Another city meeting was canceled when one of the residents temporarily banned from public facilities attended the finance and labor relations subcommittee meeting Tuesday.
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Former NDP MP Mike Sullivan, who is awaiting an appeal after he was reprimanded until July 2 under the city’s Respectful Workplace Policy, showed up to Tuesday’s meeting shortly after he began wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses and sat in the back row in council chambers at city hall. It was the second meeting ended early because Sullivan was in the room. A city council public meeting was also shut down last month.
Sullivan went to the meeting to hear a prepared speech from retired journalist Robert Roth, who was set to speak out against the ban. However, Roth didn’t finish his introduction when Coun. Mark Hunter, who was chairing the committee meeting, stopped him to tell Sullivan to leave.
Hunter said the meeting could not proceed with Sullivan present while staff were also there without exposing the city to liability.
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“So I either have to ask you to leave, or we’re going to have to conclude the meeting,” Hunter told Sullivan.
Roth said he was there to defend the right of people to speak and asked what the nature of the ban was, but Hunter did not answer. When Sullivan did not leave, Hunter made a motion to adjourn the meeting.
Roth’s wife, Kathleen Beattie, also attended the meeting and was visibly upset when it ended.
“You feel unsafe from words? Get a better backbone,” she shouted out.
Following the meeting, Roth said it was frustrating that council shut down the meeting without an explanation.
“I found it a bit weird to shut down a municipality because you don’t like someone in the room,” he told the Beacon Herald. “Specifically, I was told it was because staff felt unsafe. But I could not get an answer as to why they felt unsafe. I didn’t see anyone in here with a hatchet or a gun or grenades. So what is unsafe about a taxpayer sitting in the room listening? I think it’s incumbent upon council to explain when you take an extreme action like banning someone from a public facility,”
Sullivan said shutting down the meeting was council’s way of trying to prevent people from speaking.
“None of us said anything bad,” he said. “This is their way of shutting people up. That’s what it’s about. And they were trying to shut me up.”
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