By Melissa Mancini
Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes has dismissed a complaint by her opponents for city council that her campaign violated municipal election laws on Nov. 13.
The complaint was sent to Ottawa election manager Shane Kennedy in an e-mail.
It claims the veteran city councillor encouraged her supporters to vote multiple times and at more than one polling station and instructed residents in other wards to vote in Somerset.
The e-mail was sent by George Guirguis, “signed” by Karen Dawe, Idris Ben-Tahir and Luc Lapointe.
Holmes says the complaint, lodged under the Municipal Election Act is “a lot of nonsense” adding that the allegations are untrue.
“Mr. Guirguis has a very active imagination and is a poor loser,” says Holmes.
Holmes won the election with 63.07 per cent of the vote. Her closest rival was Lapointe with 17.03 per cent, followed by Guirguis, Dawe and Ben-Tahir.
Both Lapointe and Ben-Tahir say they did not give Guirguis permission to be included in the e-mail.
Lapointe says it “was quite a surprise” that his name was included.
He says he agreed to meet with Guirguis on Nov. 16 to talk about the concerns he had, but the e-mail was sent even before the meeting was to take place.
“I do not like the tone the letter was written in,” says Lapointe.
“If there are concerns they are worth being looked at, but this is not the way it should have been sent.”
He says he has contacted city election officials to let them know that he did not agree with the content of the e-mail.
Ben-Tahir says he also did not agree with the tone of the email complaint, which he says painted an unfair picture of city staff by threatening them if action was not taken immediately.
“Mr. Guirguis has a good cause, but has ruined it by saying that city staffs were compliant with the incumbent,” says Ben-Tahir. “This is my disagreement with him, not the facts he has stated.”
Guirguis says that the e-mail complaints are “enough evidence” for the city to conduct a full investigation.
He says that he sent two other formal complaints via e-mail before the election, all concerning Holmes’s conduct on the day of the elections.
“Mr. Kennedy should do the right thing and look at these problems,” says Guirguis. “Or else how can we trust the system?”
He says he will be sending a formal letter to the city soon. He says in the e-mail that he wants the Nov. 13 election nullified and a byelection called in which Holmes would be disqualified from running.
Dawe says she agrees that city officials should investigate the allegations.
“She [Diane Holmes] is not entitled to interfere with anyone’s democratic process,” says Dawe.
Kennedy says he cannot comment on the complaint while it’s being reviewed.
“With specific complaints we normally chat to the staff involved at the site,” says Kennedy.
He says the time it takes to complete a review depends on the workload at the city, but reviews commence as soon as the complaint as been received.