PREFACE: For the purposes of historical accuracy and wanting my remarks to be preserved, I am going to share a copy of the speech Mat Siscoe, the current mayor of St. Catharines, didn’t want you to hear.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

To quote Suzy Kassem: “Capitalism is a social system owned by the capitalistic class, a small network of very wealthy and powerful businessmen, who compromise the health and security of the general population for corporate gain.”

Please bear with me for a moment as I read a letter unearthed from the City’s vault.

Dated: Thursday, June 25th, 2020, 10:20 a.m.
From: Aaron Collina, CEO of Movengo.
To: Brian York and Walter Sendzik.
Subject: “RE: GM Lands Meeting with Mortgagee 249.”

And I quote: “Gentlemen, Confidentially. Thank you for the the call. The below are the notes on a confidential and without prejudice basis. As briefly discussed to help achieve a great outcome for both myself and the city on the site. Please advise if I have mis understood the below so I can help move forward.” End quote.

As I read through this six-year-old email between the former mayor and the City’s current Director of Economic Development and Government Relations, I will do my best to preserve the language and intent of the email as much as possible, even when and where the grammar and agonizing syntax make that difficult. Based on a plain reading of this email, it was sent confidentially to Brian York and the former mayor to ensure that Aaron Collina had fully and accurately captured the details of this clandestine meeting.

And I quote: “Opinion is 100% probability of change in use of residential mixed use.” The email continues: “City will look into their ability to transfer or assumption of erfa or GM covenants regarding enviro risk to city in exchange for a res mixed use land use.” End quote.

This has to be one of the more poorly constructed and disoriented sentences in an already obnoxious email. But what it appears to say, in plain English, is that the City of St. Catharines would look into assuming the millions of dollars in remediation and cleanup obligations associated with this privately owned property, so long as the City also rezoned the property (for the benefit of the developer).

If I have mischaracterized something, or if I am missing something, I encourage the author of this email, Aaron Collina of Winona, Ontario, who also sometimes summers in Stoney Creek, or Mr. Sendzik or Mr. York, to explain it. I am also open to hearing where, exactly, the downside is for the developer.

The City assumes the liability for the cleanup. The City facilitates the rezoning of the property. And the developer gets all the benefit. That is the arrangement described in this email.

The timeline is important. This email was written in June 2020. Two years later, in 2022, Sendzik is out and Aaron Collina became a campaign benefactor of Mayor Mat Siscoe and councillor Robin McPherson. By then, the conversation about the future of the GM lands had not gone away. The property was still there. The environmental problems were still there. The development ambitions were still there. And the City was still involved. Whatever was discussed in that room in 2020, it clearly wasn’t the end of the story.

Circling back to the email: “City will look into or write letter to MPCA add some pressure to possibly accept transfer of slope. Their job is to preserve water way.” End quote.

Setting aside the fact that Aaron Collina apparently wasn’t sure what the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority was, or even what it was actually called, he seems quite pleased with the prospect of the City exerting outside pressure on the NPCA to take on the financial liability for cleaning up a mess that is the responsibility of the private company that own’s the property.

Never has there been a clearer example of the misuse of political office and the levers of power. Think about what is being contemplated here. The City of St. Catharines, the 17th largest city in Ontario, would solicit a community-based natural resource management agency whose mandate is to protect, enhance and sustain healthy watersheds, in an effort to transfer the risk and financial burden of cleaning up a contaminated industrial property. A property burdened by decades of unsafe, possibly illegal industrial dumping, contamination, neglect, and abandonment. A property purchased by private developers. And instead of those developers bearing the full exposure, cost, and responsibility associated with that property, the plan appears to be to find someone else to carry the risk. The City. The NPCA. And ultimately, the taxpayers. That is grotesque!

And if anyone wants to lay all of this at the feet of a former mayor and cosplaying-radio-DJ, I want to end with two final lines from the email.

And I quote: “As of now city agreed to take on financing of secondary plan. By end of summer CIP will be in front issue.” End quote.

Again, setting aside the grammatical train wreck that is this sentence, the message behind it is remarkably easy to understand. The City had agreed to finance the secondary plan. And by the end of the summer, the Community Improvement Plan would be “moving forward.”

It would appear that the current, and likely outgoing, mayor of St. Catharines, Mat Siscoe, has picked up the to-do list from his friend Aaron and is checking off the remaining tasks. The City has already put hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars into a no-bid tender for a secondary plan that helps out the same development interests. And, as promised, the CIP is “front and centre.”

The same interests that, two years after this email was written, contributed to the political campaigns of the people now responsible for carrying this plan forward.

As is so often the case with corporate welfare: Privatize the profits. Socialize the losses. And somehow convince the people paying the bill that they are the ones getting the deal. As the old adage goes; “If you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.”

Six years ago, Brian York, Walter Sendzik and Aaron Collina were having “conversations” about how to get the NPCA and the taxpayers of the City of St. Catharines to assume the debt, risk and responsibility associated with cleaning up a contaminated industrial property on behalf of several for-profit companies.

The residents of this city weren’t at that table. They weren’t included in the email chains. They weren’t ‘part of the conversations’ shaping decisions that could leave them carrying the financial burden for years to come. But was their health was at that table. It was their prosperity was at that table. And the financial health of this city certainly wasn’t at that table. Instead, our health, prosperity, and financial exposure were being served up to some ravenous corporate appetite.

And here we are, as promised by York and Sendzik, and cheerfully and carried out by Siscoe for the sole benefit of a for-profit corporation with no ties to the city, the taxpayers of the City of St. Catharines assume all the debt, risk and responsibility.

Mat, on behalf of BayShore, a company run by a convicted extortionist, and in the service of Movengo, Aaron thanks you for your continued patronage. His investment in you in 2022 was money well spent. And in closing, given that this meeting and this email were apparently meant to remain “off the books, secret, and confidential…” Please, don’t tell anyone I told you.