Man apologizes for yelling vulgar phrase at reporter during broadcast

A female reporter says she’s satisfied by a restorative justice process that saw a man apologize for yelling a vulgar phrase at her.

CTV Atlantic’s Heather Butts was broadcasting live from a Halifax pub on the World Junior Hockey Championship when Nash John Gracie made a crude gesture and uttered a sexually explicit comment on Dec. 29.

Butts said she is satisfied that the 25-year-old Nash has taken responsibility for his actions through the restorative justice process and has agreed to community service.

She says the incident is an example of the harassment many reporters have experienced over the years across North America.

She says the process sends a message that these incidents will not be tolerated.

A spokesman for CTV says the network is “pleased the person responsible ... is being held accountable through the restorative justice process,” adding it’s important journalists are able to do their jobs free of harassment.

Gracie was charged with public mischief and causing a disturbance. When the case was referred to restorative justice, his lawyer said the charges would be withdrawn once he completed the process.

The provincial website says restorative justice is “a response to crime that focuses on restoring the losses suffered by victims and communities.”

Nova Scotia’s freedom of information law is becoming “an exercise in frustration,” the privacy commissioner said after the government partially rejected her recommendations on a report on a man’s jailhouse death.

Commissioner Catherine Tully told the Justice Department it should provide The Canadian Press with most of an internal report into how 23-year-old Clayton Cromwell died from a methadone overdose at the Burnside jail in April 2014, other than names of prisoners and guards.

The efforts to see the internal report — and what it says about the Cromwell’s death — extend back to December 2014, when The Canadian Press first applied for it.

Tully said the province failed to provide evidence to back its assertions that releasing the report would harm law enforcement and the facility’s security, or that it would be “detrimental” to the custody of inmates.

She said when the province applied sweeping exemptions to almost all of the report, they didn’t link their claims to specific passages, and “provided no evidence of (law enforcement) harm.”

The commissioner says the province has told her it is now willing to release some of the documents, but will continue to apply exemptions that she has found aren’t backed with evidence.

Tully added it’s still unclear how much of the document will be provided by Oct. 10, the deadline for The Canadian Press to appeal to the courts.

She said the government argues “harm” frequently in its refusals of freedom of information requests, and when her reviews have noted the lack of evidence, the province then rejects her findings and repeats its general assertions.

“It’s an exercise in frustration for the public bodies, for the public and of course for this office to go through this kind of analysis and have it for the most part rejected out of hand,” she said in an interview.

She said the case also illustrates how the current system forces applicants to either abandon their effort or face the expense of a time-consuming appearance before a Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice, despite a review in their favour.

However, Justice Minister Mark Furey responded that he feels his department is striking the proper middle ground between the public’s right to know and his protection of the institution’s safety.

“I’ve given instructions within the department to review the original application and the information released with a lens to providing what additional information we can, conscious that we still have to protect the privacy of individuals and the safe functionality of the facility,” he said.

He said the redacted document will be provided before Oct. 10.