First post of the day
The beat goes on. Did Bob Spooner vote Yea or Nay. The audience and the tallyman heard what they though to be Nay but that does sound an awful lot like a nasal Nyay. Anyway that doesn't matter because he told the tallyman to change the result and he committed himself on the Yea side. All he has to do is live with himself!
3 comments:
I am the original "anonymous" about the Spooner vote-change trick. For the record, I am NOT any of the "anonymous" since then until now --though those anonymouses had interesting comments. Every person I spoke to who was at the meeting all agree Bob Spooner cast a "Nay" vote. Every person I spoke to who watched the meeting on TVCogeco agree Bob Spooner cast a "Nay" vote. People at the meeting and watching on TV all agree that the Town Clerk read it back that way and Councillor Spooner did not correct her. The vote was announced as 5 - 2.
The fact that the Town Clerk acknowledges a change happened THE NEXT MORNING clearly confirms that Spooner voted "nay" at the meeting. He was not correcting an error. He was changing his vote after the fact.
What is the legality, in a Recorded Vote, to cast the vote one way at the meeting and then change it the following morning? What does the Municipal Act say about this?
As is his habit, the morning of Tuesday March 10, Councillor Spooner was out and about in different places downtown. He told anyone who asked that he had voted "Nay" and also said he went into the in-camera meeting that came right after the meeting with the censure vote to tell all who voted "Yay" that he did not agree what they did. Apparently he underwent an adjustment to his p.o.v. soon after that, contacted Lorraine Brace and changed his vote. Make no mistake. He changed his vote. He did not just correct an error in the way everyone else in the world heard him. Who gave him a viewpoint adjustment? How can this be "not important"? Councillors know a recorded vote is a significant event. How can such a significant formal procedure be revised 16 hours after the fact? Ben, what does the Municipal Act or Robert's Rules say about changing a vote after the vote is taken and announced, after the meeting ends, after 16 hours elapses? To know what he did, we don't need Spooner to tell us what he did, we saw it for ourselves. We need him or someone to tell us why he did it. We need Mayor Delanty or someone to tell us why he was allowed to do it.
I bet the Mayor didn't know about the kerfuffle until he read about it here. The whole affair is quite embarrassing and the less said about it the better!
The first thing that I thought was to wonder who changed his mind for him?
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