Brady’s casino injunction bid could be heard in Toronto
Local activist Roy Brady is still taking the city to court over a plan to allow a new casino in the city’s south end – but now the case may be heard in Toronto, rather than Oshawa, at a hearing sometime in December.
Court documents filed by Brady and his lawyer, Michael Binetti, argue that the site selection for the new casino – which is under construction now, on Crawford Dr. at The Parkway – came of “a tainted process” that began in secret at City Hall.
Brady filed an application in May for a court order quashing council’s rezoning of the property on Crawford Dr. for the new casino. Brady is also seeking an interim injunction to keep the city from allowing the project to go any further.
Initially, the application was made for court in Oshawa. But Binetti said there were no dates available for 2017.
Meanwhile, casino construction has been underway since Sept. 6 and Shorelines Casino Peterborough is expected open by mid-2018.
Binetti said it didn’t make sense to wait for a court in Oshawa: the casino could be up and running by the time they make it to court.
He said the city consented to the potential change of city for the hearing, and the associate Chief Justice for Ontario agreed to change it to Toronto court.
Binetti said it didn’t take much to persuade the courts to allow the case to be heard in Toronto.
“We said, ‘This is a pressing matter – they’re building this thing,’” he said.
Brady didn’t want to comment for this article – he wrote in an email that his lawyer’s statements would suffice. Great Canadian Gaming Corp., a private company based in Vancouver, is building the casino and will operate it once it’s open.
Brady’s court application is focused on a closed-door meeting that took place at City Hall on Nov. 16, 2015, where councillors discussed the idea of allowing a casino to be built on the property on Crawford Dr.
The public wasn’t allowed at this meeting, the document points out, and yet councillors decided then to direct city staff to start the process of rezoning.
That was an “illegal process,” says the document, because it came from “an illegal meeting.”
The document also states that the public only found out about this six months later, when the property was identified as the site for the future casino as a passing reference in a city staff report.
Later, it was confirmed by an investigator that the city broke Municipal Act rules in its private meeting in November 2015.
The closed-meeting investigation firm Amberley Gavel looked into the meeting after a complaint from a member of the public. Amberley Gavel is contracted by the city to investigate complaints about closed-door meetings.
The firm revealed that councillors had been talking privately about negotiations over land annexation with Cavan Monaghan Township during that meeting.
But then they talked about a potential site for a casino, the report from the investigator states - and they shouldn’t have, because it had nothing to do with land acquisition.
The court document takes issue with this, stating the city “unilaterally” made a decision.
“City council acted in bad faith, in an arbitrary and unreasonable manner that was unfair,” states the document.
Binetti said there’s no court date yet in Toronto, but he said the case could be heard sometime in December (or potentially even earlier).
He said they can’t set a date yet because the city hasn’t responded to the initial court filings with documents of their own.
Binetti said those documents were expected filed from the city is September, and that if they’re not filed in a week or so the courts will be asking for them.
Lawyers from the Toronto firm WeirFoulds are expected to represent the city in the matter.
City CAO Alan Seabrooke said on Thursday he didn’t know anything about the court filings and referred questions to the city’s legal department.
Alan Barber, the associate city solicitor, couldn’t be reached for comment Thursday.