Sewer gate if counsellors were employees
Let’s imagine that you are a very wealthy landholder with extensive properties. (Perhaps you are the Queen). You employ a Property Managers to take care of the day to day operations for you including, ultimately, supervising all of the employees. The Property Managers mention that the bacteria count in one of the streams and lakes are extremely high and put up a few signs so that your friends and family are made aware. What the Property Managers do not tell you is that one or more of the employees left a sewer gate partly opened and that sewage had been leaking into the stream and lake for four and a half years … constantly. About ten months after the Property Managers became aware of this grievous error you found out on your own.
When you confront the Property Managers, appalled that this information was not immediately disclosed to you, excuses are made. You are told that the Property Managers received legal advice indicating that keeping the four and a half year leak a secret from you and your friends and family might lessen any fine that will eventually be levied by the Ministry of Environment for the leak. Basically, since you are the one who would have to pay the fine keeping this a secret was for your own good. Of course it was you and your friends and family that had been exposed to this effluent over a four and a half year period. Would you have just cause to fire your employees, the Property Managers, without notice or pay in lieu of notice? The answer is quite clearly yes. The Property Managers have breeched their obligation of honesty and good faith that they owe you as an employer. Any judge would accept that the necessary relationship of trust has been destroyed by the Property Managers’ actions.
The problem, of course, is that if you have signed a four year contract that is fixed and has no clause allowing for termination before the four years is up even if there is just cause. You have a problem. You can send the Property Managers home but you still have to pay them for the rest of the four years. You might decide that since you’re going to have to pay them no matter what happens you might as well get what work you can out of them for the remainder of their contract and then simply not renew.
Of course the citizens of Hamilton do not have a legal way to send our Counsellors home even if we were willing to pay them for the rest of their term. Some would argue that that is as it should be. Counsellors are elected to make hard decisions and if we could recall them every time a majority disagreed it could lead to administrative mayhem. Regardless, in the absence of an impeachment option it will be up to the electors to decide.
