As Global News continues to investigate spending at the City of Richmond, there has been a troubling incident involving Mayor Malcolm Brodie.
It happened Tuesday morning at a playground in Steveston.
Global News attended as invited guests and, in addition to covering the event, we tried to ask Mayor Brodie about a European junket taken by employees of the Olympic Oval and the city.
In a stunning turn of events, Mayor Brodie grabbed our camera.
Richmond’s media relations person intervened, saying the mayor was sensitive to our reporting on Monday that the city and Olympic Oval had refused our repeated attempts to obtain costs of the 2022 junket, which later prompted us to file a freedom of information request.
Sources inside the Oval have now told us eight people went to Olympic-related events in Spain and Switzerland and that the trip cost about $77,787.
“Unfortunately, a lot of politicians across the country know that they can’t blatantly steal the public’s money and so they use perks and junkets as another form of corruption, which really amounts to theft of the public’s money because there’s no reason for most of the trips that they’re taking,” Democracy Watch co-founder Duff Conacher commented.
After Brodie left the playground, his PR person contacted Global News and requested a sit-down interview for the mayor on Wednesday.