Some days I get tired of researching and recording dates, times, details, etc.. However, when you know that a man as powerful as our Mayor will have his people question your comments, it becomes an important part of everything you write.

So having said that… I will spare you some of the details but they are certainly available.

Our Council members have all taken oaths of office. They are all bound by a code of conduct and are to abide by a Policy known as a Procedural Bylaw.

In order to introduce a new agenda item, council members are to prepare and submit a “notice of motion”. The notice of motion is to be read without comment at the meeting and then it is to be tabled at the next meeting.

I am not aware of exception to this procedure, but there must be something I am missing, because a notice of motion appears to have been lost in the process somewhere.

Councilor Joe Belanger was found guilty of breaching the Code of Conduct several times during his last term of office. During this term of office, he feels that he should be able to reverse those decisions and have his lost pay (punishment for his breaches) reimbursed.

So… in order to get his money back, he introduced a Notice of motion asking the current council to review the previous punishments. I believe that was in January 2024. According to policy, the motion should have been in the agenda of the next meeting. It was not.

I wrote extensive discussions about this at the time (see discussion 31) and I followed up with the town a couple of months later. I was informed it would be on a future agenda.

So, I waited and here it is April and still the notice of motion has NOT come to the Council table.

Why is this? Is it possible that at the time of the notice of motion, we raised enough awareness that Councilor Belanger knew he would not find someone to second the motion?

Is it possible that the integrity Commisioner was consulted and Council was advised that they could not fulfill his request?

Is it possible it was quietly withdrawn (with no public notice) because Councillor Belanger would have been found to have had a pecuniary interest?

There have been online discussions surrounding the coincidence that Councilor Belanger’s recent reimbursement for previously unclaimed expenses for 7 years happens to be a similar dollar amount to what was asked for in the seemingly abandoned notice of motion. But that MUST just be a coincidence!

What bothers me the most about this is that we have a Mayor, a Deputy Mayor and 4 other Council members who have NOT raised this issue publicly during the “Notice of Motion” section of our Council meetings.

This should have become a motion at the very next meeting! Oh…. They may just do it now that we point it out, but WHY hasn’t even one of them questioned this when the Mayor reads that part of every agenda. Perhaps, just like Joe Belanger said about his forgotten expenses…. It was just an oversight on ALL of their behalf’s?

Another possibility is that this matter was dealt with in camera (behind closed doors), but any decision made in camera would be shared publicly so that doesn’t add up.

Why should residents of Wasaga Beach always have to dig for answers that procedurally should have been answered months earlier.

I guess the most important person to ask directly is Councilor Belanger himself. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask all 7.