At this week’s council meeting, before a vote to approve a new development on Gordon Street, Mayor Cam Guthrie thanked the five or so delegates for bringing their concerns to council in a respectful way.
Politeness, decorum and respect have been watch words in politics lately, and I completely understand why. Over the last handful for years there’s been an increase in threats of political violence, often driven by anger about difficult to solve issues like housing and affordability and fed by misunderstandings, ignorance and conspiracy theories.
Under no circumstances are violent threats acceptable, let’s make that clear from the start. Even a joke about killing someone is inappropriate in this era of taking things seriously but not literally. When you need a secret decoder ring to determine if someone’s being sarcastic or not, perhaps it makes sense just to err on the side of caution.
But while we’re erring, I’m haunted by this idea: Are we confusing genuine criticism for disrespect at the best, or open hostility at worst.
Up the road in Stratford, a new measure approved by their city council called the Respectful Workplace Policy led to two community activists being banned from city hall for three months for “inappropriate behaviour”. When asked by the CBC what was “inappropriate” Stratford Mayor Martin Ritsma wouldn’t (or couldn’t) say, so we just have to go by what was said in the offending delegations on Feb. 26.
While it’s true that Barb Shaughnessy and Mike Sullivan were fighting mad about a plan to allow 56 units in a residential building to apply for an inn license, essentially turning an apartment building into 56 short-term rentals, they were actually pretty even tempered and even pleasant about it. Now granted these things are subjective, but I’ve got to say that I didn’t detect, in Mayor Ritsma’s words, any “threatening” behaviour or “offensive and humiliating" comments.
Now, I did see one report that said someone threatened to punch the chair of the board that runs the building in the face, which is obviously unacceptable, but that was not a threat to council.
There’s also a missing context because this whole debated happened under a cloud of deep skepticism about Stratford council that dates back to the previous term, specifically around the approval of a now-cancelled plan to build the Chinese-owned glass plant that Guelph/Eramosa Township took a pass on. In fact, concern about Stratford’s closed meeting procedures was on the same agenda.
Sullivan initially delegated on his alarm about the number of council decisions that had been made in-camera. The results of an independent investigation into those closed meetings noted that one-third of council votes had been held in-camera, and that there was only one time when a member of Stratford council tried to move a motion from closed session to open.
In his delegations, Sullivan never deviated from his moderate and even-tempered tone, he never cast aspersions, he never made a threat, and he never issued a mandate or a demand. It’s also worth pointing out that Sullivan appeared on a third item concerning the budget, where he even praised council and staff.
But lest you think this is becoming “Market Squared: Stratford City Hall Unit” let me bring this back to Guelph, because I recall an incident in February when Mayor Cam Guthrie threatened to clear the gallery because things got too rowdy in the stands at the special meeting about the Public Spaces Use Bylaw.
The immediate visceral reaction, and perhaps it was understandable given the heightened emotions around the issue, was to shut the meeting down. To his credit, Guthrie took a beat and came back to the council chambers to explain the rules of decorum, which is something he should have done in the first place, especially when someone in the gallery yelled, “What’s decorum?”
In an age when the only thing people believe in is universal deceit on the part of our leaders, those leaders should be taking every opportunity to educate the public about how decisions are made, especially when they’re looking at a gallery full of people in the council chambers first thing in the morning.
Creating more engaged citizens means weeding out the chaos agents that just hate government for being the proverbial troll under the bridge, and make no mistake, politicians are particularly sensitive to that heat.
This week, Brantford’s Mayor Kevin Davis announced that he was stepping down not even halfway through the term to go back to being a lawyer and spend more time with his family, but he also cited being a popular punching bag for the Telephone City’s problems as a tertiary reason for his resignation.
“As an elected official, you become the target of a lot of harassment and abuse, and I really worry about the future," he told the Brantford Expositor.
For fun, I scrolled the comments on the Expositor page, all 51 of them at the time, and while there were at least a few, shall we say, even tempered comments, there was mostly just accusations of gross corruption as well as some very casual racism and at least one mention of the World Economic Forum as having a part in the machinations of Brantford City Council.
But this is a trend. France Belisle, the first woman to hold the mayor’s office in Gatineau, stepped down in February citing repeated death threats she had received that all had a negative impact on her health. Russell Mayor Pierre Leroux stepped back from social media due to the flood of threats and vitriol he had received. Two councillors from Brampton used International Women’s Day to speak out against the harassment of female politicians like them.
So we have two problems that I think we’re seeing as the same problem, but you only know the difference when you take the time to confront the issue head on as opposed to hiding behind rules and procedures. A person with genuine concerns will accept an answer to their question, even if it’s an answer they don’t like, but the chaos agents and harassers will never be satisfied by any answer.
To separate the former from the latter our local leaders need to embrace more openness and transparency and you can’t assume that the public has the tools to navigate the system because there’s a big education gap that no one bothers to address till they’re painted into a corner. The thing we don’t want to do is confuse legitimate criticism for a baseless attack because then no one’s well led, and more than that, no one will want to lead either.
