Failure to invite mayoral candidates "oversight"

Council candidate David Briggs said he inadvertently forgot to invite Lynne Bennett, Tim Wright and Jeff Marceau to a meet-the-candidates session he had organized at Nipissing University Wednesday.

The session was scheduled on the same evening as an all-candidates meeting at the North Bay Mall and a meeting of the Widdifield Taxpayers Association.

Briggs, a 22-year-old student at the university, said he thought there might be an opportunity for candidates to attend the Nipissing event once they’d finished at the North Bay Mall.

“But I never even clued into the fact that they would have mayoral candidates there, never even thought about that for a split second and it didn’t come into my mind to invite them,” said Briggs, pictured above.

“It was one of those things, everything was going crazy. We had a big snow day Tuesday, I was trying to do this, trying to do that, trying to study for exams, trying to do my three assignments which were due today, just everything at once.”

Tempest in a teapot
At least one of the mayoral candidates, Tim Wright, believes Vic Fedeli had put the university event together and then deliberately chose not to invite his three opponents.

“If that wasn’t the case why wasn’t the courtesy of inviting all the candidates extended to the mayoral candidates,” Wright said.

Wright also claimed Fedeli had told Briggs not to cancel or reschedule the evening due to the conflict.

Fedeli denies Wright’s allegation.
“I would think he is purely misinformed and creating a tempest in a teapot,” Fedeli said.

Wright admitted he hadn’t spoken to Fedeli about the matter.

Briggs said he talked to Bennett and Wright at the mall about what happened, but to little avail.

“Lynne came up to me and said ‘I never heard anything about this’ and I apologized to her right then and there,” Briggs said.

“She seemed very upset about it and Tim seemed very upset about it too. I think they sort of thought Vic was organizing this all on his own, and that it was just to have it all to himself. It wasn’t that. I never really invited him either, he just came.”

More to it than that
Bennett said she didn’t believe Briggs’s explanation.
“I don’t think an oversight had taken place. There’s more to it than that,” Bennett said.

Briggs said his detractors were blowing the matter “way out of proportion. They didn’t seem to accept it.”
Marceau, Briggs added, was the exception.
"He seemed to be alright with it."

Ironically, Briggs said, the evening “was a disaster” with only one student showing up.