Falls council votes against NPCA supervisor motion
Niagara Falls city council voted against a motion requesting the premier of Ontario immediately appoint a supervisor to take over the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.
Some other Niagara municipalities, including St. Catharines, have voted in favour of a similar motion.
“The bottom line is the NPCA is in trouble,” said Coun. Carolynn Ioannoni, who introduced the motion during Tuesday night’s meeting.
Her unsuccessful motion came on the heels of a ruling by Justice James Ramsay, who Friday ordered NPCA and its former chief administrative officer and current Niagara Region CAO Carmen D’Angelo pay environmental activist Ed Smith $131,076 in legal costs.
In November, Ramsay dismissed the NPCA’s defamation lawsuit against the retired Air Force major.
Ramsay pointed out in his ruling that the order was in part to act as a deterrent to prevent government from turning to the courts in the future to silence public debate.
Niagara-on-the-Lake businessman William Montgomery was also ordered to pay Smith $48,172 in costs.
In a statement Friday, Smith said he was “elated” with Ramsay’s decision on the awarding of costs.
“The justice identifies that the purpose of the lawsuit was to silence me because the NPCA deemed me as an annoyance … In other words, a government agency attempted to intimidate and silence a citizen who was critical of them, and in effect strangle my right to freedom of speech.”
Smith said he believes Ramsay’s decision “should resonate in Niagara for a long time, the behaviour displayed by the NPCA cannot be tolerated in Canada.”
NPCA posted a notice on its website late Monday afternoon saying it “stands by its decision to defend its employees and the organization itself.”
The statement said NPCA’s lawyers asked Smith three times to retract and correct the “most offensive” parts of a document he distributed about the organization in 2016, but Smith refused to do so.
“This was never about silencing an individual asking questions; it was about correcting defamatory statements made against an NPCA employee, and the organization as a whole,” the NPCA statement said.
The organization also said it’s “grateful to the court for finally correcting the record by confirming that Mr. Smith’s claims were false.”
“The legislation for this type of lawsuit sets a very high presumption in favour of a cost order, which is why NPCA was ordered to pay Mr. Smith’s fees. Had Mr. Smith’s original document been corrected, there would have been no case, and therefore no associated costs.”
NPCA, jointly with D’Angelo and Montgomery, sued Smith in connection with a report Smith authored in 2016 that alleged NPCA was rife with conflict of interest problems and engaged in other questionable practices. The plaintiffs claimed Smith had defamed them in his report.
During Tuesday night’s Niagara Falls council meeting, Coun. Kim Craitor voiced his frustration that the NPCA, the board of which is largely made up of elected officials, used taxpayer money to sue a veteran “who fought for our rights for freedom of speech.”
The $131,076 awarded to Smith doesn’t include NPCA’s own legal costs related to the lawsuit, which have yet to be publicly released.
The NPCA is covering D’Angelo’s costs in the case.
“Our taxpayers money has been used to attack and sue an individual that had the courage to stand up ...” said Craitor.
“It’s hard for me to believe in this day and age we can have an agency made up of elected officials ... sue a veteran who fought for the rights of us to have freedom of speech and said you don’t have that right because we don’t like what you’re saying ...”
Welland NDP MPP Cindy Forster plans to introduce a private member’s bill to allow Queen’s Park to appoint a supervisor to run the NPCA.
The bill has yet to go through the house.
“What they’re hoping is by having municipalities support this resolution, as the bill moves forward then they’ re able to show that there’ s support by municipalities for saying there should be a supervisor appointed,” said Craitor, adding current legislation doesn’t allow the province to appoint a supervisor to run conservation authorities.
Coun. Wayne Thomson said he has “some concerns” with council calling on the province to appoint a supervisor to run NPCA. He pointed to occasions where he, as an elected official, has been subjected to Facebook comments“and people making comments which are totally inappropriate.”
“You have to be able to protect yourself, and it doesn’t matter what citizen it is, if they’re making derogatory comments you have to have the right and the freedom to do what you have to do,” said Thomson.
Ioannoni’s motion was defeated in a 4-3 vote.
Ioannoni, Craitor and Coun. Vince Kerrio voted in favour of the motion, while Thomson and councillors Joyce Morocco, Wayne Campbell and Victor Pietrangelo voted against it.
Coun. Mike Strange did not attend the meeting.
Mayor Jim Diodati, who is an NP CA board member, said “it doesn’t matter” whether Smith is a veteran or not, “false statements” were made, and “you still obey the law like everybody else.”
Diodati said NPCA doesn’t yet have the final bill for its legal case against Smith.
“My vote will be to release the numbers because I don’t think there should be any hidden numbers, the numbers are the numbers, so that’s going to be my vote,” he said, adding it will be a board decision.
In November, Ramsay ruled NPCA had failed to demonstrate its case had any merit and said the authority, as a government agency, had no right to sue a citizen for criticizing it.
In the cases of D’Angelo and Montgomery, Ramsay found they failed to show that Smith did not have a valid defence for the content of his report, even where he made mistakes. He found Smith made his allegations without malice and, given the information he had at the time, “had a compelling interest and moral obligation to raise matters that had come to his attention.”
After Smith published his report, NPCA threatened to sue Smith and demanded he apologize and promise not to publish his report again. Ramsay found this was akin to “the opening salvo of a war” and that a reasonable person would not question the accuracy of Smith’s report given the NPCA response.
Expressing disappointment in how NPCA reacted to Smith and his report, Ramsay ruled in November that the authority’s actions ran contrary to the Canadian value of free expression.
“There are many places in the world where I might expect such a thing to happen, but not in our beloved dominion,” he said.
In a statement Tuesday, Smith said “sadly, the leadership at the NPCA continues to display a limited ability to understand Justice Ramsay’s decision.”
“The decision was clear: a government entity should never have sued a private citizen commenting on a matter of public interest in the first place. The NPCA was well aware this was my position even before they formally started their lawsuit, and Justice Ramsay agreed. Justice Ramsay was clear and unequivocal, the NPCA brought forward this lawsuit to silence a citizen, and this was something that was obvious to all citizens from the onset.”