An important lesson for Council

So much for transparency.

That’s the feedback, quite loudly, from many corners of the community, especially on social media, about the hush-hush Dean Montour settlement last week.

In a story broken by The Eastern Door, we revealed to the community that Dean Montour was suing his former employers for what amounted to wrongful dismissal, but it was also aimed directly at former little Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK) chief, who is now big chief, Cody Diabo, because he accused Montour of malfeasance when Montour was head of Mohawk Online.

It didn’t go well when a few chiefs, who were later sanctioned quietly (another story broken by The Eastern Door), revealed contents of a meeting in which Diabo pointed the finger at Montour.

Even worse, when Montour shared his point of view with The Eastern Door, the MCK countersued him for speaking to the community in our pages, accusing him of defamation for expressing his opinion.

To say all of this could have been avoided is a no-brainer, but it’s something the MCK still has trouble grasping.

Case in point, how many items in the Council’s weekly communique are “client-attorney privilege” - in other words, they don’t want you to know about it, so don’t ask. But the problem is we ask the questions, and when they answer, it’s to a community that has a right to know.

Client-attorney privilege? Who’s the client? The community is the client, ultimately, and the lawyers are in-house attorneys, making them the community’s employees. Yet it’s just the chiefs who get to access what we all should be able to see. How often is it applied to protect the MCK from revealing things it doesn’t want you to know, rather than protect the community?

All we get to know is it’s applied an awful lot - four times at this week’s Council meeting, for example, pretty much every substantive item on the agenda.

In this case, instead of planning properly and giving Montour the common courtesy of talking through a potential mutual termination, they just tossed him aside because…who knows why, they haven’t come clean on that, and probably never will.

But many chiefs ran on transparency as their platform, and so far, as a collective, they have failed.

Why else do they continue to hide things from the community? Why else do they continue a ban on the author of this editorial from community meetings due to some BS reason that happened over a decade ago? Why do they disallow our non-Native reporters into meetings, even though they report to you, the people?

You know the answer.

We are still waiting on that supposed agreement that would have seen a return to meetings for all, a year after Diabo himself made the mistake of publicly targeting us on social media, signing off on Council letterhead by himself, and acting more like a dictator than a leader for the people.

So, all of that to say, did Dean Montour do anything wrong in defending himself, suing, and obviously winning his suit, secretly, with hush-hush dollar figures? No, he was defending himself, and we would expect nothing less from employees who weren’t given a fair shake from the largest employer in town.

Which brings us to another story broken by The Eastern Door: a $200 million lawsuit launched by Magic Palace.

Kahnawake would not know about this story if it wasn’t for us breaking it, alerting K1037, and them also reporting it to a wider audience. That’s how good media works - fight for the truth and ensure it gets out there to the people.

We can already see what’s going to happen with this one; another confidential settlement, but this one is for much more money than Montour. Why, some will ask, since Magic Palace had someone in their ranks who was allegedly involved in organized crime?

Because, the Magic Palace fiasco, no matter which side you’re on or what you believe, was botched by Diabo and the MCK once again, as Diabo himself, in court proceedings, said he relied on a report he didn’t fully read or properly dissect.

These two cases alone put the community in a terrible spot, and with chiefs leading with their emotions and not their heads, proper due diligence and common sense, you will surely be hearing about more lawsuits in The Eastern Door in the future.

Transparency isn’t just a word; it isn’t just ‘well, we were going to tell you what happened,’ it goes beyond that.

It’s about trusting the people enough to let them in on the inner workings of Council - you know, the deals that affect us all.

It’s about trying to bring everyone into the fold on big decisions - and no, not just the loudest mouths that the MCK fears.

But what it’s not about it pretending that transparency exists when the opposite is becoming more and more true every single day.

Steve Bonspiel

The Eastern Door