NEWS RELEASE
SAVE OUR SPEECH STRATFORD
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Stratford City Council’s unanimous decision Monday to review the controversial Respectful Workplace Policy is a partial victory in the fight for free speech, but citizens must continue to be vigilant, says Save Our Speech Stratford, because councillors did not suspend the policy and are backing it up with bogus legal arguments and utter falsehood.
“When Councillor Hunter said council always unanimously approves all delegations, that is simply not true, and the council minutes prove that,” SOS Stratford spokesperson Robert Roth says. “Council has relied on fiction, fantasy and falsehood in keeping this anti-democratic policy alive in the council chambers.”
On Monday, a motion by Councillor Cody Sebben, seconded by Councillor Geza Wordofa, to suspend the policy was defeated in a 9-2 vote, but a motion to review the policy passed 11-0.
The unanimous decision to review the policy is significant, Roth said, because two similar motions to review the policy made by Sebben at the May 13 council meeting failed to pass, let alone get unanimous consent.
“There is no doubt that the hundreds of people involved in Stratford’s free speech movement deserve credit for pressuring council into that about-face,” he said.
Seven delegations, including Roth, appeared Monday to challenge the way the workplace policy has been directed against at least six Stratford residents, including three who were banned from the council chambers, a fourth who was given a warning, a fifth who was subjected to a secret investigation and a sixth who was chastised for, among other things, improper facial expressions.
Roth said most councillors “were fixated on the need for the public to shower them and their staff with respect. They should have been more concerned about how the workplace policy has been weaponized to disrespectfully deprive the public of its basic democratic right to hold councillors and staff accountable for their actions.”
He noted that the Ontario Court of Appeal in the case of Bracken vs. Fort Erie makes it crystal clear that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms overrides workplace policies and that a councillor or staff person’s “feelings” of being disrespected do not negate a citizen’s Charter rights to use strong language in challenging political decisions in a public forum.
Roth is particularly critical of Councillor Hunter’s “attempt to confuse people about the Court of Appeal ruling” by arguing that the city must abide by the Ontario Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and apply it in the council chambers.
“However, in the Bracken case, the court ruled that the OHSA does not apply to non-employees,” Roth points out. “Hence, neither it nor related workplace policies can be used to punish citizens at large.”
The actual court ruling is below:
“Although the OHSA imposes a duty on the town to take reasonable precautions to protect workers, it does not confer any powers on the town regarding the activities of someone who is not a coworker.” Bracken v. Fort Erie (Town) 2017 ONCA 668 (CanLII)
“Despite the obvious clarity of this court ruling, Hunter made a bizarrely convoluted argument that the above statement does not mean what it actually says,” Roth states.
“This baffle gab was buttressed by an outright falsehood when Hunter said, “In my two years on council, every single delegate who’s been up here and asked to speak to us has received unanimous support for the motion to hear them.”
In fact, the July 24, 2023, council minutes show that it was less than a year ago that Hunter, himself, voted against hearing a delegation. In a recorded vote, Councillors Hunter, Brad Beatty and Harjinder Nijjar voted against hearing from Jane Marie Mitchell regarding the Ad Hoc Grand Trunk Renewal Committee.
Hunter’s legal argument was also flawed when he argued that the city had no choice but to use the OHSA to protect staff from harassment.
Questioning staff processes is not harassment, Roth says. In the court’s own words, free speech cannot be denied because of “a person’s subjective feelings of disquiet, unease, and even fear.”
In short, “feelings” do not trump rights, Roth said. The court confirmed that a critic can be “confrontational, loud, agitated, and excitable.” There is no legal requirement to be respectful or soft spoken.
The court ruling also notes that council can only “withdraw permission from an invitee to be present on its property, subject always to the Charter.”
Roth argues that councillors are “so focused on respect for themselves and their staff that they are oblivious to their own disrespect for the courts, the public’s Charter rights and even the Stratford Police Service who they impudently assumed would obediently enforce their illegal bans like some ayatollah’s private guard in a Third World theocracy.”
He says it is clear Monday’s decision to review the policy “is based more out of embarrassment and face-saving than a genuine commitment to free speech, so we will have to remain vigilant. There was no apology from council for illegal bans, security guards, secret investigations, meeting shut-downs or criticism of people’s faces. This council is shameless.”
Over the past weeks, several Stratford residents fell victim to the workplace policy’s restrictions on free speech.
Three people were banned from the council chambers for three months and another person was given a warning after officials concluded their criticism of City Hall at a public meeting was disrespectful and offensive.
Then the city hired a law firm to conduct a “confidential” investigation into a fifth person after the city clerk complained about statements he made at a different public meeting. That investigation was halted after the man went public and the complaint was suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn without explanation.
A sixth person, a long-time volunteer chair of a city advisory committee, also went public recently about an 11-page chastisement sent to her by the clerk alleging a number of workplace policy violations, including “facial micro-aggressions.”
Several of Monday’s delegations underscored how ridiculous it was to police facial movements and exaggerate a raised eyebrow or furrowed brow as some form of “aggression.”
“This policy has gone more out of control than the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” Roth said in his delegation.
“What could possibly be a more convincing repudiation of your workplace policy than the refusal of the Stratford Police Service to enforce it?” Roth asked council.
When the police refused to arrest the banned citizens, the city hired its own private security guards in an attempt to stop the citizens from entering the council chambers.
“It didn’t work,” Roth notes. “The only result was more dollars added to the tax bill.”
Rather than rescind the bans, however, the mayor and committee chairs would abruptly end meetings as soon as any of the banned people showed up.
“This action took away the ability of every citizen to appear and delegate at these meetings” Roth points out. “In effect, everyone’s rights were taken away. The councillors would rather shut down the city than take criticism.”
Roth argues the real concern is how to protect the public from the staff, not vice-versa, “given the use of bans, warning letters, secret investigations and demands that all faces stand at attention.”
He remains skeptical about the policy being reviewed by staff. At Monday’s meeting, he had called for review by an ad hoc committee of councillors and citizens at large.
“Staff should not review the policy,” he told the meeting. “They are too connected to the problem. It’s like asking the James Gang to review bank policy.”
At the meeting, Roth argued that giving unelected staff the power to discipline members of the public is dangerous, anti-democratic behaviour and demonstrates just how much the councillors have abdicated their responsibility to govern “by letting the tail wag the dog.”
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