After years of preparation, engineer and venture capitalist Peter Diedrich has submitted his candidacy for mayor of Thunder Bay.
Over time, the mayoral candidate has become concerned with Thunder Bay’s economic situation.
“When I saw the numbers for Thunder Bay’s growth since the early 2000s, in real economic terms, it’s not growth, it’s shrinkage,” he says.
He adds that “we have the ingredients to do much better, and I want to harness those ingredients, harness the talent, and bring the capital to build this city into what it can really be.”
Diedrich began his career building memory chips as an electrical engineer, before getting into space policy with the Canadian Space Agency.
His work with the CSA led him into the world of management and economics, and resulted in him pursuing an MBA (Master of Business Administration) at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
He describes MIT as “an eye-opening place,” where he learned everything he could about economics, economic development, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Since then, Diedrich has worked in the field of venture capital, working with companies like McKinsey.
The work has taken him around the world to places including China, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, managing projects like the privatization of Brazil’s national telecoms and delivering internet access to Saudi Arabians.
“These are big projects, right? The project of building a better Thunder Bay is a big project,” Diedrich says of his experiences. “I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I don’t want to live in the past, I want to learn from it. And I’ve spent 40 years of my career doing just that.”
The platform
As a mayoral candidate concerned with economic growth, Diedrich supports many of the ideas from the city’s Smart Growth Action Plan, saying the plan is “a really good start” and “an excellent initiative.”
But he says the action plan lacks key details, such as in budgeting and timelines, which makes it “a vision, a strategy, but not a plan.”
He argues the job of the next council is “to actually turn that plan into real action and to prioritize it.”
Diedrich teaches project management to graduate-level engineers at Lakehead University.
His time at the university has convinced him that skilled talent in the city is being underutilized.
“It absolutely pains me to see graduates from engineering and in my classes who have great skills, great talents, great abilities, ending up in the K&A pumping gas, or at Walmart doing overnight stocking, or at Canadian Tire running the auto shop,” says the engineer-turned-businessman.
He feels the university, the college, and the health sciences sector are filled with talent and ideas that should be nurtured, and says the city should be “more ambitious about entrepreneurship, funding new companies and new ideas… We can’t have one every 20 years. We’ve got to have five every year.”
Diedrich says funding these ideas are key to growing employment and attracting talent and capital to the city.
On public safety, Diedrich says he was pleased to see the police budget increase, and says the city “may need to go further.”
He says there is a lack of imagination on the part of Thunder Bay’s citizens, and they need to “imagine it as it should be: a place where it’s safe to walk in the streets, where it’s safe to be in our parks, where it’s safe to be in our downtown neighbourhoods.”
He suggests technology can be used to help make the city safer, such as by broadening how traffic light cameras are used.
“Are they there for bylaw enforcement, traffic enforcement, or could they actually be there for safety?” He asks. “Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice of privacy for safety, and we need to have that debate in this election, because I think that’s where we need to go to be more effective in delivering a safer Thunder Bay.”
On rising police budgets, Diedrich acknowledges the challenge of balancing the needs of policing with the budgeting of other city services: as was recently pointed out in city council budget deliberations, emergency services now make up about 40 per cent of the city’s expenses.
He suggests that should he be elected mayor, he will want to take a look at the city’s services and make tough decisions about what may not be financially viable to continue offering.
“We need to choose what not to do, because that actually frees up resources and budget that would otherwise be allocated.”
On homelessness and addictions, the mayoral candidate suggests the city take a more centralizing role in coordinating the efforts of different services, including police, community non-profits and outreach organizations, medical services, and more, to handle crises.
“Everybody’s trying to do the right thing, but we haven’t thought about the process from end to end.”
He feels there is too much hand-wringing from city council on coming up with temporary solutions to homelessness, pointing to the years-long debate to agree on a location for the city’s Temporary Shelter Village as an example.
“Let’s not debate it for so long that we can’t get started and people still end up freezing in the winter,” says Diedrich.
The Tbaytel situation
Since the mayoral candidate’s announcement, much of the discourse has revolved around a controversial decision during his tenure as CEO of Tbaytel from 2006 to 2008.
The story of the controversy begins more than a decade earlier, when what would become Tbaytel was still the city’s telecommunications department.
One of the department’s employees, a woman named Linda Colistro, lodged a sexual harassment complaint against her supervisor, Steve Benoit, in 1995.
A year later, in 1996, Benoit was fired from the city, in part due to sexual harassment complaints.
In 2007, Diedrich, as CEO of Tbaytel, hired Steve Benoit to be the company’s Vice President of Business Consumer Markets.
Linda Colistro was still an employee of what had become Tbaytel, and strongly objected to Benoit’s hiring.
Despite discussions with Colistro, Diedrich chose to proceed with the hiring of Benoit, offering Colistro a new position in a building next-door to where Benoit would work.
Colistro took time off from work while discussions played out over whether to hire Benoit, and never returned to work at Tbaytel once Benoit was hired.
She was later diagnosed with PTSD and depression as a result of the situation with her employer.
In 2008, Colistro began a lawsuit with Tbaytel that was not resolved until 2017, with an appeal that lasted until 2019.
Colistro sued Tbaytel for constructive dismissal, alleging that the hiring of Benoit made it impossible for her to continue working at the company.
“I am satisfied that Tbaytel’s conduct in deciding to proceed with hiring Mr. Benoit was, objectively viewed and in all the circumstances, flagrant and outrageous conduct,” said Justice John S. Fregeau at the trial.
Diedrich’s hiring decision “minimized and invalidated the sexual harassment complaints of Ms. Colistro, a 20-year valued and respected current employee of the company,” according to the ruling.
Colistro’s lawsuit successfully proved that constructive dismissal had taken place, though in the end the proceedings costed her more than she earned in damages.
The appeal upheld much of the original ruling, though it rejected the notion that hiring Benoit was “calculated to produce harm.”
Asked by this reporter about the decision to hire Benoit, Diedrich says he owns the decision.
“I’m the CEO, so I own it. And I own the consequences of that decision for all the parties involved, all the stakeholders,” he offers. “The minute you start blaming other people for your mistakes, you’re a failure. So I own it. I continue to own it.”
Diedrich says the facts of the situation are out there for anyone to see.
“The social media buzz is out there. The question is now answered. I’d like to move on and talk about Thunder Bay’s future.”
