Blind trust and the Sarnia police board failures

In Nathan’s latest column, he questions why candidates who enabled the Sarnia Police Service’s failures — through blind deference to a suspended chief and a $231M vanity project — are now seeking your vote. Blind trust has costs. Sarnia deserves better.

I’m genuinely surprised that several people who played key roles in the Sarnia Police Service’s recent governance and budget controversies are now asking for your vote to lead this city.

If we want to stop our tax dollars from being swallowed by top-heavy institutional vanity projects, we have to stop electing people who let bureaucracies do their thinking for them. This election season, when these candidates knock on your door, don’t ask them if they love Sarnia — ask them why they refused to look at the receipts. Blind trust is a luxury our neighbourhood budgets simply cannot afford.

We watched a suspended chief push a massive police facility proposal — a build whose lifetime cost with interest would have hit Sarnia taxpayers around $231 million over 30 years before public outcry and board shifts finally took it off the table.

We saw manipulative media releases, an over-focus on shiny new tools and militarization upgrades instead of front-line officers on the ground, and the department’s own Facebook page turned into a toxic gossip and public shaming platform. We saw attempts to use public tax dollars to fund a $1.5 million defamation lawsuit aimed at silencing investigative journalism before that funding decision was forced into a reversal. And we saw public town halls framed as "consultation" long after the core direction had already been selected behind closed doors.

Through these consecutive controversies, key Police Services Board members followed the administrative lead with little visible scrutiny or meaningful pushback.

The Board Record:

• Councillor Chrissy McRoberts (mayoral candidate): McRoberts presents as a compassionate, boots-on-the-ground community champion, and that desire to protect neighbors is genuine. Yet her role on the Police Services Board revealed a profound structural blind spot. She consistently backed the administrative vision on the massive building project, supported taxpayer-funded promotional videos to pitch it, and voted for communication protocols that centralized public messaging while limiting public transparency. Her public record shows a consistent pattern of treating top-heavy administrative demands with automatic support rather than executing the rigorous financial oversight required of an independent civilian scrutineer.
   
• Councillor Anne Marie Gillis (long-time board member and Vice-Chair): The classic career politician. I’ve rarely seen anyone grab a microphone more often to deliver empty talk about "modernization" and "progress" while promoting and voting through whatever agenda the institutional staff placed directly in front of her. Long service on an oversight body carries direct responsibility for its record, and voters are entitled to ask where her visible skepticism or resistance ever manifested.
   
• Paul Wiersma (former board chair, now running for council): Wiersma stated that city councillors on the police board “don’t represent City Council” once they step inside the station. He also acknowledged that the public town halls on the facility were never designed as open-ended consultations, given that the core decisions had been determined a year prior. (See my open letter to Paul Wiersma here). This position effectively attempted to insulate the single largest item on your municipal tax bill from direct public accountability.

These individuals weren’t acting as independent civilian scrutineers. Their public record shows a pattern of approving the ambitions of senior management, offering political framing, and voting it through. While current workplace investigations and administrative suspensions are not final findings of misconduct, this severe management turmoil makes the board's previous oversight record the most critical issue of this election. The public has a right to ask whether clear warning signs were missed, and whether the board became too deferential to the institution it was tasked to oversee.

This approach delivered closed-door decisions, public relations disguised as community consultation, and a persistent focus on top-heavy institutional expansion over real community safety.

To Chrissy, Anne Marie, Paul, and the rest: Before asking Sarnia to trust you with the mayor’s office or council seats, you need to account for your recorded history on the Police Services Board. Own the enablement of an unchecked, centralized institutional vision.

Show us you’ve learned that blind deference isn’t leadership. Until then, why should citizens believe more of the same won’t produce more of the same expensive distractions and institutional protection?

Sarnia does not need elected officials who merely approve the ambitions of powerful bureaucracies. It needs representatives with the guts to examine evidence, challenge authority, demand transparency, and ensure that public bodies actually serve the people—not the other way around.

If you want different, vote accordingly this election.