By Steve Hubrecht
A former Canal Flats councillor sought to raise concerns about village issues during last week’s council meeting, but her letter was expunged from the agenda.
Marie Delorme served on Canal Flats council for more than a decade from 2011 to 2022. Although she’s no longer a councillor, Delorme has continued to follow municipal issues and has spoken as a resident at several council meetings or public meetings in the past few years. She also wrote an opinion piece covering several hot topics in the village newsletter during last summer’s contentious council by-election.
More recently, Delorme sent a letter to the current Canal Flats council outlining her worries about several issues. But precisely which issues Delorme wanted to address, and precisely what her concerns are isn’t clear, since her letter has been removed from the public record.
The letter was initially included along with other publicly available documents on the agenda for the March 24 meeting, but the first order of business was to remove the letter from the agenda. It was expunged because it touched on sensitive points that could get Canal Flats council into legal trouble if councillors publicly discussed them.
Delorme was at the meeting, along with a few other concerned residents. Although Delorme was understanding about the potential for legal issues, she still wanted answers to her questions.
“You did email me and tell me it would be on the agenda, and you did email me and say that the answers (to the questions in the letter) were forthcoming in a week. On the agenda it says it would be a written response,” said Delorme.
Canal Flats chief administrative officer Sylvie Hoobanoff and mayor Mark Doherty explained that the village still plans to send a written response to Delorme, and they confirmed that if they are not allowed to answer specific questions due to legal reasons, that will be indicated in the response letter.
“It’s really disturbing when you go to Facebook and you see information there (about village issues),” said Canal Flats resident Pat Schwartz.
“We can’t comment on (Delorme’s) letter itself,” replied Doherty, but he added Schwartz could send in her own letter with questions, and the village will reply.
“If I send in my list of questions, how long would it take to get answers to those?” asked Schwartz.
“We don’t know without knowing the questions,” replied Hoobanoff.
