Pickering City Councillor Lisa Robinson is once again in hot water, this time for appearing on far-right streamer Kevin J Johnston’s podcast. In response, Pickering Mayor Kevin Ashe and the city’s five other councillors are calling on the province to give it more powers to sanction councillors who engage in controversial behaviour. Municipalities should not have more sanctioning power. Politicians should have the power to say what they want so long as they don’t break the Criminal Code.
In an episode published on August 8th, Robinson is seen on Johnston’s podcast, supposedly discussing “The Corruption of Government in Canada.” At the beginning of the episode, she reads a pre-written statement condemning the council’s efforts to censure her. According to a statement released by Pickering Council, Johnston called council members “pedophiles,” “Nazis,” and “Fascists,” while Robinson looked on, refusing to dispute such claims.
This isn’t the first time Robinson has been embroiled in controversy. In 2021, while running for the Conservatives in the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York, a tweet from an account associated with her surfaced in which she says, “Muslims go home.” As a result, the Conservatives dropped her as a candidate.
More recently, in February 2024, Robinson published a column in The Oshawa/Durham Central Newspaper in which she said that people are “hung-up” about the transatlantic slave trade and claimed that she was a “modern-day slave” after her pay was suspended for a total of 90 days in 2023.
Robinson’s pay was initially suspended for 30 days after she made a post on Facebook that an integrity commissioner found to have used bullying tactics. And again, for a further 60 days, after she announced her intention to introduce two motions, one which would remove the city’s support for drag queen story times, and another which would prohibit flying the LGBTQ pride flag on city property.
In response to the latest controversy, Pickering City Council has called on the province to amend the Municipal Act to allow for more punishment options against councillors. Currently, the strictest sanction available is a 90-day pay suspension. However, with Robinson already having received two separate pay suspensions, this seems not to be much of a deterrent, especially considering, as alleged by Pickering City Council, that Robinson gets funding from outside sources.
This begs the question, though, of whether punishments should be stricter. And what would stricter punishments look like?
Currently, punishments can only be handed down by a municipality’s integrity commissioner, after an individual has been found to have violated a city’s code of conduct. Section 5.1 of Pickering’s Municipal Code of Conduct states that council members must treat staff “with respect dignity and without abuse, bullying or intimidation,” which is presumably what the council is accusing Robinson of having violated this time.
Mayor Ashe has stated that he believes municipal integrity commissioners should have the power to recommend a councillor’s removal and that the judiciary or a tribunal should also be involved in managing sanctions against councillors.
In some regards, this issue touches on a more significant question facing Western democracies: should we expect our elected officials to be moral role models? And, more specifically, should we enforce their morality?
The current scandal embroiling Robinson is because of something she said, not something she did. In a democracy, free speech is one of our most sacred rights. No matter how heinous the things said may be (excluding those which contravene the Criminal Code), they must be protected. Allowing for the removal of an elected official because of their public comments threatens this. Rather than discouraging heinous behaviour, it will only lead to public officials walking on eggshells for fear of being fired.
Another issue is municipalities’ codes of conduct themselves. Cities’ codes of conduct are set by city council, not the province or a larger overarching body. This means that the role of integrity commissioners is to investigate codes of conduct violations by councillors, which are set by the councillors themselves. This opens the door to a wide range of potential abuses of power.
Putting too much power in the hands of the integrity commissioner further risks undermining the council’s power by handing over the fate of an elected official to an unelected bureaucrat. It will also lead to accusations of abuse of power when distrust of government institutions is at an all-time high.
It is not the job of council or the integrity commissioner to police individual politicians’ morality or public comments. It should be left up to the voters at the ballot box to determine if they believe an elected official’s comments have crossed the line.