MISSISSAUGA CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE IN FIGHT OVER NAMES.
Hearing into use of indigenous names for teams
The windows of the 14th-floor Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario hearing room in downtown Toronto look over a construction site, complete with cranes.
As Stan De Rango, vicepresident of the Mississauga Girls Hockey League (and Mississauga Chiefs), and Michael Doyle, president of the Lorne Park Hockey Association, looked out over the site Wednesday, it appeared to be with some longing.
Used to the speed with which the national game is played, probably they’d never before seen anything move so slowly.
Both men, hockey volunteers, took time from their jobs to be at the hearing.
On one side is Brad Gallant, a proud Mi’kmaq and aggrieved hockey parent who has complained that the City of Mississauga is supporting racism by not preventing some hockey teams that use city facilities from using indigenous names and logos.
On the other side are the five Mississauga teams that are the subject of Gallant’s particular complaint — the Mississauga Braves, Mississauga Chiefs, Lorne Park Ojibwe, Meadowvale Mohawks and Mississauga Reps (which uses the Chicago Blackhawks’ logo).
One of the offenders, the Lorne Park Ojibwe, amalgamated because of dwindling numbers with Clarkson, and their teams are now known as the Lorne Park Clarkson Wild. Another, the Meadowvale Mohawks, only ever used “Mohawk” for the older-aged teams and has since shortened it to Hawks.
And smack in the middle, really, is the city: As its main witness, Michael Cleland, testified — he is on loan to another city department now but his regular job is area manager for sports and community development — the city doesn’t name any of the sports teams in Mississauga, come up with the logos, or have anything to do with their running.
What Mississauga does is what towns and cities all over Canada do: The municipality provides the facilities and allocates the ice time, giving priority and a better rate to the non-for-profit community groups with the bona fides.
Gallant wants the city to remove all banners with indigenous names, stop subsidies to those with indigenous names or logos, take those organizations off the preferred ice allocation list, and is seeking $500,000, an amount he says is based upon the subsidy the city gives the teams. His complaint says the amount is a “per annum amount and should be awarded” yearly until Mississauga fulfils “its supposed commitment to equality.”
(His claim says if awarded, the money would go to support First Nation cultural awareness and an educational program “on First Nations mascots … this application is not a profit-taking opportunity for me.”)
Gallant testified last November, when the hearing began.
It is slated to run the rest of this week, but that remains in some doubt, despite the best efforts of Ken Bhattacharjee, the amiable arbitrator presiding.
Bhattacharjee is that rare bird: an uber-courteous, non-condescending fellow who takes seriously the need for such quasi-judicial proceedings to be transparent, and who tried desperately to keep the hearing on track.
But the gods of government were conspiring against him.
With the next witness scheduled to testify via video from North Bay, the lawyers all immediately began wrestling the TV monitors in front of them in anticipation that the man’s testimony was imminent.
Meantime, from North Bay, the witness — his face in a tiny, barely visible corner of the screens — kept saying, “Hello? Hello?” The acoustics were so good it sounded as though he were speaking from an underwater cave.
At that point, Bhattacharjee took a brief recess so the IT people could attempt a fix.
Shortly before noon, he returned to announce that the Ontario Public Service Conferencing System “is not working. I’m sorry. It’s not repairable today, and I’m not sure it’s going to be fixed by Friday.
“It’s government,” Bhattacharjee said with an apologetic shrug. “I’m not optimistic.”
Several times, he spontaneously addressed the press and public, saying he was disturbed by a recent Toronto Star series on access to documents at the various “Social Justice Tribunals” of which the Human Rights Tribunal is one. The stories reported the tribunals often “block” documents that should rightly be public.
“There’s a lot of public interest in this case,” he said, “and I don’t want to see down the road that the media had difficulty getting documents.”
On his own, Bhattacharjee said he was going to “direct the registrar” to make the pleadings and exhibits in the case public in a “timely” way.
Indeed, he did just as he said, and by the time reporters reached the reception desk, the woman behind the counter had the name and email of the registrar (and helpfully, the phone number of a communications person) ready.
She declined to give a colleague and me the registrar’s phone number, citing the need for security.
We sent emails. The only reply from the registrar was what I got, an automatic response warning that “Sameday replies are not always possible.” We left voicemails for the comms person.
She phoned my colleague and explained that the documents certainly couldn’t be available Wednesday.
But, she added, “it might not take a week.”
The merits of the case be damned; spare a kind thought for Ken Bhattacharjee, fighting against the man from within.