Blatchford on why Senator Meredith has to go

Details damning of senator’s pursuit of teen

In the modern world, an allegation of sexual harassment has morphed into a broad charge, in that it is sometimes levelled in what surely appears to cynical old eyes to have been ill-advised but consensual relationships among relative equals.

This was not the case with the “Hon. Rev. Dr. Don Meredith-Senator Ontario,” as he once modestly signed a reference letter, and the young woman known only as Ms. M. When they met at a Black History Month event at an Ottawa church in February of 2013, he was 48, three times her age.

He was a senator well-ensconced (it doesn’t take long to acquire the to-the-manorborn attitude), having been appointed in 2010; the founder and volunteer executive director of the Greater Toronto Faith Alliance Learning Centre (a non-profit supporting at-risk youth and newcomers); a former Pentecostal pastor; and a bit of a wheel in Toronto’s diverse black community.

Ms. M. was 16, a university student living in Ottawa and, but for a brother, pretty much on her own — her parents lived in an unidentified foreign country.

She was the very definition of at-risk youth, and Meredith appears to have had her number in a New York minute.

She came to the church event to get his picture and shake his hand. She left with his cellphone number.

And the ugly picture painted by the excellent report Senate ethics officer Lyse Ricard wrote in March is that for the next two years, Meredith engaged in a calculated effort to both woo her and wear down her doubts.

A word, first, about that report. Meredith’s lawyer took the position that the draft version of it went into “an unnecessary level of detail.”

By “unnecessary,” it appears the lawyer meant “mortifying.”

Ricard made some revisions, but stuck to her guns, deciding detail was necessary to understand the narrative and that there was a “need to promote public confidence in the fact-finding process employed in this inquiry.”

She also said she was “invited to prepare ‘public’ and ‘private’ versions of the report.”

Ricard declined, and thus does she demonstrate that it’s possible to conduct a thorough and fair investigation and produce a detailed report that can be released publicly, while protecting the identity of the complainant.

It was this report that led to the Senate’s ethics and conflict-of-interest committee on Tuesday recommending that Meredith be expelled from the Senate, the first such recommendation in its history.

The senator, now 52, has five sitting days to respond, so there won’t be a vote by the full Senate until next week at the earliest.

The aforementioned narrative goes like this.

From the moment he met her, Meredith pursued her. He invited her to a Valentine’s Day dinner; he began calling her; he took steps to reassure her by meeting Ms. M. and her brother for lunch at the Château Laurier and a short time after he introduced them to his wife and daughter.

You see, he was saying, how benign my intentions are.

But he also started Skyping her (within three months of meeting her) and invited her to his Senate office (within four months), where, Ricard found, “he touched her, rubbed her knees, tried to get into her dress and grabbed her buttocks.”

Ms. M was confused and conflicted; she was, in the way of teenage girls, already half in love, but he was married.

As she told Ricard, “like I was getting attracted to him and I wanted to, like, not have anything to do with him because I had kind of a bad feeling about the whole idea of being in a relationship with him, at the time, even though I wasn’t yet in a relationship with him.”

In July of that year, they had a sexual encounter at her apartment.

By this time, he was also throwing around vague offers to help Ms. M and anyone she knew — help her sister’s business, perhaps go into business with her parents, write her a letter of recommendation — and showing how very well-connected he was.

About 14 months after they met, they began having sexually explicit chats over Skype. Often, Meredith would be in his GTA Faith Alliance office, sometimes in his room at the Chateau, a few times in his home office.

Often, Meredith would masturbate.

A few days before Ms. M’s 18th birthday, he gave her what he called a “teaser,” wherein he penetrated her, but just for a minute.

By February of 2015, two months after that birthday, they had full intercourse (Ms. M. somehow didn’t consider the teaser to have been the real deal) for the first time.

It was about 10 days later that she reminded him she still didn’t have the reference letter — she was applying for an internship program on the Hill — he’d promised.

That was the one he signed, essentially, as God, “the Hon., Rev. Dr.-Senator.”

By the time he got it to her, she’d already had to submit her application.

For the record, throughout the investigation, Meredith was unhelpful and dismissive, and Ricard invariably preferred Ms. M’s evidence (backed up by the cell records she handed over, and Meredith’s own Senateissued cell; he handed over little else) to Meredith’s. He called the relationship “an interaction” or “this engagement.”

Lyse Ricard doesn’t use the word, but what he actually did was this — he groomed that poor bamboozled girl.

Expelling him should take the Senate mere minutes.