The latest chapter in the sad saga of the marital breakup of Mayor Gregor Robertson and his wife of 26 years turned up on the letters page of Wednesday’s Vancouver Sun.
NPA vice-president Rob Macdonald claims: “The Vision propaganda department has maliciously misquoted” what he calls a “private email to the mayor’s office.” It detailed a series of allegations about the mayor’s personal behaviour.
A couple of things about that “private email.” Macdonald was replying to a bulk email sent out June 16 by Vision Vancouver to thousands of people inviting them to a neighborhood forum to discuss Kinder Morgan’s pipeline proposal.
Macdonald responded the same day stating he couldn’t make the Kinder Morgan meeting because he had “been asked to go to a different meeting to discuss some terrible gossip” about Robertson and his wife. He then lists a series of allegations many of which are verifiably untrue including one that has the mayor “phoning Jeff Lee at the Vancouver Sun to suppress the story.” Lee says it didn’t happen.
In a comment that is too cute by half, Macdonald’s “private email” to the mayor’s office said: “Of course, this kind of rumour mongering is despicable and I will have no part in it.” Except that his email wasn’t private. It was copied to at least one city councillor, Geoff Meggs. Three minutes later, Macdonald sent it to Globe and Mail reporter Frances Bula. Goodness knows who else got it. And let’s remember
Macdonald was going to a rumour mongering meeting “to discuss the terrible gossip.”
But he also goes after Robertson’s chief of staff, Mike Magee. When, for a moment, Macdonald was thinking of running for mayor, he claims that Magee threatened to “destroy my reputation and one of the disgusting things they were going to leak to the press was a ridiculous accusation of philandering.” He observes there is “poetic” justice — more like revenge — “now Magee gets to deal with Gregor’s widely rumoured philandering.” (Just how “widely” outside Macdonald’s circle is debatable.)
In his letter to the Sun this week, Macdonald actually suggests that Robertson is a victim of his own actions: “Those rumours were all over town and, if anything, were started in earnest by the mayor himself when he was busy trying to get members of the press to stop investigating his behaviour.” That would be the Jeff Lee reference, which, as I’ve said, is not true.
If the mayor and his office did have a role in all of this mess, it was this: Instead of waiting for all hell to break loose on social media and Rob Macdonald to fuel that uproar, the moment Robertson decided to leave the family home and rent an apartment downtown, he should have made that fact public. Failing to do so, well, you can see for yourself what has happened.
I suspect that Robertson and his party will survive this. The damage Macdonald has done is mostly to his own party.
Macdonald’s actions to bring down Robertson appear to be more the work of one powerful loose cannon than a strategic direction by the NPA. It puts him at odds with (at the time of writing) the putative NPA mayoral candidate and former journalist Kirk LaPointe on the matter of personal attacks. On Facebook, LaPointe noted: “Nothing positive comes from the discussion of personal issues,” adding “as a journalist,
I have had many opportunities to report on the private lives of public figures. I long ago concluded that, unless there is an impact on duties, those matters are irrelevant.”
But Macdonald persists in his attack. His most recent email, this one to councillor Meggs is about “Gregor’s girlfriend and baby.” Then he provides a link to an easily identifiable photo of a woman who is holding her child.
The question for the NPA is what to do as Macdonald continues to soil his own nest and raises questions in the minds of members about the value of sticking around if this is all that the party has to offer. But who would dare stand up to the guy who in the 2011 campaign contributed free office space and a donation of $900,000 plus to the NPA cause, making it the largest personal political donation in Canadian history?
agarr@vancourier.com
