Calls grow for criminally-charged Woodstock mayor to step aside

He remains at the helm of Woodstock city council, saying nothing publicly about the controversy swirling around him, but calls are growing for Mayor Trevor Birtch to step aside amid criminal charges, including sexual assault, laid against him last week.

“He has the moral obligation to step down or take a leave of absence,” Diane Harris, who heads two domestic abuse agencies in Woodstock, said of the two-term mayor charged with assault, sexual assault and sexual assault with choking.

Birtch still wasn’t talking Thursday, a day after his council—half of them women—met in a closed emergency meeting to discuss the situation, though the chief administrative officer of the city of 40,000 clarified that Birtch is still politically in charge.

“There is no change to that status. He remains the mayor,” David Creery said.

But while Birtch and most of his council have remained tight-lipped in the wake of the charges, with the mayor saying nothing about them or about his political intentions in an election year, Harris and other observers say they believe he should step aside pending the charges against him.

“How can he manage a city when he is up on (such serious) charges?” asked Harris, executive director of Domestic Abuse Services Oxford and Ingamo Homes, a transitional housing agency for women and children fleeing domestic abuse.

Harris noted the mayor read a proclamation last fall on the International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women, and “if he is going to say those words, he has a moral obligation to step down and to show women and girls in our community that he means those words.”

AnnaLise Trudell of Anova, a London shelter and counseling agency for abused women, agreed Birtch should step aside.

“For those (sexual assault survivors) watching this, it is so heavy, so diminishing,” she said, adding “there is a need for him to step back and aside to honor that experience, otherwise it looks incredibly insensitive.”

Birtch has entered no pleas to the charges against him and is not due in court until May.

Under Ontario’s municipal law, there’s no requirement for a civic politician facing criminal charges or convicted of them to step aside or resign. Only a jail sentence disqualifies a municipal politician from holding office.

Still, with Birtch likely to be “under this cloud for some time,” the optics of hanging in are not good, said Jacquetta Newman, a political science professor at King’s University College in London and a specialist on women in politics.

“It may be that the mayor is concerned that to resign his position as mayor, it makes him look guilty,” she said. “On the other hand, these are particularly serious charges and it makes sense for an authority figure. . . to refrain from public duty until the situation is figured out.

“It will certainly undermine his credibility as mayor. Plus, continuing to sit as mayor is going to keep him in the public eye. And those charges are going to hang over him. And it may take a lot of time to be resolved,” Newman said.

Birtch, 46, was charged by London police last week, court records show. The allegations all involve the same woman as complainant, whom he is accused of sexually assaulting on Valentine’s Day last year.

Birtch is accused of assaulting her sometime between June 1 and Sept. 30, 2021, and accused of sexually assaulting her with choking between Dec. 10 and 13, 2021, the documents say.

A Woodstock police spokesperson said the force received a complaint about Birtch and asked London police to investigate, citing a potential conflict of interest.

Birtch has not responded to repeated Free Press requests for comment.

Woodstock’s next regular council meeting is Feb. 17, but Creery, the chief administrative officer, said he couldn’t say whether the mayor will be there.

“We will have to wait for the meeting to convene and if he is there, he is there,” he said.

The board that oversees the Woodstock police force, on which the mayor sits as a council representative, has asked a provincial oversight agency, the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, to investigate and rule on Birtch’s membership on the board. The board has also excluded him from meetings until then.

Birtch also sits on Oxford County council, but Woodstock’s deputy mayor, Connie Lauder, filled in for him during a meeting this week.

Woodstock, like the rest of Ontario, is eight months from its next civic election. Birtch was first elected as mayor in 2014 and re-elected in 2018.

Giselle Lutfallah, who co-chairs the Oxford County Domestic Abuse Resource Team, said Birtch remaining as mayor with the charges pending is problematic, and potentially “very triggering” for victims of sexual violence.

“Now that police charges have been ugly, and we look at people in positions of authority — this really erodes trust,” she said.

Birtch chaired a council meeting Feb. 3, a day before The Free Press broke the story about the charges against him.

Municipal councils can pass symbolic motions asking a member facing charges to step aside, but they have no power under Ontario’s Municipal Act to force such a politician to withdraw or resign.

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