THUNDER BAY — Ontario’s integrity commissioner has cleared Thunder Bay–Superior North MPP Lise Vaugeois after investigating whether she improperly used constituency office resources in creating a partisan NDP newsletter.
Integrity commissioner J. David Wake absolved Vaugeois, even as he found some rules violations by her staff, which he said he accepted had been the result of inexperience, not abuse.
The complaint was filed in January by Whitby PC MPP Lorne Coe, who asked Wake to investigate whether Vaugeois had used constituency resources for partisan purposes in the production of a recent newsletter.
In an interview, Vaugeois gave a defiant response, calling the complaint itself partisan.
“It really amounts to a pretty frivolous complaint made by somebody from the [Progressive] Conservative Party,” she said. “In my job as an opposition MPP, I’ve clearly ruffled some feathers — that’s my job. The fact they came after me to try and undermine my credibility just tells me I’m doing a good job.”
Specifically, Coe alleged Vaugeois’s office featured contact information for her Queen’s Park and constituency offices, as well as the provincial coat of arms, on a newsletter that also promoted NDP membership and sought donations to the party.
It’s a long-accepted parliamentary convention that constituency and legislative resources are not to be used for partisan activities like the riding association newsletter.
In a report, Wake said the evidence established the newsletter was paid for by the Thunder Bay–Superior North NDP riding association.
He concluded the newsletter was prepared by a member of Vaugeois’s constituency office staff, who is also a volunteer with the NDP riding association.
“For the most part, the newsletter was prepared during this individual’s personal time and on a personal computer” in line with the rules, Wake stated.
However, there were “a few instances” in which the staffer admitted to working on the newsletter in the constituency office using an office laptop, during their lunch break — effectively violating parliamentary convention.
Wake said he was inclined to attribute the minor rules violations to the staffer’s inexperience, and not to a meaningful breach by Vaugeois.
“In this case, given the relatively minor nature of the non-compliance by the staffer, the fact that it was early days after the June election and subsequent hiring of staff, and the undertaking given by Ms. Vaugeois to me that this honest mistake will be addressed within her office, I am not prepared to attribute it back to her and make a finding of a breach of parliamentary convention on her part,” he concluded.
Vaugeois said while she didn’t consider the issue a serious violation, it wouldn’t happen again.
“One of my staffers worked on the newsletter over his lunch hour using one of our computers,” she said. “It’s a volunteer thing, and he thought that would be OK. But we’ll just make sure he uses his own computer on his own time.”
“We’ve actually got other volunteers now who work on the newsletter, so fairly easy problem to fix.”
Wake agreed neither the provincial nor the Legislative Assembly’s coat of arms should be used on partisan communications, but called that a common, if “regrettable,” issue.
