Innisfil has thrown its support behind an attempt to make town halls as safe as any other workplace in the province that is again working its way through Queen’s Park.
The Stopping Harassment and Abuse by Local Leaders Act, also known as Bill 5, will have its second reading in the Ontario legislature May 30. Innisfil council received a deputation on the issue at its May 10 meeting from Amanda Fellows, representing The Women of Ontario Say No, a collaboration of various individuals and organizations who want to ensure basic human rights are upheld in the workplace.
What Bill 5 would enshrine is the right for a worker not to be harassed by an elected member of council.
“There are so many good people who serve the people as elected representatives, however, like every sector, there are people who are guilty of perpetuating harassment in the workplace,” Fellows said, listing examples in Ottawa, Brampton, Mississauga and, “most embarrassingly,” she added, closer to home in Barrie.
“The number of those cases have only increased since the bill was last on the floor,” she said.
What’s different is that there is no mechanism to remove an elected member of council from their position if found to be guilty of harassment. Currently, the maximum penalty for a councillor found to have egregiously harassed a staff member is 90 days without pay. Also, nothing is to prohibit that council from running for re-election again.
Fellows called that “unacceptable” and the Stopping Harassment and Abuse by Local Leaders Act looks to change that.
The private member’s bill has been introduced by Orléans MPP Stephen Blais on three occasions to date, with the previous two dying on the floor due to the federal election in 2021 and the provincial election in 2022.
The second attempt, known as Bill 10, made it through to a second reading but was not pushed through by the Ford government in the final days of its mandate prior to the June election.
It’s a simple bill, Fellows said, holding municipally elected officials to violence and harassment policies of the municipality they serve. The harassment claim would face the same tests any other internal harassment claim would face from the municipality’s human resources department.
Bill 5 also creates a process where an integrity commission can apply to the courts to vacate a position for substantiated acts of egregious harassment, which closely follows the process to remove an elected official for not properly disclosing their campaign finances.
That one issue is treated so seriously, and the other hardly at all dismays Fellows.
“It’s hard to stand here and try to rationalize how a lack of financial disclosure warrants penalty while councillors guilty of egregious harassment can pursue re-election no problem,” Fellows said. “Something is wrong with this picture.”
Innisfil Mayor Lynn Dollin was able to provide some additional context on the bill, as through her role on the Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s Small Urban Caucus, she has seen the evolution of the bill and its wording since before the last provincial election. Most of the feedback that the organization provided found its way into the wording of Bill 5, she said.
Dollin also noted that through her work provincially, she’s been able to sit with members of other councils who have dealt with this type of harassment and witnessed the trauma they brought to the table firsthand.
Innisfil was the 95th municipality in the province to pass a motion in support of Bill 5, including nearly every lower-tier municipality in Simcoe County, as well as the City of Barrie and the City of Orillia.
