I have to make this statement so it is clear that I am not harassing our elected officials: The following is political commentary related to community damaging policies that need to be reversed for the betterment of "all CBRM". 

I have been looking into a potential conflict of interest in CBRM that has negative effects on certain communities and may give rise to potential liabilities on the taxpayers. It sucks but if it has happened then someone needs to be held accountable, in some way. Thought I would share some of my findings.

I looked into how a conflict of interest is defined by the federal Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. It will need to be someone like the Nova Scotia Provincial Ombudsman that will officially look into this but some initial footwork needs to be done to outline the history and series of events (and lack of events) around the particular decision.

So what I see is that if a decision is to be made by a public official then it should benefit the public in general and not specifically the public official(s), their family or special interest groups associated (or not) in some way with the public official(s). 

Sometimes public official(s) can be blinded by excitement around a decision because they are directly affected by it and people close to them who may have significant mindshare of the public official(s), are also excited. But this does not make it right to influence the decision.

From HERE we see:

"Public office holders are in a conflict of interest when they exercise an official power, duty or function that provides an opportunity to further their private interests or those of their relatives or friends, or to improperly further another person’s private interests (section 4)."

"You must recuse yourself from any discussion, decision, debate or vote if you would be in a conflict of interest (s. 21)."

The key here is to research how the decision was made, who was involved, who benefits and who doesn't benefit. Then it will be important to watch for actions post-decision to see if there is evidence that it may be known by the public official(s) that they are/were in a conflict of interest situation and should have recused themselves from the decision making process. They probably should have informed the public about the pending decision and actually made it clear to the whole council that this specific decision was being made and the specific ramifications of it.

So if we can get the public official(s) to publicly state on video (like Facebook or council videos) that a decision, that they were involved in, directly benefits them, their family and/or a special interest group, then this would be a good first step.

Next if we can show that the general public was not the target of the decision; say only 1~3% of the public "may" benefit, then that may be an indicator that the general public's interest was not the driving concern of the decision made by the public official(s).

We would also check that the general public was not being fed a contradicting message to what the actual decision would result in. Transparency is usually absent in a conflict of interest situation.

Finally we should watch for patterns that show actions are being taken post-decision to rectify a conflict of interest. This would most likely be due to a reluctance to be fully accountable. For instance if after the decision was made,  data is collected to try to show that the decision was made with the general public's interest in mind, instead of just a few, then this would support the claim of a conflict of interest because it was not completed before the decision. Especially if the data collection is tainted in some obvious way and/or past data exists that contradicts the new data.

Also if the public official(s) try to make claims that were not made before the decision about how they benefit from the decision then this may indicate an attempt at accountability after the fact. This is just bad politics and proves that the public official(s) should have recused themselves in the first place.

So we have to watch for all this and keep records.