Briefly: Ethics commissioner’s report on New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone’s dubious Dubai vacation disclosed, finds he breached rules.
Bob Mackin
The leader of New Westminster’s NDP-aligned civic party broke laws when he took a luxury junket to the United Nations COP28 climate change conference in Dubai from a foreign lobby group.
City ethics commissioner Jennifer Devins found Mayor Patrick Johnstone of Community First New West ran afoul of the city’s code of conduct and the Community Charter for the $15,000 worth of flights, hotel accommodation and meals paid by C40 Cities.
New Westminster Mayor Patrick Johnstone in Dubai (Johnstone/Instagram)
The organization’s funders include the governments of Germany, United Kingdom and Denmark, Bloomberg Philanthropies, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and corporations like FedEx, Google, IKEA, Zurich Insurance and Novo Nordisk.
Section 105 of the Community Charter states that a council member must not accept a gift or personal benefit that is connected with the performance of duties of office, unless the gift or personal benefit is related to protocol or social obligations normally attached to the duties of office.
Devins’s Sept. 23 report determined the conference attendance was the only gift or personal benefit that met the legal exception. However, she ruled that Johnstone acted inadvertently, “the result of an error in judgment made in good faith” and recommended he receive coaching or training as punishment.
“While they may not be lobbyists in the traditional sense, particularly as it is reportedly a global network of mayors, [C40 Cities] have the stated goal of influencing government policies,” Devins wrote. “The fact that its goals align with the city’s current stated objectives does not remove this potential conflict. Public perception, rightly or wrongly, may be that by accepting the trip, [Johnstone] could be more easily influenced to implement climate change initiatives if approached by C40 Cities.”
Councillors Daniel Fontaine and Paul Minhas of the New West Progressives filed the complaint last February. Fontaine declined comment on Oct. 30, because the matter is going before council on Nov. 4. New West Progressives president Karima Budhwani said Johnstone should receive more than a coaching session for the misconduct.
“Our community has higher expectations, they expect him to do the right thing,” Budhwani said. “Either return the $15,000 or donate them to a charity in New Westminster, and, as well, apologize to the residents.”
Johnstone did not seek city council approval before the Nov. 29-Dec. 7 trip, on which he travelled with New Westminster climate action manager Leya Behra. Fontaine had previously said he discovered Johnstone was in Dubai from Johnstone’s own social media channels.
On his blog in December 2023, Johnstone wrote that the adventure began when he received an email “from out of the blue.”
The Nov. 3, 2023 invitation to the Local Climate Action Summit at COP28 came from Michael Bloomberg, the C40 board president, ex-New York mayor and United Nations special envoy, and Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the president of the Dubai hosting committee.
“It was so out of the blue that I joked to my [executive assistant] about it – could you imagine going to Dubai? – and dismissed the invitation pretty quickly,” Johnstone wrote. He eventually had a change of heart.
In his defence, Johnstone told Devins that the Fontaine and Minhas complaint was unfounded, based on false assertions and vexatious.
“The respondent asserts that the language and allegations used by the complainants are intended to cast aspersions on his character and integrity, which he believes to be the goal of the complainants,” Devins wrote.
Johnstone told Devins that an in-house city lawyer advised him that the trip likely did not constitute a gift under the Community Charter. An external lawyer, however, told him that attendance likely did constitute a gift or personal benefit, but fell within the protocol exception.
Meanwhile, Devins found that Johnstone met the requirements of section 106 of the Community Charter when he submitted a timely disclosure statement on Dec. 21 to the city’s corporate officer containing the cost of travel, lodging and meals for the trip.
Johnstone sat for two terms as a city councillor from 2014 to 2022 before his election as mayor. He had previously worked as a contaminated sites specialist for City of Richmond, City of Vancouver, the Illinois State Geological Survey and SNC-Lavalin.
NEW: Subscribe to theBreaker.news on Substack. Find out how: Click here.
