I sent two letters to Council concerning Devours!’ request to amend its Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Town. See my December 6th and December 15th posts, below. (The posts, to make sense, should be read in chronological order.).
Council approved the proposed amendment to the MOU at the December 17th council meeting.
At the Council’s Committee of the Whole meeting, December 3, 2024, and at the Council meeting, December 17, 2024, the issues raised and the questions posed in my two letters, and in a letter written by another resident, were not addressed.
The recently elected members of council acted irresponsibly and unreasonably. To be clear, the issue is not whether the Council’s decision to amend the MOU was the right one to make. Rather, the issue is how the Council arrived at its decision.
$100,000.00 is a lot of money. Members of council acted irresponsibly when, contrary to their fiduciary duty to the electorate, they failed to seriously consider the possibility of seeking the return of $50,000.00 the Town had already paid to Devour! and of not paying the second $50,000.00 instalment.
The Supreme Court of Canada wrote in Dunsmuir v. New Brunswick, 2008 SCC 9 at para. 47: “In judicial review, reasonableness is concerned mostly with the existence of justification, transparency and intelligibility within the decision-making process”
Based on the Dunsmuir description of “reasonableness” the members of council acted unreasonably. There was no justification provided for the decision the Council made. Why the Staff did not raise the possibility of the Town seeking the the return of the $100,00.00 grant remains a mystery. Questions asked remain unanswered and the Town’s decision-making process is unintelligible.