Patrick Brown spins false tale about Ombudsman report on Niagara Region chief administrative officer scandal

On a Facebook page followed by thousands of people, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown falsely claimed Wednesday that the Ontario Ombudsman had “cleared” former Niagara political figures now working in his city of wrongdoing in the 2016 Niagara Region chief administrative officer hiring scandal.

The mayor and former Progressive Conservative party leader also accused the St. Catharines Standard of engaging in a “witch hunt” through its coverage of the Niagara controversy and was responsible for a “smear” against a political aide at the heart of the issue now working in a high-level staff job at the City of Brampton.

The 2019 Ombudsman’s report, which labelled the hiring of Carmen D’Angelo as Niagara Region’s CAO “unjust and wrong,” directly implicated former Port Colborne regional councillor David Barrick, former regional communications director Jason Tamming and former senior regional political aide Robert D’Amboise in a plot that tainted the hiring process.

Brown, however, told the 7,000 members of the Brampton Beats Facebook group the Ombudsman cleared Barrick, now Brampton’s CAO, and that D’Amboise, Barrick’s recently hired administrative assistant, was the victim of a smear campaign.

“Can’t blame the CAO for wanting to have an administrative assistant he trusts and has worked with before,” Brown wrote, referring to D’Amboise’s hiring. “This was an individual cleared of any wrongdoing. He faced a smear in Niagara and overcame it.”

When a member of the group pointed out the Ombudsman report does not clear anyone, Brown doubled down on his narrative.

“Clearly you didn’t read the Ombudsman report,” Brown wrote. “It cleared our CAO. I don’t care about political capital. The only thing I am focused on his (sic) getting things done.”

The Facebook posts are the first time Brown has directly addressed the hiring of Barrick, Tamming and now D’Amboise and their role in the D’Angelo affair.

The inside job

Following more than a year of investigation by the Standard, Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dube launched a probe into D’Angelo’s hiring. Dube’s report, released in November 2019, positions all three men at the heart of a scheme to hire D’Angelo that the Ombudsman called an “inside job” orchestrated from the office of then regional chair Alan Caslin.

Before and during the hiring process, D’Angelo downloaded a series of confidential reports, secret memos and other documents that gave him an advantage over his competition. These documents, largely written by D’Amboise, then Caslin’s policy director, included interview questions and answers and confidential information on other CAO candidates.

D’Angelo initially told the Ombudsman he could not recall who gave him the documents and said they could have been planted in his computer at the Niagara Penninsula Conservation Authority where he worked in 2016. When confronted by Ombudsman investigators with forensic evidence proving the documents were authentic, D’Angelo fingered D’Amboise as the likely source of the documents.

In their joint statement of defence in the civil suit filed against them by Niagara Region, Tamming, D’Amboise and Caslin deny knowing how D’Angelo got the documents.

Tamming, meanwhile, was Caslin’s personal communications director in 2016 and helped D’Angelo write a submission for the hiring committee, which Caslin chaired.

The Ombudsman report showed Barrick was involved in clearing the way for D’Angelo, his boss at Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, before the hiring process started.

The report details a conversation between a regional councillor and a senior regional employee, in which the employee is asked to hire D’Angelo as the next CAO among other senior staff. The Ombudsman report said the councillor said he did not remember the meeting, but investigators found an email in which the councillor thanked the employee for the meeting.

The Standard later obtained that email, which was sent from Barrick to then regional treasurer Jason Burgess.

“Thanks for taking the time to meet today. I appreciate your insight and ability to discuss strategy, etc.,” wrote Barrick, who then provided Burgess with talking points that sang D’Angelo’s praises, including the promise of having “influence” with the new boss.

“That messaging early on may provide ease as we move forward and regional staff start hearing all kind of rumours,” wrote Barrick.

At no point in the report does the Ombudsman clear anyone of wrongdoing. Rather, the report lays out in detail a scheme to secure the Niagara Region CAO position for D’Angelo and the role each man played in that effort.

Get more of what matters in your inbox

Start your morning with everything you need to know, and nothing you don’t. Sign up for First Up, the Star’s new daily email newsletter.

Sign Up Now

Niagara Region forwarded the Ombudsman report to police with a request for further investigation. The Ontario Provincial Police anti-racketeering unit decided not to pursue a criminal investigation. In an email obtained by the Standard, a member of the unit noted there are Provincial Offences Act matters police might have pursued, but the statute of limitations for those offences had run out.

A councillor by no name

Brown did not respond to an interview request from the Standard for this story.

On Thursday morning, the Standard posed several questions to Brown on the Brampton Beats Facebook group — it can only be joined with the permission of the page’s administrators — about his false claims about the Ombudsman report. Brown did not reply and shortly after the questions were posted, the Standard was banned from the page.

However, in response to questions from the Standard’s sister weekly paper The Brampton Guardian, Brown accused the Niagara newspaper of conducting “witch hunt” against Barrick, Tamming and D’Amboise.

Brown did not explain why he thinks the Ombudsman “cleared” Tamming and D’Amboise” but told The Guardian Barrick was not implicated because he is not specifically named in the report.

However, the practice of the Ombudsman is not to name specific people except in rare circumstances. In the report, only D’Angelo is named as the “central figure” of the investigation. Everyone else, including Tamming, D’Amboise and Barrick are identified by their official title.

“Our focus is on administrative conduct, and our intent is never to ‘name, blame and shame’ specific individuals,” the report said, adding that when titles are identified “it should be understood that the titles refer to the individuals who held them at the relevant times.”

In Barrick’s case, the email to Burgess is the same one referred to in the report, further confirming his identity.

Brown did not provide any evidence that any of the men were the victims of a smear campaign, although the claim echoes one made by D’Angelo and his allies at Niagara Region when the tainted hiring process was uncovered.

D’Angelo has repeatedly claimed he was the victim of a “proxy war” between councillors, a claim the Caslin trio repeat in their statement of defence to the Region’s lawsuit.

The Ombudsman’s office declined to comment on Brown’s mischaracterization of the report’s conclusions, saying the report stands on its own merits.