Pickering city council should let voters decide who to evict

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The men and women who make up the city council of Pickering, a Toronto exurb, are frustrated and perturbed. They have a rogue in their midst. Her name is Lisa Robinson. She keeps saying the most problematic things.

She wrote a column in a local newspaper questioning the need for Black History Month. She suggested Pride parades and drag story time be kept away from children. When council docked her pay after a finding against her by the city’s integrity commissioner, she said she was being treated like “a modern-day slave.”

Pickering’s Mayor, Kevin Ashe, says her behaviour is creating “chaos,” getting in the way of council’s business. He and his fellow councillors are asking the Ontario Human Rights Commission to step in. They want changes to Ontario’s Municipal Act that would allow for the removal of elected officials deemed guilty of discriminatory conduct. The job of making that call would fall to judges.

As upset as the good councillors may be, this is a simply awful idea. If complaints from their colleagues can get elected officials thrown out of office, no end of trouble could follow. Who is to decide what is discriminatory and what is not? What is to prevent politicians from ganging up against one of their number on partisan or ideological grounds (which is just what Ms. Robinson claims her fellow councillors are doing)?

For good reason, legislative bodies at all levels give their members broad privileges and protections. The aim is to guard their independence and freedom of speech. Members of Parliament cannot be held legally liable for something they say in the House of Commons. City councillors cannot be removed from office by other city councillors, though they may be penalized or sanctioned.

As the country learned a decade ago, even admitting you smoked crack cocaine while in office does not get you removed from the post you were elected to hold. Rob Ford’s colleagues could curtail his powers, but not chuck him out. Chucking is the voters’ job.

That is as it should be. Voters don’t have much power between elections, when they often sit seething on the sidelines. But at election time they are boss. Rulers get to rule; voters decide who those rulers are. It’s our system and most of the time it works. If it means putting up with a few cranks, it is a price well worth paying.

Every democracy has its cranks, gadflies and loose cannons. Some of them become president. Others become mayors of big North American cities.

Well before he sat in the mayor’s chair, Mr. Ford was driving his fellow councillors to distraction with his rants about, among many other things, the evils of free snacks at council meetings and the scandalous amount the city was paying someone to water the plants at City Hall. The voters kept electing him. It was their right to do so.

Winston Churchill himself was considered a rogue MP by most of his fellow parliamentarians in the 1930s, though most conceded he was a brilliant rogue. He called Mahatma Gandhi a fanatic and opposed the government’s attempt to grant limited autonomy to India. He supported Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis, putting himself on the wrong side of parliamentary opinion. His own party shunned him as unbalanced, unreliable and self-serving.

Lisa Robinson is no Winston Churchill. Her constituents may well decide she is chuck-worthy when the next election rolls around.

The point is that dissenters are important, even when they are crude, rude and wrong. That is a truth too frequently forgotten in our censorious age.

If the dissenters go too far and descend into crankdom, their fellow officeholders are free to denounce, rebut or simply ignore them. Just not to have them tossed out. That must always be the prerogative of those who put them there in the first place.