Key points of NPCA ruling can’t be ignored

Context is for kings. In the wake of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice’s dismissal of the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority’s defamation suit against St. Catharines activist Ed Smith, that is something the NPCA should remember instead of walking its worn, pitfall-laden road.

In his Thursday decision, Justice

James Ramsay took the NPCA to task for suing a private a citizen — something a government agency is forbidden from doing — and its bellicose response to Smith’s 2016 report critical of the authority’s operations and practices. Ramsay described that response as “the opening salvo of a war.”

Smith made errors in his report, Ramsay ruled, but those errors were not made with malice and were based on the best information he had at the time.

Moreover, Ramsay described the NPCA demands of Smith — which included a threat of litigation, a public apology and a promise to never speak ill of the NPCA again - as utterly out of step with 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,” Ramsay said.

Such a stinging rebuke from a judge should give any government agency cause to slow down and look inward.

Not the NPCA.

The NPCA’s response to Ramsay’s decision — including a string of tweets by board member Tony Quirk — strangely claims a moral victory from its legal defeat.

Quirk’s assessment of the ruling dismissing the NPCA case? “Didn’t lose.”

Making no references to Ramsay’s criticisms, the NPCA claims its $100,000 defamation suit was only launched because it wanted a court to rule that Smith’s report was in error and contained “deliberately misleading information.”

That isn’t what Ramsay ruled. The NPCA position is only tenable if the full context of his decision is stripped away. That Smith did not act out of malice and that some sources of his information were in error are not trivial facts. They are keystones to Ramsay’s ruling that cannot be ignored.

Instead of trying to spin their legal defeat as a win, the NPCA should accept Ramsay’s ruling in its full context and take a moment for sober reflection.

The lawsuit is the latest in a string of NPCA controversies, including labour strife, the forensic audit odyssey and the Bill Hodgson censure scandal.

Ramsay aptly concluded the NPCA is “a body that has had trouble finding its way,” and the last 48 hours have done little to show otherwise.

To regain the confidence of the public it serves, the NPCA board of directors must have the courage to accept its missteps and chart a new path forward.

Otherwise, its members should resign, and allow others to frame the future.

— Postmedia News