I am thinking of you in my sleepless solitude tonight, if it’s wrong of me to even think these things, I don’t care! It seems unfair that someone as dear as your brother could be so unlucky.” He would later apologize, claiming the email was not meant to be a threat. By July 2011, McLean had started receiving complaints from fellow councillors who claimed Doolittle wasn’t doing his job. Then in October, a city auditor issued a scathing report critical of Doolittle for taking a long leave of absence while he recovered from stress and anxiety, and for failing to properly report his absences or recover from work at home. The report also detailed complaints about his management style that the auditors said were serious enough to warrant termination. The audit by R.M. Hodgins & Associates said the mayor, who wasn’t in the office for 80 hours in the two months before the audit, was taking work home on weekends and on holidays. It also said the mayor was sending email from his government email and mobile phone to personal email addresses. One of the auditors on the team, Charles Kernaghan, says the mayor emailed him from a personal email address on Christmas day. “He said he was taking a lot of family issues at home, he said he had been dealing with some of the things over the Christmas holidays. And so he’s trying to deal with that at home, but he was unable to function as mayor,” said Kernaghan. The mayor and his chief of staff denied that happened, and instead of replying in writing, sent the auditors a letter from mayor saying the commissioner had taken the matter to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Kernaghan says it took an executive director to get the letter from the privacy commissioner and then another week for the commissioner’s decision. “We’re used to getting answers in two seconds. It’s another government function that requires a lot of legwork,” said Kernaghan. The auditors also raised a number of accusations about Doolittle’s management style, including that he had refused to send emails to the email addresses of city staff and instead wrote them on paper, which then became litter at city hall. It would be another year before the mayor hired another assistant. By November 2012, a group of councillors and the city manager came together and wrote a letter to the mayor saying they were concerned about his job performance, which they said included communicating with staff and responding to emails sent from councillors. One of the questions the group wanted to have answered was why the mayor used his personal email account for work emails, but replied to messages on it. “The mayor has never responded to me by email. If I need to contact him, it is always by phone,” said Councillor Joe Swan at the time. “He never wanted to discuss issues, he would never give me any reasons for any of his decisions or actions.” That same month, city hall held an emergency meeting about a year after the auditor’s report was completed. The report identified “improper and inadequate” management as the reason the city was wasting millions of dollars in the years previous to the auditor’s findings. The auditor identified a staggering amount of waste as a result of poor record keeping by a range of departments. “I remember that meeting as being very sobering to say the least,” said Councillor Frank de Jong. The city manager at the time, Michael Nilsson, was replaced in 2013. In February 2014, five years after Doolittle started as the city’s mayor, he came before council and admitted that he should never have taken the job because he’d never worked in municipal government before. By then, Doolittle had taken two leaves of absence, one to take care of his father’s health issues and a two week trip to China with the city’s Economic Development Committee. He said he would be retiring, but months later sent a letter saying he had one more year left in his contract. According to the city’s bylaws, the mayor is supposed to be able to take as many as four leaves of absence per year, but has to have approval from the city manager, and have a medical reason to do so. The auditor’s report concluded the mayor’s use of a personal email address for work was illegal. He said the mayor should never have had his personal email address, but not until December 2012. At that time, it said Doolittle had a computer crash and “forgot” he had his personal email. “From January 2011 to the summer of 2011, the mayor was out of office for a large portion of that time,” said Kernaghan. “From September 2011 to January 2012, there was another leave of absence as the mayor was not in office because he was recovering from surgery. From October 2013 to January of 2014, the mayor was recovering from surgery.” By then, the auditor’s report on Doolittle’s work had gone to Doolittle’s superior, council. That’s when councillors decided to let the auditor’s report remain confidential. Councillor Joe Swan tried to keep it secret. “I really, really tried to keep it secret. But I think I was overruled by councillors, that they wanted to make sure the press knew about it, which is their prerogative,” said Swan. Doolittle retired in May 2014. Two months later, the city took Doolittle to court to try to force him to pay back $3,200 he had spent on things like groceries and coffee for staff in the city hall lobby. “He took a long leave of absence which we understood and were quite happy to do that, and we understand that he had made mistakes and he was embarrassed about it, and there was a lot of things that he has done to get himself on a better track in his life,” said city solicitor Jaswal. “The city took steps to minimize that… I would submit to you that it is reasonable that you leave something like that behind you. You can’t move ahead if you have all of those hanging around.” But in November 2014, a judge ruled in the city’s favour, finding the mayor had intentionally failed to repay a debt to the city, but ruling the city had no authority to recover it. “I think it’s appropriate for a municipal government to set expectations for its employees, or should expect its employees to adhere to its policies and it certainly shouldn’t be okay to violate that,” said Kernaghan. “People are going to do that, and it’s one of those where you hope that maybe the person in the higher level is going to learn a lesson and realize that he has to make good on this in order to maintain their job,” said De Jong. A former employee who was with Doolittle for a year in 2013 before he was promoted to acting director of communications says Doolittle told him he believed using the city’s email address for the city was illegal, and that he would have done the same thing even if he’d known that was against the rules. “As much as it’s a slap in the face that he’s being held to account, I’m glad the system works,” said Klemens. In the court documents related to Doolittle’s retirement that were filed by his lawyer in November 2015, the city asks for $15,000 to cover the cost of the lawsuit. Heather Doolittle filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2016 after she lost her position as a result of Doolittle’s conflict of interest and the expenses he had been ordered to pay to the city of London. Doolittle’s letter says he did nothing wrong and that taxpayers should pick up the tab for the litigation. But the city of London says the case was not a matter of “misfeasance, malfeasance or nonfeasance.” For the Doolittles, the ongoing lawsuit against Doolittle and the city “is a battle to get even,” says the mayor’s daughter. Her mother, who is now 65 years old, lives on the Doolittle family’s farm on the outskirts of London. She gets three years in and out of jail for selling a drug that is considered to be very addictive to women. She says she is not in jail to take care of him. “It’s the city of London that does that. It’s the city that is trying to hold him accountable. It is that, more than any other person. I can’t believe he made that decision… he was making the right decisions, and that’s why he’s had to pay for it, to clean up his messes and mistakes. Like what you just read? Sign up for The Cornfield Express newsletter, and we’ll send regular updates to your inbox.