Where's The Basse Report
- "Good Morning Mr. Arditti,
It is my understanding that the report will be made public Friday and I will have my office email you a copy at that time.
If anything changes and it is released sooner than Friday, I will forward it to you at that time."
My question is a simple one: why has it not been released already.
It has been shown to Council in camera. The media know all about it and it is finished.
Why do we have to wait until Friday?
Come, come now....you ought to know. As Councillor Bill Marra said:
- "Marra believes a politician was the source of the leak."
That had to come from something Mr. Basse wrote in his Report or discussed with Council.
Oh my, that means the City was at fault and all of the blame on CUPE or the fellow from the other Union was not true at all but an attempt to deflect attention from the real culprit!
Who could it be---the Mayor, a hardliner or a softliner or more than one?
No doubt we are going to be made to believe that the person is the one mentioned in the Eh-Channel News report about the second investigation by Basse. That is the Report supposedly not complete yet where a Councillor made hundreds of phone calls to CUPE's Jean Fox.
Why I would expect that it will be completed by Friday and ready for distribution at exactly the same time as the Basse Report.
People will automatically be conditioned to think the worst even if the Councillor has a perfectly reasonable explanation. That person will be blamed for the leak and smeared regardless of what is said. Even though there might be a straight-forward reason why the calls were made, who is going to believe the Councillor.
It means that the blame for the real person at fault will be submerged in all of the brouhaha and calls for resignation and worse. I can hardly wait for the demands to "move on" so the real party will never be known.
Of course, the Councillor has a simple way to handle it but I will let his/her lawyer deal with it.
Naturally, the whole episode means more wars at Council to make it even more dysfunctional than it is now.
That's politics baby.
UPDATE
Now we should be able to guess why we needed the leak about the second Basse Report and why the first Basse Report was not released as it should have been immediately on the City's website on Monday night.
Once there was a leak about report #2, and to Eh-Channel as well as good theatre, Jones was doomed.
Who cares about it now. Councillor Jones has been named by the Star. And in such a nice way too:
- "The Star has learned from a number of sources that the phone log in question lists calls made on Coun. Ron Jones’s cellphone to CUPE Local 543 president Jean Fox.
Fox, who represented inside workers during the bitter 101-day strike, wouldn’t identify the caller but admitted she received many calls during the labour dispute from a councillor who is a lifelong family friend. She said the calls were always of a “personal, friendly nature” and never dealt with any of the bargaining issues regularly dealt with by council meeting in camera.
Jones won’t admit he was the one on the line or that he’s the target of the latest probe by the integrity commissioner.
“I’m not going to comment on things discussed in camera,” he said Wednesday. Eventually, however, Basse’s findings should become part of the public record.
“Everything will come out in the wash,” said Jones.
Recently released minutes of council’s in camera voting record during the strike showed Jones was one of only several councillors who regularly sided with the union bargaining team’s positions. He was also at Fox’s side last month in court when the Local 543 leader sought and obtained a restraining order against an anti-CUPE protester she testified had harassed and stalked her.
The mayor and councillors contacted Wednesday declined comment on the propriety of a councillor with inside knowledge of the employer’s bargaining strategy allegedly calling one of the leaders of the striking union more than twice a day on average over the course of a long labour dispute."
Should this prompt an investigation too since the Star got this information from "a number of sources" who obviously had to be in attendance at the Monday in camera meeting. Where is the Mayor's call for sworn affidavits now?
Of course, the Mayor and Councillors must know exactly why Jones called Fox during the strike period. It had to have been discussed at their session.
It is very obvious if you know some of the background, entirely innocent and quite praiseworthy. I better not say anything more or else someone will be accused of leaking information to me! I will let one of the traditional media types discover it for themselves.
However, the end result is that Jones will be crucified, smeared and I am waiting for the calls for his resignation.
The real leakor must be laughing all the way to the polls. A perfect distraction has been created. You just watch and see.
I just wonder who could have figured out how to create and then carry out this stratagem.
The real question that needs to be asked is why the Second Report was carried out and who at City Hall knew about it in advance. Did Basse get permission from someone to do it because he would be charging a fee for it? That information alone will give us all of the answers we need to determine who the real Leakor was.
Now Council has no choice but to demand a judicial inquiry to investigate everything that has gone on. This whole episode stinks.
Now you know also why CUPE workers have to sue for their $30M and get the OLRB complaint going. We need people testifying under oath. It's all part of the anti-CUPE war
As I said, that's politics baby.
UPDATE 2
Check the online Star. It has started already.
posted by JoeBlog at 8:35 a.m.
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