City administration is disappointed with the coverage the Moose Jaw Express has given to the Seventh Avenue Southwest Bridge and the fact the newspaper didn’t approach city hall first for comment.
The Express started its multi-part series about the bridge on June 8 and produced several stories during the following month. The newspaper then reached out to city hall on July 6 with a list of 26 questions that it hoped city manager Jim Puffalt would answer about the situation.
On July 8, city hall communications manager Craig Hemingway emailed Express editor Joan Ritchie with a reply.
“Thank you for your inquiries. We are disappointed that no attempt was made to ask for our (City of Moose Jaw) comments for any of the eight stories you have published on this issue … ,” he said. “Instead, the many claims against the City by the lawyer for the Thorns and Averys have been presented as fact without allowing the City to respond in a timely manner.”
In its defence, the Express wrote the articles using documents that the families’ lawyer, David Chow, provided about the situation and its decades-long history. The families presented these same documents to city council and city administration when they made their presentation during the in-camera — behind closed doors — portion of executive committee meeting on May 25.
“We believe this is unfair, biased reporting that does not fall in line with standards set by the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ),” Hemingway wrote.
He then quoted a section of the CAJ’s ethics guidelines about fairness: “We give people, companies or organizations that are publicly accused or criticized opportunity to respond before we publish those criticisms or accusations. We make a genuine and reasonable effort to contact them, and if they decline to comment, we say so.”
“As mentioned, there is no record of any effort to contact the City for comment before publishing the series of articles,” Hemingway continued. “We are also disappointed by the tenor of the questions, many of which we find biased against the City of Moose Jaw.”
The three questions the communications manager listed as examples of the supposed bias were, “Why isn’t city administration taking this (situation) seriously?”, “Why has city administration been unresponsive to the concerns of these residents?” and “Why has city administration dragged its feet in meeting with the families and their lawyer?”
“The phrases we have italicized and put in bold are not facts; they are subjective opinions based on one-side information,” he added.
While the Express did ask those questions, it also asked other questions that were fact-based, such as:
- Why has city administration not put away any money to fix/replace the bridge in the last five years?
- Why has city administration not put away any money for the bridge in the five-year capital plan for the next five years?
- During the April (2020) meeting, why did city administration refuse to recommend to council the repair or replacement of the bridge?
- Why did city administration refuse to put the families’ concern about this issue on the public portion of the May 25 council meeting and instead bury it in-camera during executive committee?
- Why do you (Jim Puffalt) want the provincial government to pay to fix/replace the (city-owned) bridge?
- Why did city administration not use some of the MEEP (provincial) funding to fix the bridge?
- Why did city administration double the cost to replace the bridge?
In response to the questions the Express presented, Hemingway offered this statement:
“This is a challenging situation involving several stakeholders and decades of history. The City of Moose Jaw will not risk taxpayers’ money by negotiating a sensitive matter in public. We take this matter seriously and are actively working to find a solution.”
