By Pepper Parr
July 24th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON.
I have written extensively on the difficulty in getting information from the politicians, City Hall and the Regional governments to keep the public informed.
We were aware of a report that listed the names of streets on which houses were flooded and the number of homes that were flooded; not the address of the homes – just the number of homes on the street.
The data in the report came from the information the Region collected through their 311 service.
The data wasn’t providing the actual address of the homes – just the number of homes on each street.
Over a period of five days we bantered back and forth with the Regional media people.
We managed to get some of the information from material ward 5 Councillor Paul Sharman had sent out to his constituents (but not the Gazette) which had most of the information we were looking for.
Hours after publishing that data we got the following from the Region.
“Neighbourhoods who have been impacted by the recent floods continue to recover, and out of respect for their situations right now, we are not sharing impacted street information at this time.”
What a piece of crap: And we rely on these people to keep us fully informed?
Statements like this get approved at a higher level which at the Region would probably mean Jane McCaskill, the Chief Administration Officer . The decision not to make the data available might be for liability reasons – lawyers would want that information
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Governments at all levels more and more are treating constituents like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark and feeding us horse manure.
Their cover is a tightly managed and taxpayer funded communication machine. Forget 1984 this is reminiscent of 1939.
THIS IS NOT TRANSPARENCY IT IS CALLED COVERING BUTTS!!!!!!