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| Councillor Steve Sainsbury |
Has Tomlinson worn out his welcome in Kearney?
We posed that question here and so far 350 citizens of Kearney have said YES. Now we know that a majority of Kearney's council also agree.
Councillor Steve Sainsbury has been increasingly distancing himself from the other members of the Proudfoot Four as they've embarrassed themselves and the town again and again with their antics. But no one expected it when Sainsbury, at the council meeting on Friday, September 7, 2012, tabled a motion asking council to demand Mayor Paul Tomlinson's resignation. Mayor Tomlinson has a history of harassing and bullying the town staff and town citizens, and a majority of Council agreed that it would just be a matter of time before Tomlinson did it again. Of the six councillors that voted, the only two that thought Tomlinson was still doing a bang-up job were fellow bully Councillor Barry Dingwall and Tomlinson's meat-puppet Deputy Mayor Louise Wadsworth. (Are you surprised?) Sadly, if Deputy Mayor Wadsworth becomes acting mayor it will allow Tomlinson to still govern as mayor in exile. And Dingwall will happily step in to harass and bully people in Tomlinson's stead.
We posed that question here and so far 350 citizens of Kearney have said YES. Now we know that a majority of Kearney's council also agree.
Councillor Steve Sainsbury has been increasingly distancing himself from the other members of the Proudfoot Four as they've embarrassed themselves and the town again and again with their antics. But no one expected it when Sainsbury, at the council meeting on Friday, September 7, 2012, tabled a motion asking council to demand Mayor Paul Tomlinson's resignation. Mayor Tomlinson has a history of harassing and bullying the town staff and town citizens, and a majority of Council agreed that it would just be a matter of time before Tomlinson did it again. Of the six councillors that voted, the only two that thought Tomlinson was still doing a bang-up job were fellow bully Councillor Barry Dingwall and Tomlinson's meat-puppet Deputy Mayor Louise Wadsworth. (Are you surprised?) Sadly, if Deputy Mayor Wadsworth becomes acting mayor it will allow Tomlinson to still govern as mayor in exile. And Dingwall will happily step in to harass and bully people in Tomlinson's stead.
Not surprisingly, Tomlinson is refusing to resign saying that the people elected him (thank you, people of Proudfoot) and he will serve his full term. This despite the petition, the people of Kearney presented to the Town this week, demanding Tomlinson's resignation. That means that Council will have to censure Tomlinson and not allow him to take his seat at the council table. He'd still be mayor, but have no voice or vote (except through Wadsworth). The other option is to apply to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to have Tomlinson's mayoral status revoked.
But the fun didn't end there. Along with Mary Beth Hartill of the Almaguin News, a reporter from the Queens Park Review (a publication of the Toronto Star) was also in attendance with her video camera. Naturally, Councillor Barry Dingwall objected to the video-taping of the meeting and the matter was put to a vote. Council voted in favour of allowing the video-taping and the standing-room-only crowd was treated to Dingwall turning purple and sputtering and fuming before being booed down by the crowd. Stupid democracy, eh Barry?
But let's go back to Councillor Steve Sainsbury. There's still a taint on him from the Tim Brown fee waiving debacle and the ill-conceived abolition of the wards in Kearney, but in the grand scheme of things Sainsbury has been demonstrating that he'll put the greater good ahead of whatever alliances he may have had with Tomlinson, Dingwall, and Wadsworth. Nobody's perfect, and compared to some of the real "can't do" clunks we have on council, Sainsbury's practically golden.
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