Last Updated on: 3rd March 2015, 03:45 pm
I’m going to assume though I may be wrong that the good citizens of Huntsville, Ontario had not seen the kind of dumbass side of Claude Doughty before they elected him mayor.
The reason I bring him up are the comments he made after a series of emails between himself and Tony Clement relating to shady dealings before the G8 summit were discovered and publicized by the NDP. These dealings, in case you’ve forgotten, are among the ones that saw a shiteload of money sneakily spent on sprucing up and building things in areas nowhere near where anything was actually happening.
When they were discovered, what do you suppose Doughty did? Did he apologize? Not so much. Did he try to deny them? Thankfully no. What he did do was say this, which is good for no one.
“To me, these emails are conversation … but they’re in a form that’s now reproduceable,” he said.
“I guess we’re all going to go back to telephones.”
Doughty pointed out that the telephone is another mode of electronic communication, but unlike email, phone conversations aren’t “reproduceable.”
“I guess that stocks in Bell telephone are going to go up because everybody’s going to talk on the phone again.”
Not reproduceable? Try telling that to…oh, I dunno, pretty much everybody who’s ever been arrested for something serious and complicated.
And geesh, corrupt sounding much?
Among the other things this poor fellow appears not to have a handle on is what constitutes a press conference. I always thought it was a meeting with reporters, but thanks to Mr. Doughty here, I have been shown the error of my ways…or something like that.
Doughty betrayed some naivete in dealing with the media. When a national reporter showed up at last week’s meeting with local reporters, Doughty issued a statement saying it was “a private meeting”and “not a press conference open to all.”
Behind the closed doors of the meeting, he continued to insist it wasn’t a press conference but eventually allowed local reporters to record it.
Somebody looks to have graduated from the Harper Government school of media relations, yes? And if this story doesn’t represent an isolated incident, somebody’s also lucky that municipal election time doesn’t come around for a while. Then again, if this is any indication, he might have a decent future as a United States Republican.