Sarnia’s integrity commissioner needs to act after a training company canceled City of Sarnia diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in the wake of “hostility” from councilors in a November closed-door meeting, the mayor says.
Sarnia’s integrity commissioner needs to act after a training company canceled City of Sarnia diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in the wake of “hostility” from councilors in a November closed-door meeting, the mayor says.
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“I would hope the (integrity commissioner) would see this as an extremely important issue for the community,” Mike Bradley said Thursday.
This alleged hostility involved a Nov. 15 virtual council meeting with Kike Ojo-Thompson, a trainer with the Toronto-based KOJO Institute for diversity, equity and inclusion training.
Council had unanimously approved the $6,500 training last juneand completed the two-hour session more than three months ago, but there was “a great deal of tension at the end,” Bradley said.
A Dec. 2 letter to Sarnia chief administrator Chris Carter from KOJO director of client services Craig Peters indicated “undisrupted, uncorrected and unabated hostility demonstrated by some members of council toward our principal consultant, Kike Ojo-Thompson, was wholly inappropriate” and concluded it was “unsafe” to complete other scheduled training sessions with senior city staff and Sarnia’s police board.
“We will not be countersigning the other agreements,” the letter said.
Peters declined an interview request and said the specifics of their complaint would not be disclosed.
Sarnia County. Nathan Colquhoun said in a Feb. 24 blog post he had attempted to make the KOJO Institute letter public so people would know what was happening within city leadership.
That council motion did not pass.
“In this closed meeting, (Coun.) Bill Dennis worried that this letter would become public and continued to scream and threaten me,” wrote Colquhoun, noting Dennis threatened to “come down like a hammer with a lawsuit.”
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Dennis, when contacted Thursday, said he couldn’t comment on what happened in a closed-door meeting as it would violate the Municipal Act.
Colquhoun wrote in his post he made a formal integrity commissioner complaint on Dec. 17 that included information about Dennis’s conduct at the Nov. 15 training session. That complaint was ultimately dismissed Feb. 8 because integrity commissioner Paul Watson found no “harm to the public with respect to the conduct of a member at a closed meeting.”
Watson said in an email he’s required to maintain confidentiality about any complaints he receives and could not comment.
Bradley said he later asked for clarification about Watson’s response to Colquhoun after the commissioner “said, basically, ‘I’m not investigating in-camera meetings.’”
“I was absolutely stunned by that because that has much broader implications than just this one particular issue,” Bradley added.
In a Feb. 25 response to Sarnia’s clerk, Watson said members of council remain bound by its code of conduct at all times, including during closed meetings and in social media posts.
The integrity commissioner and the code of conduct process is the only way these matters can gets investigated, Bradley said.
“(Watson has) now clarified his position and said, ‘Yes, I can investigate,’ and I think that has to happen,” the mayor said. “I hope he would do it. For the good of the city and the good of council, do it in a prompt and timely manner.”
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Sarnia council’s code of conduct requires members to perform their duties with integrity, honesty and respect.
Several councilors contacted KOJO to apologize for what happened during the tense Nov. 15 meeting, Peters’ memo indicated.
While Bradley and Colquhoun said they had offered their apologies, Dennis did not confirm in his written response if he had done the same.
Colquhoun, in his blog, indicated “a few councilors … were hostile, racist, sexist and completely disrespectful and inappropriate to Kike,” who Colquhoun described as brilliant.
“They chose to debate, insult, override her session and challenge the reason for taking training like this,” Colquhoun wrote.
He clarified in a phone interview there were two councilors allegedly involved, including Dennis and another “not nearly as hostile” he declined to name.
“The fact that Bill was so aggressive in his threats after … I didn’t want it to stay hidden for sure because there was clearly more that needed to be exposed if he was so scared of that letter coming out,” Colquhoun said.
The training-session hostility began with a discussion of critical race theory, Colquhoun said.
“That set them off.”
Ojo-Thompson, who is Black, was accused of indoctrination and was called a racist, Colquhoun said.
“It was pretty wild.”
Dennis, who was in hospital Thursday recovering from kidney surgery and with another looming, did not respond to questions about the allegations.
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In a brief phone call, he said it was “highly inappropriate” for Colquhoun to discuss anything that happened in a closed-door meeting.
The call was cut short when Dennis said nurses were returning to check his vital signs.
The councilor’s wife called a short time later, saying Dennis would provide a written statement in response to both emailed questions and the allegations from Colquhoun.
“I believe wholeheartedly in complete and total equality,” the written statement said in part. “I believe the very future of our city depends on our ability to embrace diversity and be fully inclusive.
“I do believe there are many ways to approach any conversation on (equity, diversity and inclusion training). I further believe that every participant in any (equity, diversity and inclusion) exchange should feel free to share their views and that this diversity of thought should not be discouraged, especially when the mutual goal is the eradication of any form of racism and full and complete equality.”
Colquhoun said he spoke up, risking further code-of-conduct complaints, to call out bad behavior. The integrity commissioner process, he added, is insufficient.
“I don’t understand what the point of it is if all they’re doing is making judgments on things that the public can already see,” Colquhoun said.
A different trainer or trainers are now being sought for senior city staff and Sarnia police board training, Bradley and Carter said.
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It’s unclear whether the closed session was a formal meeting of council that carried all of the usual restrictions, Coun. Mike Stark said.
“I think it would be fair to say that there’s a fair number of inquiries … going to the integrity commissioner asking, or demanding, for the information to be disclosed,” he said.
He was also among those who, of his own volition, apologized to Ojo-Thompson for what happened Nov. 15, he said.
Colquhoun said it was Bradley’s responsibility as chair to bring the meeting under control when it got out of hand.
“The mayor’s job is to keep things on track and keep things respectful, and to put people in their place if they’re not doing that,” Colquhoun said, “which he had plenty of opportunity to do so.”
That’s why the words “undisrupted, uncorrected and unabated” were used in the KOJO letter, the councilor said.
Bradley said the session was an educational meeting, not a council meeting, so he was not serving as chair.
“I turned the keys over to the trainer,” the mayor said.
There had been discussion in the preceding weeks about whether the training session should be held publicly or in closed, he said.
“I was opposed to that but, in the end, I accepted the argument from the trainer that she did not want to be in a position, for commercial reasons, that her competitors would see how she trains and the content of those training sessions, ” he said.
There’s likely no recording of the meeting, he said.
Along with the nine members of council, Carter and clerk Amy Burkhart were also there from the city, the mayor said.
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“Just like 11 witnesses to a car accident, there’s 11 different versions to what occurred,” Bradley said.
The mayor also declined to address specifics about what happened during the contentious session.
“I certainly was devastated by some of the comments made,” he said.
There were “high hopes” for the session, which Bradley said he considered a team-building exercise that council should complete every year.
“You need to understand your community, your country and the diversity of it,” he said.
Part of the reason for the training, he noted, was to buoy local efforts at attracting newcomers, a strategy that includes a Lambton College Immigration Task Force.
Peters, in his letter, said “under different circumstances” there may be an opportunity to partner with the city again.
Community Legal Assistance Sarnia, meanwhile, called in its own Feb. 26 letter to mayor and council for the KOJO memo to be released publicly, along with more information about what council will do to address what happened.
Council voted unanimously for staff to review this letter and report back to council.
Legal issues about disclosure still remain, Bradley said.
“Even that (KOJO) letter itself, it was leaked, but we do not have (KOJO’s) permission to give that letter out,” he said, “so council has to be careful. … That’s the tightrope we’re walking.”