supervisory jurisdiction over municipalities, the minister does not have authority to summarily remove a counselor from office currently under the legislative scheme that is enforced. This dismissal of a counselor by the minister is an extraordinary exercise, like, extraordinary.

Like, we're talking major crimes here, and to come in to swoop in and summarily remove, you know, them just, not just one though. He's removed four. He's effectively gotten rid of all three CIOs and the ability for them to push things through counsel. Now we have these two row counselors who are in there. They've canceled all the projects. You know, the other thing that this letter goes on to say is that the minister, in his purview with the ability to do that under extraordinary circumstances, is also has to consider the municipalities being managed. Here are these words. in an irregular, improper, or in provident manner as a result of the inspection or inquiry. So, of course, now, you know, Rick reads this and he's like, oh, here's three words that I need

to make sure I put into my inspection report, even if they're relevant or not. So, you know, it's just an inspection report. It's not legally binding. It doesn't, you know, it's, it's, there's no sworn affidavits. There's no judge that comes to the table. And so this is where Jeff and the guys are struggling and they need our support and our help, I think, because they need some impartiality when it comes to what they're presenting versus what Rick is presenting or saying about them, which may or may not be true. But that's, you know, up to a court judge evidence, the process, which they have not been awarded.

Well, and it's a shame because our taxpayers voted us in. They didn't vote Rick McIver to come affect us. And as we said before, our taxpayers are not unhappy with us. you have, of course, some fringe groups, but we've done massive things. Give me a politician. Give me the greatest one of all time. And I'll show you people that hate them. So it's, it's, you know, to me, you know, you can have, like, when did you ever see

100% approval rating? Exactly. Even if you believed it, Putin only got 98% folks. So if you believe it, you don't believe it, I don't care. He got 98. Not 100. And the words that Selena was saying, like a regular and provident and imprompt. and improper, you think those are negative, okay, just by saying it.

So the tri-CaO model, okay, is irregular. But in the MGA, it says under Section 205 that the CAO's position can be held by one or more people to carry out the duties. Well, I didn't write the MGA. They did. It says one or more persons. So irregular, yes, not often, but not bad. illegal. And so why would they try to put these terminologies into something as a reason, well, that's something wrong? It's like, no, it's not wrong. And so this is the problem is that in the

inspection report, the inspector goes through all these narratives about how everything's, the world is terrible, everything's so bad, but it's okay that it's actually not a bad thing. Or it's not, something to be offside. You're like, why did you make that whole two pages or a page ahead of it saying it was so terrible? But then when you get down to it, Oh, but they didn't do that. So here's some hearsay about whatever might have been happened, but there's no evidence to say it happened. I would just like to see Rick's evidence at this point.

I would just like to see it, you know. Well, in the evidence they didn't give us there, so they're in breach of a court order now for over three months to provide us with their record of evidence in court. So that's like an affidavit of record. And they haven't done that. So you'd think, well, hold on a second. You released counselors plus CAOs without having the evidence ready?

Yeah, it's a head scratcher. Wow. Can we, the CAO thing? Yep. I'm just trying to piece this together. So normally you only have one CAO. Yep. Is the CAO a counselor or this is a separate?

Non-elected position. Non-elected, okay. The council hires. Do they get to vote on things? No. Okay, so they're just there to operate the city. Yep. Okay.

Yes. It's like a president of a company. You can be a CIO and a counselor, though. No. No. No. No, you know, they're totally separate. Okay.

Clear something up there for me. Because you said you had two rogue counselors or whatever now called that were upset with how things were going. We have two now. One had resigned. So there was three total. We had seven of us. So four of us counselors were removed, including myself. And then three counselors were remaining.

And then one had resigned. They were rogue. pre-er-roaked. They were upset that they were getting voted down on things. And then they found a thing where instead of having one CAO, you had three because it was, as you pointed out, right, it ain't costing you any more money. It's just delegating the work over multiple people who are more competent in that position. And then they're bringing you better ideas and you get to work with them and that, gee, that seems like, and then it becomes, I don't know better way to put this, a pissing man.

match over you have the majority. If it goes 3-3, you're to the setting vote, and all of a sudden it's 4-3. So they're upset. This is human beings being upset. And then tack on the fact that McIver, his brother-in-law, was the former mayor, and that's what you're undoing all the things of. And you might even point out that it went before him because in 2016, they'd already had a position of it.

That's right. Yeah. I'm just making sure I'm getting all this. I'm getting... This letter on how to remove a counselor days after they get elected. And what was odd is that our three rogue counselors had also gotten the same advice from the city's lawyer, who was a rogue lawyer as well, the same advice from them on the same day. Days after we were elected.

So everybody looked at you and went, this is a problem. Right? Like they didn't think you were going to get elected, then you get, which is actually kind and like laughable when you have so much, you know, your public is engaged. If you get 5,500 people all sign in a, you got some engaged folks. You know, it's more laughable, actually, which is,

I think where my interest in this whole story is mostly focused on is that, you know, their intent is to hopefully get reelected, right? Or not reelected, reinstated, rather. They want their jobs back. You know, they feel like this is wrongful dismissal. I feel like that way as well, just from what I've been, you know, seen. And what's funny, I think,

well, not funny, is that, you know, They currently don't have the required number of counselors in the city of Chesterdamer, so they can't, they don't have quorum, which is in the MGA as well. And so if they don't get reinstated, Rick McIver has to call a by-election, but that they can run again for. So these guys who have been removed from office have the ability to run again and get re-elected into the positions that they were dismissed from by the munis, Affairs Minister. So this is where I'm like, can I need to see how this plays out because if they

don't get reinstated, maybe they can get elected. And what is Rick McCyver going to do then? He's going to fire them again? When, when does he have to have a buy, like what's the time frame on? There has to be a time frame on this. Right away. Yeah, I mean, he's supposed to do it within six months, call it within six months. So that literally gives it this month, right? If I'm doing my math, December 4th, basically the end of April. Yeah, yeah. So you're traveling Alberta right now, I understand, henceforth you being here, just A, trying to like shed a light on this wild story, right?

Like, it's funny, I've read, I've read the articles on it. Heck, we might even talk about it on the mash. I probably did. And hearing it firsthand is even more wild. So you're going around Alberta trying to, obviously, shed light on it is there other ways people can help or you know I heck I don't know I got people listening chestermere so they probably know you know or or around that area what are you looking for is there any way people can help is there any way people can follow along I don't

I don't I don't shed light but I think the biggest concern for me just as like a citizen you know in my municipality is you know I I have concern when my elected officials are getting fired especially for what appears to be like not a legitimate reason you know Is that where we're at now? We're just going to fire her elected. Why would bother voting then? Why bother running in the election? We did live through COVID.

And COVID taught us a whole lot, didn't it? Yeah. Well, and when you're critical of your government and then getting fired. So that's the big problem, right? Because that's not what democracy is supposed to be. No. Well, Chase Barber, do you know who that is? No, tell us.

Edison Motors? Do you know anything about this? No. BC guy. He is sharp. but Edison Motors created the first ever electric logging truck, right? He's found a way to change my mind on EVs. I'm like, that's saying something.

And so I, you know, I listened to him. And he was just on the mashup and he was on a blue collar round. In the studio, I believe the blue collar voice needs to be heard more. So we have a blue collar roundtable. It's just, you know. And so shout out to Guardian for helping facilitate that. And so him and a guy. from Saskatchewan, Quick Dick, MacDick, and then a farmer from Alberta, a crackpot farmer

all come on together. And he starts talking about M&P and how they, you know, you can apply for like green grants, right? Like they're doing something that it very much fits it and is being very successful. And then the government tells them, they don't give them the grant and say something along the lines of like basically your timelines are too fast. You didn't ask for enough money, blah, blah, blah, blah. And MMP is one of the ones initiating the grant, right? Got the thing from the government. So they approach them and say, you know, if you pay us 20%, we'll get you the grant.

And so he blows the horn off this and it goes all the way up to government. And he was just talking about this. And in government, the NDP government in BC walks out and says, no, no, no, we're not looking into this. So when you talk about like this could be bigger than just your. It is. We're seeing it on the liberal government. We're seeing it in the provincial government. That's right. And like I got a lot of time. I've sat across from Daniel Smith in that chair where you're sitting in January, right? Like it wasn't that long ago. I got a lot of time for that woman. I think anyone who listens to this will know that.

But at the same time, if we don't get to the bottom of some things, we're going to have COVID 2.0 in whatever way that is come back. And like, nobody wants to go back there. I can't find a single soul that's like I want some more mandates in lockdown. right and what you're talking about you'll find them there you probably will you probably will but you know it's funny I got people who listen to me out in Ontario and like there's there's there's a ton of people

that don't want to go you know and what person doesn't want their government spending less money or more efficiently you know like well this is what you think right you think what you think unless you're in the community and you stand to benefit from these over in priced quotes and estimation so you know

I just think the only way we're going to really truly find out what's going in chestamere is by getting these guys back in so that they can look. Because we know Rick McIra's not going to do it. And his current inspection that he has going on is just looking at the timeline that these guys were in. Chestermere, not anything before. Just so you're aware. But them shining a light has done exactly that. It has brought out these other communities and they're letting us know that, hey, we've found some dealings with the minister that weren't so great either. That's interesting.

goes yeah well see if I can get the old premier back on you know because like yeah I got this list piling up of as I spit I got this list piling up of things I know it just makes you love a spit I'm supposed to ask her right people are always upset because I don't ask enough questions right questions are hard enough and on and on and I'm like like is anybody stared at our world today like it just seems like every time I think I get to the bottom and I've met like all the people somebody walks through the door and I'm just like this is wild and I already knew the story right It's just wild that we've never met before. Nobody knows each other.

You know, it's like, do you know who you are? No, live not that far apart. And you're doing wonderful things by the, you know, like. And yet, here it all comes undone. Okay, before I let you out of here, is there anything else that I've skimmed over? You know, you said, how long does this go for? Well, it can go for a long time, you know? We're closing in on two hours.

So, you know, like, if there's, there's things that you want to make sure the public knows, here's your chance. One of the things that we're finding when we're being invited to these different communities to talk is that we find that the people are really frustrated with similar things. And what we found that to be is they definitely believe there's corruption. I asked them about, okay, what would that look like? And what evidence do you have of that? And it's a similar concept that it's a feeling they have.

And they have suggested evidence, but not hard concrete proof typically. So what they're very surprised about is that we're actually coming out with evidence. And they said, you know, people from the inside don't do this. And, you know, we were coming out for the last two years. We've been saying this. You know, in our media in Chestermere and in Calgary, the Calgary Herald, has been absolutely okay with printing lies. And we've presented them with evidence. And we said, why are you doing this?

Well, that doesn't shock me. You know, and it shocked me because I was a little bit naive. I mean, I thought that the media might actually report stuff that was real. And then I saw the whole Trump thing with the states and, wow, you watch two programs, you watch an outlet and they didn't say the same thing. You go sit in Ottawa. Wow. You watch exactly what they say while you're sitting in Ottawa and you look out the door and you go. That's not what they said.

They're reporting on nothing and they have nobody on the ground actually here to document it. And so that was disappointing. And I was there too. That was disappointing that they won't actually just come out and tell the truth. In fact, they actually say against it, the opposite of what's actually being said. And you're like, well, why would you do that? Like it just sells more papers? Is that the only reason or is there more to it?

And so anyways, when we're talking to people around Alberta, that's one of the things they come forward is they're really excited to actually talk to us about what we've discovered. And they want to know, how can we apply this to our city, our municipality, And we said, well, I mean, there's some basic principles that you can do. I mean, it does involve looking into things. But some of the things are, for example, how you take a look at your operational budget, which you'll, it's all public knowledge for each municipality online. And then you divide that by your population. And where do you sit?

Chestermears is in and around $1,600 person. Calgary's around 23. Edmonton's around 1,800. Chestermear, or sorry, Cochran, for example, is around 2,600. And you're like, well, whoa, that's a lot. thousand more than us and we're the same size and you're like well you're spending 30 million dollars more a year that's that's interesting and so these are the things that why you'd want to start something now in the aid there's an AGM for the

UCP coming up in November 2024 one of the motions that we want to try and bring forward for resolutions is standardized accounting for municipalities right like and also the procurement process to be completely transparent Let the public see it. Let, of course, bring the developers in. And don't let anything be quiet. And everybody's got to be able to look at it. Have you not been able to get something to somebody else in the Alberta government, like on this?

Or are they just not talking to you? Well, it's the only only one person, really. Well, yeah. And we found out that they're actually been told not to say anything about chestermary. And you're like, why are we this hot topic? What are you talking about? So I'm stepping on a landmine all over again. You know.

Yeah. What did I say when you walked in? There's only a few people who get through the door, it seems, these days. So you're one of the hot topics that the Alberta government doesn't want to talk about. Yes. Yeah. And so that's what we basically, people have asked us to come talk about, is that they feel there's corruption. They feel they're not being heard by their government, and that be their municipality.

And then ultimately, they really push for the transparency side of things. And politicians use that word all the time. And what we did is that we actually. stuck to it like when we had that utility company for example we were told by this president of it that we had to sign a confidentiality agreement NCND that said you can't tell anybody anything and we said what are you talking about and then not even tell the city staff what was going on inside the utility and we said not going to happen I said we're going to erase that clause out of our our shareholders

agreement and he said you can't do that and we said you know this isn't our first rodeo I said who's the shareholder city. Well, who's the people that run the city? We do. We're not only the chairman of this private company, we're actually the mayor and council of the city. So we're the ones that set the rules in the unanimous shareholders agreement. So guess what we're going to do? We're going to stop this meeting, put it in recess. We're going to start a council meeting and we're going to vote to rescind those clauses in that unanimous shareholders agreement, come back into the meeting in our private business board, and then we're going to agree with that and we're going to remove it. And

within three, I don't want to say exactly three days, this president resigned. And is in his letter from us, he says, I want to remind you that I have an indemnification clause in my agreement that says anything that happened when I was here, I'm indemnified against any wrongdoing. And we're like, wow, all for us trying to get transparency, eh? Trying to get out to our public. Now that you've heard it all, what is your take on it? when I was asking if either of you had heard about anything to do with the podcast, right?

Oh, yeah, I have. I was just curious because, like, you know, if I had been told this probably three years ago. No, that's a lot. Yeah, three years ago because I've been full-time podcasting out two years. So three years ago, I probably would have been, like, floored, you know? And it's not that I think the entire world is evil. I actually don't think that at all. I think there's so many great human beings.

I just, you know, when I listen to you talk, I go, I think this is what most cities want. Is somebody at the top that's competent that's bringing in things that reduce our taxes and put it to things that can benefit the public. And yes, you know, build things, but build it in a way that it doesn't seem, you know, you can go, oh, that makes sense. And if you have questions, which so many of us do, you don't shut them down, you go, oh, ask your questions. like we want to be transparent. So many times it feels like whether it's, you know, go what, it doesn't matter what level of government. It feels like there's a lot where people aren't allowed to ask questions or they're made to feel stupid for asking questions. And there has to be an education of our public because they're trying to engage.

They don't fully understand all the laws and rules of everything. And they shouldn't need to. Yeah. They really shouldn't need to. They just want to have trust in the people. have elected, right, the majority of them, have elected to do a fiscally responsible job over the management of their money. I mean, that just would apply in any situation, I think. But what I like what Jeff and these guys have done, especially Blaine, or Stephen rather, because he's got the

financial background, is identified an area where people can siphon taxpayer money. So that might be across the board in every municipality. And I would encourage by education people to look at the financials. All public information, right? They have public auditors, the city, so they're publicly audited so you can look at this information and see out, like, why are we taking on so much debt? Like, we pay astronomical property taxes in St. Helbert, right? Why are our property taxes going up? Why are we, like, how? Like, how is this even possible? Like, it's got me now thinking, wanting to look into and question the use and management of our money. And I always think as a citizen, I'm like, why is it the only thing we can do is just

raise property taxes to pay for everything? Thank you. Thank you, Sean. This is exactly what I asked. Why can't we have some creativity? Like that isn't that what we do here? Like creativity but also efficiency. Yes.

Why is there never any economies of scale with a city? The city is a perfect animal for that because you're adding a thousand houses a year or something like that. So it's like awesome. You know you can do more efficient things. That tractor, that truck is going to get used perfectly. Yeah. And Jeff's idea of the standardized accounting process I think is fantastic because in any other company, you want efficiencies, you're going to do that. You're going to kind of sort of

streamline the most efficient process and have it go across the board. Why wouldn't Rick McIver want to do that? Why wouldn't they want information sharing amongst municipalities of the same side? We're getting into some tin foil hat things now. It's a valid question though. It's a valid question. Why wouldn't you want that, right? Well, because then you don't get money. I mean, we can't hide things that way. We reduced our staff from, you know, it wasn't just us reducing it. We did have staff that retired and we did have staff that always get cherry picked for the bigger cities.

But we also had staff that left when we started asking questions. And it's like, well, why are you leaving? We haven't said anything, but can you get us information? And the fact that we started to look at things, people started leaving. And then there was staff that we noticed that had been

promoted that didn't have the necessary skill sets. And you're like, how did you get promoted? And what we were told by other staff, is that these people were friends of the people that, and they kept that narrative going. So we were able to, with 25% less staff, more than triple the amount of work that we started with

and our production with our building permits and this kind of stuff in that two years. So we tripled the amount of work with less people, but you're bringing people, it's like private sector. So we increase the knowledge base and the skill base of the city by not only training it, but hiring it. And so we went after people that had the right resumes, the right skill sets. We don't know these people, but there's a lot of good people out there.

And so you want to build a great team because they've got a job to do. It's not, you know, again, we have a job that's got to hit certain targets that are, I keep calling the shareholders that our taxpayers want us to hit. And we want to perform for them and we should have to. And how do the taxpayers know if we did? Well, I just feel good. Okay. That's one way.

but how about some actual targets that we've committed to or you can you can at least gauge us against you know KPIs key performance indicators cities don't have that stuff and you're like what you guys have 50 hundred city of Calgary four and a half billion dollar budget and you guys aren't being held to account for that if you like you know that you heard this information going on in Chester Mirror I can't even imagine what Edmonton in Calgary well look at Abington so that the CAO quit right

And again, like I said, I have that COs reach out to me. Have you watched Mocha Bersergan's... Of course. Yeah, his documentary on the Regina Premier Highway. Yes. And the ties the mayor of Eminton has to that. Oh, Amarget, so he is another conversation that we're going to have. Sure.

Did you know that? He's a liberal minister of infrastructure. Yes, I do. Yes. Well, I mean, once again, you go Moka Bersergan. You know, he gets brought up here a lot because, like, He's a kid that's just like killing it. Like honestly, he's just breaking things and you're like, wow.

Why has the, when we talk media, there's a few things that really irritate me. So politicians really irritate me. Lawyers for a good portion of time, and I always joke with Layton Gray about this, for a good portion of time, you know, in the middle of COVID, I called a lawyer and said, here's what I signed while I was working at Baker Hughes. Can they fire me if I don't get vaccinated? Is that a thing? And he wouldn't look at it.

at it. And I'm just like, yeah, I'll pay for it. Which rate? Just, just look at it and tell me what you, nobody would touch me with a 10 foot pole. It was really, really weird. Now, I'm not saying all lawyers. I'm not saying all politicians. But certainly there's enough, uh, tomfoolery going around that, um, yeah, that like, and so you go with media, media is the next one that really irritates me. Because you go like, I don't know, I'm not, I was never big in the politics. The more I even start to scratch the surface and get into it deeper and deeper. I'm like, holy crap, this is a strange world where the rules do not apply. And any media should have been able to pick up on that.

So when you say, or maybe there's something else going on. They should apply, right? And these are the acts and the legislation that governs us. So it is incumbent upon us to learn it. If we can't rely on the people that we elect to do the job for us, we need to take the response. And Eva Chippeik says this, you know, it is. up to us, our responsibility. Did you go to four years of journalism school, Selena?

I mean, I could teach it. No, I haven't. But all I'm pointing out is, if anything, I'm a citizen journalist as well. I was a hockey player and went to the oil field and worked in the oil for 10 years. And then started doing a podcast because I'm like, something. You know, well, I like talking to people. I was hoping, you know, I was going to get some pretty high profile hockey guys. And I mean, I did for a little time.

But this has been, you know, like you think of, you want a career in journalism. Yeah. just start asking questions. Yeah. Like it's not that hard. What is true journalism? What happened to that? Like when I think about journalism, I think like Bernstein, right?

And Woodward, like all the president's men kind of stuff. Like, not this crap that's propaganda. Like you can just see right through it, right? We want the true journalist. We want journalists to be journalists. They come with this great attitude. You know, they're gung-ho out of the gates. They just can't wait to expose, get the big story.

No, no, no. We need you to say this. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering if I can get the minister on, actually. This is what I'm like, I wonder if I could do that. Well, he's not talking to anybody. Well, if you can, get out. Why not? I would love to hear his side of this story.

Well, and what we've tried, because of course we've brought it into court, but unfortunately, every time we try to get an affidavit from him, he'll never be the one who's giving the affidavit. Because we want to get him under oath. Because what he continues to do is come out with these sensational things that you have to go to court. court to prove. So for example, like he says things like, you know, the mayor bought two motorbikes on the city's credit card and they're in his garage. Did you? And you're like, no. And it's like, how would that have happened? Would a bank or would the motorcycle company have taken a layaway plan? Like, you know, our visa is a $5,000 limit. And he said we spent $75,000 on it. And you're like, that doesn't even make any sense. And what we did do.

Oh, the amount of your surplus. Yeah. That what we did do is, is two, our council we brought forward a program for adventure motor recycles to be in our new peace officer patrol so they could go across fields they could go across pathways you go across parks and our peace officers would do it it is one of the supposedly the first one in Alberta so we had to get solicitor general approval which we did that took us five six council meetings to explain that we got it approved by council six to one and we also had it approved by our administrator and then after all of this Rick McEver comes out and

says this kind of garbage. And you're like, this is insane, what you say to people. And this is why I want to get him under oath as well as, like, what they, what they do? Rick McIre, are you listening? You can come on. If you bring him on, make sure you set up the lie detector test. No, I'm just kidding. I'm joking.

But, you know, I just hope that, you know, if he does come on, he, he tells the truth. Like, you know, I just, I don't. And with Jeff, I don't think we're going to get until he's actually under oath. You know, I don't know if we're going to get it. I've seen it all. He's going to just keep continuing on this path because he can. Yeah. Challenge has been thrown out there because every example.

Fair enough. He can go on my list of like Rachel Notley and a couple others. He probably doesn't want to be on that list, but I would like, I'd love to sit across from him and sit and chat and do exactly like this because I've allowed to you, you know, the ability for you to just tell your story. And the lovely thing about the audience and the people who listen to us is they, like, they're smarter me. Believe me.

I'm just one single guy. or one person, I should say, that sits across and then this audience goes about what they do. And they're smart. They're not, none of you folks who are listening to this are docile. I mean, they're active and motivated. So I appreciate you guys coming in and doing this and meeting and all the best of luck, I guess, with what comes in the future. And if at any time there's new developments that you think we should know about,

all means we should exchange numbers that way you have it and you can just reach out and we can have a little bit of fun not fun I don't know I think it's fun bringing people up to speed right because if we don't know we don't know and people need to understand what's going on in their municipalities all the way up to their you know provincial federal government so thanks again for coming in and doing this thank you Sean thank you very much thank you