Yellowknife mayoral candidate clarifies employment history, education

Yellowknife mayoral candidate clarifies employment history, education

Garett Cochrane says title of 'former librarian' was a generalization and 'attended' U of O not misleading

A Yellowknife mayoral candidate is clarifying some discrepancies in his professional experience and education.

According to Garett Cochrane's current council profile, he has worked as a library assistant but has loosely used the term librarian to describe his work experience in his election candidate biography.

In an interview with CBC News last week, Cochrane was asked if he had an opinion on what should happen with the Yellowknife library.

“Of course I do, I’m a former librarian, this is literally what I did before I got elected onto council,” he said.

In a follow-up interview, Cochrane said he worked as a library assistant and only used the term librarian to simplify the term for those who wouldn’t otherwise understand the difference.

“That was more of a generality than I was specifically going into what a library assistant is," he said.

A library assistant position typically only requires the completion of secondary school, whereas a masters degree is required to be a librarian.

Cochrane’s candidate biography also said he attended the University of Ottawa — where he majored in political science, minored in history and specialized in comparative politics. But he didn’t graduate.

“I could see how that could be misleading, but that was not the intention. That was just stating a fact. If I graduated, I would have said I graduated,” he said.

Cochrane said he did attend the school for several years but left for personal reasons.

The issues with his candidate biography were raised by an anonymous account on a Yellowknife Facebook page and Cochrane said discussing this subject will invite more attacks.

"I wanted this campaign to be about the ideas and the future of Yellowknife and I still will be on that exact notion, or notions," he said.

"The fact that we're giving credence to the most toxic part of our social media platforms, attacking the first 2SLGTBQ+ candidate to run for mayor is just going to prohibit more people from putting their name forward."

Jack Lucas is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Calgary. He’s an expert on municipal politics and co-directs the Canadian Municipal Barometer, a research project that aims to understand and improve local democracy in Canada.

Speaking with CBC News about Cochrane’s situation with the University of Ottawa, Lucas said there’s one word to describe this: spin.

“In the sense of trying to put something in the most favourable possible frame without actually lying,” he said.

Lucas said this kind of thing happens all the time in politics, and there are numerous examples of candidates embellishing things like military experience or educational background.

Lucas said he’s not an expert on the difference between a librarian and library assistant, but that didn’t strike him as particularly misleading.

“That to me feels a little bit more innocent in the sense that if you're trying to explain to a non-specialist what it is that you do,” he said.

The Yellowknife municipal election is set for Oct. 19.

Luke Carroll is a journalist with CBC News in Yellowknife. He can be reached at luke.carroll@cbc.ca.