Community-Building Requires Civic Discourse — Lessons from Stratford’s Banning of 3 Residents from Council Meetings

As someone who has been both an elected official and a bureaucrat, I have found the City of Stratford’s banning of three citizens from public buildings and Council meetings interesting in its breadth and approach.

The backstory is that Stratford Council decided to ban three residents from municipal buildings — including Council meetings — for three months for disrespectful comments made against staff at a Council meeting. Two of the offenders decided to disregard the ban and started showing up at Council meetings, which led to a number of those meetings being cancelled because these residents wouldn’t leave.

First, I should clarify — I was an elected City Councillor in Stratford between 2003 and 2006 — and after not running for re-election, worked in the public service as a municipal staff member in multiple municipalities, including Toronto, Markham and York Region.

It is essential to recognize that staff are there to implement Council decisions. Staff often put forward ideas and positions Council doesn’t approve — and even though their professional opinion isn’t heeded — staff implement Council decisions they may disagree with. That’s part of being a public servant — you’re there to serve, and you’re there to do what those elected ask you to do.

That’s why when residents criticize staff actions, question their professional judgment, and make personal accusations, it’s important for the Council to defend staff and call out residents who make those claims. Council must own its decisions and not defer blame to staff.

Now, are there better ways to do that than what Stratford did?

Definitely.

The best way to address this is when someone makes a critical comment about staff at a meeting, the Chair should take a moment to set the record straight and correct the deputant. The Chair should highlight criticism should be directed towards Council, shouldn’t be personal and needs to be based on facts. And, if they don’t comply with civil discourse, they can no longer speak to the issue. This is how you connect bad behaviour with corrective actions — and ensure transparency.

I’ve seen this done at countless Council meetings — the Chair’s role is to keep meetings civil and on track. If you don’t have a Chair that can do that, then that’s where the problem begins.

There’s a road map for this in Stratford. Having sat in many Stratford Council meetings during debates with Lawrence Ryan — a wannabe developer who was continuously suing the City — I saw that when he criticized staff, the Mayor would ask him to stop, and when he continued, he would often be removed by the police. He’d then come to the next meeting and do it all over again. That’s how it should work.

There needs to be transparency between the negative discourse and the corrective action — and it needs to happen simultaneously as the transgression. For example, when one of the banned residents showed up at a public meeting on a development issue contrary to the ban, instead of cancelling the meeting, the Chair (the Mayor in this case) should have called out the resident, asked them to leave, and if they didn’t, had the police remove them.

However, instead, the Mayor simply cancelled the meeting without explanation. This left dozens of residents without any context on why the meeting was being cancelled — angering them and making the issue of banning residents an even bigger issue.

Now, you can argue that residents shouldn’t have been banned from Council Chambers in the first place — and I would agree. They should have been called out at the meeting, where they attacked staff and warned. Instead, they were sent letters. There was no transparency between the attacks on staff and the corrective action.

That said, of the three residents banned, two are former elected officials, and one has run for office unsuccessfully. They know better than to attack staff and should understand the importance of civic discourse. Unfortunately, it would seem they don’t, though.

One of the offenders, Mike Sullivan, is a former NDP MP and former journalist. Yet, watching the false accusation of a real estate relationship between the Mayor and a developer, it would seem he isn’t too concerned about whether what he says is true. Yes, when corrected, he apologized for making the false claim, but a former elected official and journalist should know you don’t make an accusation without proof.

Then there’s Barb Shaughnessy, a former elected Councillor in Caledon. Ironically, she was the subject of multiple Integrity Commissioner investigations while a Councillor and reprimanded for criticizing staff. You would have hoped she learned her lesson, but that isn’t the case. She decided to move to another community and reinforce her bad habits.

The thing about public service is that you need to build relationships. Criticize, yes, but present solutions and build relationships to implement those solutions. You can disagree with people without attacking them and work with them on solutions. Building community isn’t a black-or-white issue — it’s about blurring the lines and finding a common pathway forward.

When you resort to lies, attack the credibility of others, and don’t offer solutions with a willingness to do the hard work — you’re just stuck in a partisan world that won’t achieve a better community.

Hopefully, moving forward, everyone’s learned something from this episode in Stratford — for Council, it’s to call out bad behaviour when it happens, and for residents, it’s to inject some civility into their discourse.