What CAO David Barrick’s Experience Can Teach About Attracting Strong Municipal Leaders
Municipal government is not a place for those with thin skin. Ask any public servant at City Hall, be it a young intern or a seasoned veteran, and they’ll tell you it’s a crucible of clashing personalities and never-ending paperwork. Municipal governments manage big budgets, maintain the roads and public parks, handle emergency services, and respond when floods, storms, or, God forbid, pandemics upset the usual order. And taxpayers fund the lot of it, so when something goes wrong, it goes wrong very publicly. In this carnival of crowded council chambers and competing interests, someone has to keep the machinery of local government working.
Much of that particular responsibility falls to the chief administrative officer, or CAO. It’s one of the most demanding and least understood positions in local government; powerful enough to be blamed for almost anything, but constrained from giving answers about much of it. Councillors can hold press conferences. Reporters can publish allegations. Former colleagues can offer their recollections. Taxpayers, of course, are entitled to gripe about all of it. The CAO, meanwhile, is routinely left with the unenviable privilege of respecting confidentiality while everyone else discusses what supposedly happened behind closed doors.
The experience of veteran Ontario municipal executive David Barrick is instructive of the professional risk this can create.
The Record of David Barrick
Barrick has held senior leadership positions with the City of Brampton, the Municipality of Thames Centre, the Municipality of South Stormont, and the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority. His work has involved organizational reform, financial management, public services, capital projects, and crisis leadership. These are not ceremonial duties. They require firm decisions, and firm decisions tend to have a troublesome habit of disappointing someone, if not whole groups of people.
Barrick has also faced politically charged allegations connected to his public-sector work. Over the past few years, those allegations have received considerable attention, albeit from some news outlets more than others. They also prompted official responses.
Concerns relating to his tenure in Brampton raised by a mayoral candidate during a highly contentious election period were examined through an independent review conducted by Deloitte. This rigorous review found that Barrick had acted in full compliance with applicable municipal policies, procedures, and bylaws. The City of Brampton later issued a public apology stating that the investigations had been unfounded and had caused undue harm to his personal and professional reputation.
Claims connected to his time with the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority were also investigated, this time by the Ontario Provincial Police, which reported finding no wrongdoing, as well as the Office of the Auditor General, which identified no issues in the operational areas under Barrick’s purview.
These outcomes don’t mean that every decision Barrick made was popular, nor must they convince every critic to admire his leadership or revere his skill under pressure. And that’s okay. Popularity is not a requirement of a competent administrator. This is fortunate because anyone who oversees budgets, government staff, or public services will soon discover how difficult popularity is to maintain.
But having people disagree with a decision taken during the course of fulfilling one’s duties is not tantamount to misconduct, no matter how much a critic wishes that were so. Likewise, an allegation is not an official finding, and a controversy is not a verdict.
David Barrick’s case is instructive of a larger point, in that these distinctions matter far beyond the career of one administrator. Ontario’s municipalities must compete for a limited number of people who tick both the necessary boxes of one, qualified to do the job, and two, willing to lead a complex public organization. Such candidates are asked to deal with long hours, political pressure from all sides, public scrutiny, not to mention responsibility for the essential services residents notice most keenly when something goes wrong. Think waste collection, water and sewer systems, and maintenance of local roads. Needless to say, such people are a rare breed.
The Digital Shelf-Life of Allegations
Now, in the information age, another hazard must be added to the position: the possibility that an allegation, even if disproven by a trusted third-party investigator, the provincial police force, or the office of the auditor general, might become a perpetuated part of one’s public identity.
There is a bleak sort of efficiency to this arrangement. An accusation can be delivered in a headline, repeated in a social media post, and recalled ad infinitum years later should it suit the accuser’s agenda. The allegation travels lightly. The official evidence clearing it arrives burdened with all the fact-finding, research, and testimony required by a Deloitte review or an OPP investigation.
Search engines and AI-based large language models make the imbalance all the harder to correct. Old claims can remain prominent in Google or ChatGPT, while later findings dispelling those claims are scattered across municipal archives, dusty old reports, and hastily forgotten news releases. Someone searching an administrator’s name online may encounter the controversy before stumbling upon its resolution. And that’s assuming the resolution is ever found at all.
David Barrick’s career after these now-proven-false allegations provides another important part of the record. Despite all that he has endured in the past, he has continued to advance through executive recruitment processes conducted by independent firms. These searches commonly involve background checks, reference verification, and all manner of professional assessments. Importantly, their purpose is not to locate a candidate who has never been criticized (if that were the standard, municipal leadership would soon be entrusted to people who have never made a meaningful decision in their entire lives). Rather, their purpose is to determine whether any concerns are supported by evidence and, for Barrick, none of them have been.
His performance in office must also be considered.
- Thames Centre publicly described Barrick’s tenure as “transformative”, citing modernization efforts and progress in securing outside funding.
- During his time at the NPCA, parks operations moved from a significant deficit to a surplus, allowing money to be reinvested in capital improvements and environmental programming.
- At the Township of South Stormont, where Barrick served as CAO, the mayor cited Barrick’s contributions as demonstrating a “strong understanding of municipal operations and governance” and that his approach was “focused on achieving outcomes that served the best interests of the municipality and the community.”
- In Brampton, Barrick held a senior leadership role during the Covid-19 pandemic, when municipalities were forced to maintain essential services under extraordinary conditions.
A fair assessment of his record should examine all of this. The criticism, the investigations, the independent findings, his employment record, and most importantly, all measurable results. Anything less would not be proper due diligence. It would be searching until one finds the answer one wants to find.
The Cost to City Hall
But here’s the real rub: municipalities should be concerned about the larger effect of a case like David Barrick’s. Experienced administrators can choose a similar role in the private sector where the pay is objectively better, or decline a top job altogether in favour of other career paths. Further down the line, top recruits watching from university halls or high school civics classrooms may reasonably ask whether a career in City Hall is worth the bother.
If capable candidates begin reaching the conclusion that striving to become a CAO isn’t worth the personal cost, communities will pay for it. There’s just no way around that. As the old guard retires with sparse new talent to take its place, institutional memory will weaken, major projects will be delayed, other municipal staff will become unsettled, and town councils will be forced to undertake expensive new recruitment searches.
Bottom line? The potential harm here is not confined to the administrator used as an example in an article. It could affect CAOs both present and future. It will make its presence known in insidious forms, like slower decision-making, hedging on issues that need clear decisions, and it may ultimately result in disrupted services and organizations adopting a de facto bunker mentality of lurching from one controversy to the next. No government can operate properly or efficiently if that is the state of affairs.
All this is not to say that municipal executives should be sheltered from difficult questions. Independent investigations must be taken seriously when they uncover wrongdoing. But they must also be taken seriously when they do not.
The question raised by David Barrick’s experience is therefore larger than whether one lone administrator received fair treatment in the media. It is whether municipalities can continue attracting strong leaders when public allegations outlive formal findings, documented results, exoneration, and even public apologies.
City Hall will always need someone willing to make the tough decisions. The more pressing question is how many qualified people will still be willing to take a job requiring them to make the tough decisions if reputational ordeals like David Barrick’s become more the rule than the exception.
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