Posted on December 11, 2015 @ 16:00 Hrs EST


Former Sudbury Chief of Police Elsner sent an inappropriate message on Twitter to a female police officer....  May lose the job

Fomer Sudbury police Chief Frank Elsner was the subject of a no-confidence vote this week by unionized officers who are members of the Victoria Police Association.

Victoria police board imposed undisclosed discipline against former Sudbury Chief of Police Frank Elsner. Board co-chairwomen Barb Desjardins, mayor of Esquimalt,  said the board is reviewing new “serious” allegations against Elsner, relayed by the police officers’ union, “related to harassment and bullying.” There is a speculation that allegation related to sexual harassment.

Elsner is also expected to appear before Sudbury court to provide answers, case against him false arrest and detention. 

Released on November  19, 2015 at 23:00 EDT,  Posted on December 10, 2015 @ 23:00 EDT
Tag #: 684

Johnston's integrity Saga and Watergate scandal 
City's bureaucrats' attempt to keep the Watergate scandal in secret under Johnston's watch failed

Order MA 3258 against the City - Read here

 Bob (former interim CAO)  -  Johnston is toxic ? 
Incompetence, lack of openness and transparency

Ontario Privacy Commissioner ordered the release of over 9,000 pages of documents related to the Watergate scandal
Benkovich may face fraud charges

Nick Benkovich - Incompetent and controversial practices

Sudbury taxpayers will know very soon how their tax dollars were defrauded by City's Water and Waste water Director Nick Benkovich, who used the emergency water main break repair contracts.

Nick Benkovich, Director of Water and Waste water Services, outsourced repairs of emergency water main breaks.  In 2006, the contract was initially awarded an annual amount of $250,000 and ended up with an annual average of $1.6 million. Later, without any competitive bidding or tender process, the contract was extended for another term. This time (2011), however, the contract was awarded an annual amount of $750,000 and ended with an annual average of $2.8 million.

Freedom of Information Request file to access contract documents of emergency water main repairs. The City continually denied access to the expense details and attempted to permanently bury the scandal. The matter was sent for appeal to the Ontario Privacy Commissioner under Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Jamie Canapini, City Solicitor, and Kristen Newman, Assistant City Solicitor, leading City legal services department opposed the release of the documents under the direct watch of interim CAO Bob Johnston. 

Benkovich had used extraordinary action to prevent access to the information. He seems to have hired a lawyer at the expense of a contractor, in order to attempt to secure the hiding of the information on behalf of the contractor, and objected the release of the information to the public. As the affected party, the contractor did not consent to the disclosure of the remaining information at issue, and further mediation was not possible.  The appellant advised the mediator that he would like this matter to proceed to adjudication where an adjudicator conducts an inquiry.

The WikiLeaks Sudbury legal team successfully countered the City’s arguments. As a result, Diane Smith, Adjudicator of the Ontario Privacy Commissioner's Office, ordered  disclosure of the information at issue in the records.

Further, the adjudicator stated that, "I find that none of the information at issue in the records was supplied by the affected party to the City and that part 2 of the test under section 10(1) has not been met. Since all three parts of the test under section 10(1) must be met to find the information exempt under that exemption, I will order the information at issue in the records disclosed to the appellant."

A recent article published in local news papers identified Bob Johnston as a man with integrity. However under direct watch of Johnston, Benkovich and the City bureaucrats attempted to bury the Watergate scandal. Johnston  should be held accountable for his actions and also for the lack of oversight in the City business. This landmark ruling against the City is a clear indication of Johnston's incompetence and lack of openness and transparency of doing City business.

The Mayor and council took the right decision to terminate Johnston's  service immediately to protect taxpayers. Johnston's attempt to team up with corrupt bureaucrats had thawed.

The People's Mayor Bigger is working on the "Establishment of an intergovernmental working group on asset recovery and dedicated on implementation of its mandate on the return of proceeds of corruption.” Bigger and the Council  are actively participating in the political process of   the implementation of its mandate on the prevention of corruption.

Bigger's approach for an open-ended government is highly commendable. In order to achieve an open and transparent municipal government, Benkovich, City solicitor Canapini, and his assistant Newman must be removed from the City Hall.

Related Document

Privacy Commissioner's office order  MA 3258

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Editorial
Released on November  19, 2015 at 23:00 EDT,  Posted on December 10, 2015 @ 23:00 EDT

This research initially published on  Law & Social Inquiry,40 (2), 345–376. 

Excerpts of the article and brief review as follows

Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? 
Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies    

Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies

Scholars and policymakers contend that corruption, defined as abuse of public office for private gain has a range of negative consequences. It increases social inequality, exacerbates poverty, slows down economic development, and lowers institutional efficiency. Most importantly, corruption is believed to be antithetical to the rule of law. In the short run, it contradicts formal rules and procedures, affecting the distribution of resources, access to justice, and effectiveness of law enforcement institutions. In the long run, it undermines the principles of fairness and equity, encapsulated in the spirit of law, corrodes integrity of the government, and weakens the legitimacy of the state.

This research makes a case for a qualitative, historical approach to the study of the political roots of corruption. Its focus falls specifically on the relationship between authoritarian governance and the abuse of power in street-level bureaucracies. Using micro-level data on under-the-table exchanges between ordinary citizens and bureaucrats in institutions, it evaluates two theoretical propositions that are currently widely accepted in the literature on corruption despite insufficient or conflicting empirical evidence in their support.

The first theoretical proposition suggests that autocratic governance breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second proposition maintains that autocratic elites allow such corruption to flourish in exchange for the political loyalty of the population. An ethnographic and historical analysis of corruption in institutions,  partially repudiates both these hypotheses by distinguishing between political and bureaucratic corruption and revealing their relationship to each other. First, the data from institutions,  suggest that authoritarianism may either breed or suppress bureaucratic corruption. The  institutions' leadership ,  differential treatment of local universities, hospitals, and secondary schools reveals that authoritarian elites can exercise different types of governance over distinct organizational sectors, generating uneven preconditions for corruption across these sectors.

Thus, autocratic leaders tend to tighten controls and accountability mechanisms in organizational sectors that they perceive as politically disloyal, thereby eradicating opportunities for informal transactions among their members. In contrast, organizational sectors, perceived by autocratic elites as apolitical or no threatening, are subjected to lenient governance that generates favourable preconditions for bureaucratic corruption through relaxed controls and loose hierarchies. These findings suggest that while political loyalty is an important mediator of the effect that authoritarianism has on corruption, the relationship between the regime, economic informality, and political dissidence may differ from the predictions of political theorists. Thus, in the  institutions  case, the government deprived politically disloyal organizations of corruption opportunities instead of using corruption as an incentive to promote political loyalty. While this finding does not render the latter scenario impossible, it suggests that the link between autocracy and corruption is more complex than current theories would have us believe.

The first theoretical proposition discussed in this article suggests that authoritarianism generates favourable conditions for the abuse of public office for private gain. Public choice theorists argue that corruption rates are directly proportional to the degree of monopoly that office holders have over a specific bureaucratic domain and inversely proportional to accountability requirements that they bear. Based on public choice theory, corruption is likely to be high in autocratic societies, characterized by low public accountability and misaligned incentive structures within extensive governmental bureaucracies. Due to poverty and red tape, their citizens perceive corruption as beneficial or even inevitable and, since autocracies lack economic competition, free press, and bureaucratic checks-and-balances, the risk of punishment associated with corruption is often minimal.

The main weakness of these studies lies in their inability to differentiate between the capture of political power by elites (political corruption) and small-scale informal Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? The data used by cross-national econometric studies of corruption do not distinguish between these two types of informality. Most come in the form of numeric indicators assigned to each country annually or biannually based on surveys of local and Western experts and businesses. These indices combine expert perceptions of state capture by criminal groups, abuse of power by politicians, and bureaucratic corruption.

Most importantly, however, this study raises a number of crucial questions that had not been previously considered by anticorruption scholars. Although it is a common consensus that civil society is necessary for the eradication of corruption, little work has been carried out on the varieties and social desirability of transparency. Thus, not all absence of corruption is equally empowering for ordinary citizens or conducive to the development of a collective sense of universalism and personal efficacy. Whether or not such forced and instrumental transparency is a better platform for the development of democratic norms and practices than petty corruption and clientelism is an empirical question that socio-legal scholars should integrate into their assessments of anticorruption initiatives.

Editor
WikiLeaks Sudbury

Related document
Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption?

Reference
Zaloznaya, M. (2015). Does Authoritarianism Breed Corruption? Reconsidering the Relationship Between Authoritarian Governance and Corrupt Exchanges in Bureaucracies.  Law & Social Inquiry,40 (2), 345–376.