When bullies get elected

How do you solve a problem like Lisa?

If you don’t know about the Jackal, you’re lucky.

For over a decade now, Kevin J. Johnston has styled himself as an oft-persecuted free speech warrior, out to tell it like it is and save Canada from a myriad evil globalist plots to destroy this once proud country. But there’s little unique or interesting about his far-right schtick, which sees Johnston glean onto tired tropes and weird fringe internet-spread conspiracies to keep himself in the news and make money.

He started off as a minor local celebrity in the Meadowvale neighbourhood of Mississauga, hosting a a yearly haunted house, getting involved in local amateur sports, and working as a process server, comedian, life coach, and DJ. It was during his spinmaster days that he developed his nickname, using the moniker “DJ Jackal” for his gigs.

But there was always something fringesque about him. His community work appeared to come with a healthy dose of bravado. His days involved with the legal system saw him use sometimes aggressive, off-putting advertisements. Honestly, there’s a world where the internet brain rot didn’t set in and Johnston ran for council a few times before catching the eye of a party boss somewhere, eventually becoming a Tory backbencher at Queen’s Park.

That’s not the world we live in. After he found himself fighting Mississauga City Hall over a backyard rink, the dam burst and Johnston was swept into the furthest right-wing corners of the internet.

He ran for Mississauga mayor in 2014 and 2018, launched a campaign to stop the building of a mosque in Meadowvale, claimed former Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie wanted to move more Muslim men to the city so they would commit hate crimes toward members of the queer community, mused about murdering Muslim politicians, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.1 There’s almost too much to detail here, but you get the picture. A once ascendant local celebrity/politico whose career derailed with vigour. See: Nathalie Xian Yi Yan.

He lost a number of hate crime-related cases, spent time in prison for physically assaulting customer service workers during the pandemic, and, in January of 2022, attempted to “flee”, on foot, to the United States to claim asylum after skipping out on two other jail sentences in both Ontario and Alberta. Johnston’s flight happened in the dead of winter and, without enough supplies, he eventually needed to be rescued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after he became lost somewhere in the undulating prairie between Montana and North Dakota.2 The ill-fated flight from justice was partially an attempt to get out of paying the $2.5 million he owes Mohamad Fakih, the founder of Paramount Fine Foods, because of his hate campaign against the restauranteur (which included claims that Fakih had terrorist connections and murdered children). As with everything Jackal-related, the cross-border excursion was also partially a publicity stunt.

After an Alberta judge ordered Johnston to pay $650,000 to a health inspector against whom he waged a “‘disturbing’ and relentless campaign of defamation and harassment” because he wanted to “destroy this woman’s life” due to her role in enforcing COVID-19 Pandemic restrictions, he fled once again, this time to Central America, where he lives to this day.3

From his hideout somewhere between Panama and Costa Rica, Johnston has kept up with his online activity, most notably running a webshow creatively called “The Kevin J. Johnston Show”.

And his guest on July 30 was Pickering, Ontario city councillor Lisa Robinson.

***

Robinson is a never-ending source of controversy. I’ve written about her in the past, but here’s a quick refresher:

After a few failed attempts at winning a council seat in Pickering, Robinson was named the Conservative Party’s candidate in the 2021 election in the Toronto riding of Beaches–East York. After Islamophobic and homophobic tweets of hers (allegedly) were uncovered by the riding’s incumbent Liberal MP, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, she was dropped as a candidate.

She popped up again during the Convoy occupation in Ottawa where she claimed to be a paralegal who could offer people the equivalent of “get out of public health restrictions free” cards.

This had the effect of quickly making her a celebrity in the right-wing fringe world. With this newfound sense of purpose, she returned to Pickering and won a seat on their city council in 2022 representing Ward 1. Not long after being elected, she met with an Islamophobic German politician and solidified her status as, in the words of one of her colleagues, a “darling of the alt-right”.4 In less than two years, she’s been sanctioned by Pickering’s integrity commissioner twice - once for bullying residents and once for homophobic and transphobic statements.

Since being elected, Robinson has been nothing less than an agent of far-right chaos. In local media, she’s attacked the idea of Black History Month and even went so far to call herself a “modern-day slave” because she was sanctioned by the integrity commissioner.5 Through X/Twitter and the extreme right-wing platform Rumble, she promoted a wide array of conspiracy theories, aimed at satiating her vicious base. She’s claimed a Jewish conspiracy is behind “gender ideology”, expressed support for other municipalities banning Pride flags, and posted her own rambling transphobic rants.

But she also uses her platform to organize; she less-than-subtly encourages her supporters to harass her colleagues, with some of them driving in to Pickering from across Canada with the express goal of disrupting local council meetings. She has backing from the usual collection of neo-fascists, Christian nationalists, conspiracy theorists, hateful bigots, and Convoyists, all of whom work through their networks to make life a living hell for anyone they see as an opponent in Pickering and beyond. Other Pickering councillors have installed security systems after being followed home by Robinson supporters. The municipality has installed safety glass throughout council chambers. One of Robinson’s fanatical supporters threatened to lynch the mayor. Council meetings now have armed police acting as security.6

It was only natural that Robinson would appear on Johnston’s show. Birds of a feather, and all that.

Even for the pair of them, this show was vicious. During the “show”, Johnston showed photos of Robinson’s colleagues, included their contact information, called them child abusers, mocked their appearance, and, in great detail, expressed how he would like to see them mauled by dogs, beaten by “70’s biker types”, and physically removed from office by an armed mob. The pair attacked members of the queer community and Black community activists. Robinson laughed along as Johnston did his bit and, afterward, claimed that her fellow elected officials were just “getting a taste of their own medicine…Somebody's actually calling them out.”7

In the time since, Robinson has been unrepentant. Instead of apologizing, she went to Ottawa to host a bizarre press conference where she said she was being systematically silenced for her activism. When she opened the floor for questions, the assembled journalists simply sat there, uninterested in whatever game she thought she was playing.8

Over to you, Minister Calandra

Understandably, every other member of Pickering City Council is concerned about this behaviour. Robinson’s actions continue to grow increasingly unhinged as she receives validation from more and more far-right weirdos on the internet. This escalation has council members worried, especially since Johnston called for acts of violence to be committed against them, underscored by the accusation that each of them had abused children.

Right wing weirdos + unsubstantiated accusations of child abuse + a huge internet platform * perpetual feelings of persecution = 💥💥💥

To counter this, every other member of Pickering’s council signed a letter to the province’s Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister, Paul Calandra. They’ve asked him to speed up efforts to close what they call a “loophole” in the Municipal Act, namely that there is absolutely no way to address a politician’s bad behaviour aside from a slap on the wrist and a few weeks of docked pay.

Calandra has promised changes for a while, but they keep getting delayed. Now with the threat of a provincial election in the next six to eight months, we may not get any changes for years.

Even more frustrating is the fact that, in the spring of last year, the legislature had a chance to make those changes.

Stephen Blais, the Liberal MPP for the Ottawa-area riding of Orléans, had a Private Member’s Bill on the floor of the legislature - Bill 5, or the “Stopping Harassment and Abuse by Local Leaders Act, 2023”. Blais came to Queen’s Park with years of municipal experience under his belt; at age 26, he was elected to the Ottawa Catholic School Board and four years later, was elected to Ottawa City Council, serving there from 2010 to 2019 when he won a by-election to the provincial legislature.

Blais’ Bill 5 would have closed that loophole in the Municipal Act that Pickering City Council identified. Through a few small changes, it would have required mayors, councillors, and trustees to abide by a municipality’s workplace violence and harassment policies and given each municipality’s (or school board’s) Integrity Commissioner (IC) another option to punish elected officials who act poorly.

Right now, all an IC can do is recommend a reprimand and/or docking pay for up to 90 days. The theory behind the original legislation was that all an IC needed to do was put “on the record” that an elected official was acting badly and then the voters would quickly turn around and throw them out of office in the next election. But that doesn’t improve circumstances for the public and their colleagues in the time between the IC ruling and an election and with declining voter turnout and interest in our elections, there’s no guarantee voters will turf a politician for bad behaviour. As our democracy continues to disintegrate into a mushy pile of testosterone and rage, it is becoming less likely that a voter will look at a formal reprimand from an Integrity Commissioner and think “oh wow, I should really find someone else to vote for.”

Blais’ Bill 5 would have allowed an IC to appeal to a judge of the Superior Court of Justice if they found a council member’s behaviour was particularly abusive. They’d ask the judge to look into their ruling and, if they found a local elected official had violated policies relating to workplace violence and harassment, that judge would declare their seat vacant, triggering an immediate by-election or appointment process for replacing them.

It wasn’t the best possible option, but it worked within the system that existed and only made a few minor tweaks to address an immediate problem. A very Ontario Liberal Party response. The governing Progressive Conservatives were not into it and quickly voted it down at second reading, all the while promising they would bring forward their own legislation on the matter.

Earlier this year, Minister Calandra said he would have legislation ready for the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference that wrapped up a few days ago. But that conference came and went without any announcement.9 So we’re left in a position where municipalities are begging the ministry to act because, at least in the case of Pickering, some elected officials actually fear for their lives because of a colleague’s unhinged behaviour.

Until the province acts, there’s little anyone can do.

The Urban Alberta Disadvantage

Over in Alberta, their provincial government has been pushing through some very controversial new rules for municipal politicians that would, in a sloppy way, address the issues we have here in Ontario.

In April, the United Conservative Party government in Alberta announced it would be introducing Bill 20, the “Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act”. This particular piece of legislation doubles down on the idea that municipalities are “creatures of the province” by giving the province sweeping powers to meddle in local affairs.

The legislation gives Calgary and Edmonton the opportunity to allow local political parties to contest municipal elections, building in a requirement that those parties must be distinct from existing federal or provincial parties. That’s the bit I like. Unique local parties can help direct policy better and do a lot of the leg work on encouraging candidates from diverse backgrounds to run for office. But all that is beside the point for this piece.

The most controversial pieces of the bill include provisions that allow Alberta’s provincial cabinet the right to require a municipality change or repeal a by-law, unilaterally and indefinitely postpone municipal elections, and, in an early version of the bill, dismiss a councillor or mayor after holding a closed-door, private meeting.10 That last bit has since been amended slightly; rather than giving cabinet the opportunity to fire local politicians by themselves, it would now give them the authority to immediately call a recall election.

On the elected official side, it does one important thing. These new changes would give municipalities the opportunity to require a criminal records check for candidates for local office.

All this is on top of relatively new legislation, which came into effect in 2022, allowing citizens to initiate a recall of a local politician (based on similar legislation in British Columbia). Each municipality manages recall petitions on their own which can be initiated by any registered voter in a municipality for any reason. The process is straightforward, but challenging:

• Step 1: Submit a notice of a recall petition. You have to identify who you want to recall, confirm you’re an eligible voter, and pay a $500 filing fee.

• Step 2: The local elections authority (a municipal clerk or an election management body) needs to verify your info and confirm the recall petition.

• Step 3: The petitioner has 60 days to collect the signatures of 40% of eligible electors in their ward or across the city. If someone wanted to recall Calgary’s mayor, for example, they’d have to collect 514,284 signatures from confirmed, eligible voters.

• Step 4: The petition has to be submitted to the local elections authority with the required number of signatories.

• Step 5: The local elections authority has to check the signatures and determine if the petition is “sufficient” or “insufficient”.

• Step 6: The local elections authority publishes the result. If it is successful, the local official is recalled and a by-election is triggered.

There’s already been a recall effort aimed at Calgary’s current mayor, Jyoti Gondek. There were a lot of shenanigans relating to that effort, including accusations that it was being pushed by a hard-right group called Project YYC, but, ultimately, the amateurish effort led by HVAC business owner Landon Johnston managed to gather 69,344 signatures (5.4% of Calgary voters - well below the 40% threshold required to recall the mayor) on a petition that was so riddled with errors, it likely would not have been accepted even if they had gathered half a million signatures.11

The proposed changes through Bill 20 would allow the provincial cabinet to just override that and immediately initiate a recall election. The theory is that the recalled politician could run again (assuming they hadn’t actively broken the law), but that would be a huge strain on one’s time and a massive draw on resources.

Accountability now!

There are many, many, many parts of Alberta’s new municipal rules that would be disastrous if applied here in Ontario.

Ford has a habit of fixating on local issues. That’s why I’ve said his whole ethos is trying to be “Mayor of Ontario”.

He’s targeted municipal elections in the past, unilaterally redrawing Toronto’s ward boundaries and cancelling regional chair elections to deny his political opponents opportunities. He rose in the legislature last October to call Guelph’s city council “a bunch of left-wing lunatics.” Before the Toronto mayoral by-election, he told media “If a lefty mayor gets in there, God help the people of Toronto.”

It is not outside the realm of possibility that Ford would replicate Alberta’s municipal legislation and then use the powers of his cabinet to simply dismiss local councillors ostensibly for “hindering provincial priorities” but, in reality, for having a different political ideology than he does. Stand in the way of unlimited sprawl, unnecessary highways, unethical decisions to close supervised consumption sites and you could face a recall election initiated by an adversarial provincial government that is mad with power.

So that wouldn’t be the best option. But what about an Alberta-style recall law?

If Ford’s government pursued this option, they’d have to be mindful of the benefits and drawbacks. At the current threshold, a recall would be almost impossible to initiate in this province, which could be a good thing.

With a requirement that 40% of eligible voters would have to sign a recall petition for it to be considered valid, it would take 162,115 people to recall Mayor Horwath. Problem is, only 142,058 people bothered to vote in the 2022 election and, of them, 59,216 people voted for the mayor. Assuming all of those people wouldn’t want to recall the mayor, you’d need to get the signatures of the 82,842 people who didn’t vote for Horwath in 2022 and find 79,273 other Hamiltonians who couldn’t be bothered to show up and vote in a regular election, but will be super jazzed to sign a petition to recall the mayor in the middle of her term. And all within 60 days. And you’d need to make absolutely sure that you collected valid signatures from people on the voter’s list.

The bar is very high. But it is also high for a reason. A recall shouldn’t just be used to punish a politician you disagree with. That’s what a regular election is for. A recall should be a last-case failsafe if you’re faced with a Lisa Robinson scenario.

In Pickering’s Ward 1, there were 24,137 eligible voters in 2022. Under the Alberta model, you’d need to gather 9,655 signatures to initiate a recall there. Only 7,608 people bothered to vote in the 2022 municipal election for Pickering’s Ward 1. But Robinson only won with 1,634 votes or 21.9% of the vote. Her extreme behaviour, the national attention her antics are getting, and the atmosphere of hate she’s stoked at the local level means there’d be a very strong case to say 9,655 Ward 1 residents would be willing to sign a recall petition.

There are other instances where a recall petition might gain some traction, but would likely not clear the high bar necessary to move forward. After the internal report regarding the behaviour of four Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) trustees found that many had acted inappropriately and, in one instance, had made overt racist and Islamophobic comments, a group of community activists called for them to be “impeached”.12

While there is no mechanism in place to “impeach” trustees, it is important to remember this was happening around the time of the first Trump impeachment vote, so that language was already pervasive in the media.

But had the community activists been given an opportunity to initiate recall petitions, they could have made a case to the community that the actions of each trustee disqualified them from continuing their terms.

Clearing the 40% threshold would have been an immense challenge. We don’t have good data on who is registered to support each school board, but we can make educated guesses. In the case of the most egregious offender, Carole Paikin Miller, some back-of-the-napkin math indicates that only around 28% of eligible school board voters bothered to cast a ballot for Ward 5 trustee in 2018. If the community activists opposing her wanted to recall her under the Alberta model, they might have been in a position to gather over 8,000 signatures to recall an official who was elected in a race that only 5,764 people bothered to vote in.

Recall petitions are notoriously difficult to advance. This is good because you don’t want every crank with a clipboard to run off and start a recall every time a politician sneezes the wrong way, but is bad because it can be hard to hold politicians accountable when the electorate is so upsettingly disengaged.

I mentioned that Alberta’s legislation is based on similar recall rules from British Columbia, which limits recall to provincial legislators. Since recall legislation was implemented there in 1995, Elections BC has received 30 notices of recall. Every one of them failed. The only one that came close was a recall effort aimed at Paul Reitsma, the BC Liberal MLA for Parksville-Qualicum. I wrote about him in my edition on letters to the editor, but here’s another refresher: Reitsma got caught up in a scandal where he was found to have been sending letters to the editor to local papers, all under fake names, which praised his work and attacked his opponents. Very silly stuff. That recall petition cleared the threshold of 17,020 required signatures but, before they could be validated, Reitsma resigned.

All this is to say that it is possible for a recall petition to move forward, but it is an immense challenge because of the high bar to clear and the complicated issue of getting people interested in the electoral process outside of a regular election. But if someone acted unethically, as Reitsma did, or starts acting dangerously, like Robinson is, recall offers a very real option to frustrated voters.

Right now, the only avenue available to voters in Ontario who are frustrated with the actions of a local politician is mobilizing to run another candidate in a regular general election. But there are 788 long days until the October 26, 2026 municipal elections. That’s around 26 months. And, until that time, Robinson and every other strange local politician in this province gets to keep on doing their thing.

The question is: can the voters and other councillors in Pickering wait that long?

Additional Anderson

Maybe this is just the researcher in me talking, but it’s an incredible feeling to fill in the gaps in a story

Newsletter aficionados will remember my May 3 edition where I talked about Helen Anderson Coulson, one of the first women elected to local office in Hamilton. Her story is almost entirely forgotten here because she was an unabashed member of the Communist Party who was, unfortunately, involved in local politics around the time of the Red Scare post-WWII.

Near the end of that piece, I wrote:

But, since then, the doors to the Spectator archives have been thrown wide open and are magnificently searchable. Not only do we have the incredible archive available through the Hamilton Public Library, but the Spec itself has now put its archives up online, filling in those pesky gaps (1969 - 1983 and 1995 - 1996, as well as other scattered editions) in the library’s collection.

We have a select few new additions to her story that aren’t necessarily satisfying, but that give us some new information and dates to add.

In her post-local politics life, Anderson seems to have run the “People’s Book Centre”, a communist and left-wing book store and resource centre on Barton Street East. On the evening of November 20, 1956, a group of thugs broke into the People’s Book Centre and ransacked the place. Before leaving, the gang hung a crude effigy of Nikita Khrushchev from the ceiling, both expressing their anger at the Soviet response to the Hungarian Revolution that had been brutally suppressed days before and sending a message to local communists that they were being watched. Anderson dismissed the vandalism as “the work of a gang of hotheads.”13

Following the failed Hungarian Revolution, the Labour-Progressive Party (or “LPP” - the official name for the Communist Party following its ban during WWII under the Defence of Canada Regulations) experienced incredible internal turmoil. J. B. Salsberg, one of two LPP members ever elected to the provincial legislature, returned from the Soviet Union with damning evidence of rampant anti-Semitism. Between the split over the Soviet response to Hungary and Salsberg’s report on discrimination in the USSR, the party began to fracture. While the LPP was able to run 100 candidates in the 1953 Federal Election, by 1957 they could only muster the strength to run 10 candidates, sending their share of the popular vote plummeting and finally relegating them to the political backwaters where they languish to this day.

All throughout this time, Anderson was the party’s spokesperson in the area. But she began to step back from the public eye as the party’s situation worsened, even if her days in electoral politics were over. Anderson attended the last meeting of Hamilton City Council in old city hall along with fellow Communist, Harry Hunter. Her presence in the gallery was dismissed by Spec columnist Tom Mills as part of his roll call of the “middle-timers”.14

After that, the archive goes dark again until the early 1980’s.

Helen Anderson Coulson died on January 4, 1982 in Victoria. Sometime after 1969, Helen and her husband Vince made their way out west, where she was born. Her obituary implies her and Vince spent their final days in a mobile home park just off the Trans-Canada Highway and beside Goldstream Provincial Park. True to form, the park where they lived is run as a co-operative.

By the time of her death, she had three children and six grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, she asked that donations be made to a heart health charity.15

Having access to a searchable archive has helped fill in some important gaps in Anderson’s story from 1956 to her death in 1982. But, even with these archives, we still only have pieces of the story. With that, it seems, we have more work to do if we want to fully understand the life of an early trailblazer in this city’s civic politics.

If you want to revisit my original piece, “So long, Mrs. Anderson”, just click the button below.

Cool facts for cool people

• Hamilton Centre MP Matthew Green had an excellent opinion piece in the Spec last week about turning CHML into a community-owned radio station. Green proposes running the new CHML as a worker co-op that is focused on ensuring the community has access to news, local content, and important information, made by and for Hamiltonians. That’s a great idea! And you know I love a co-op.

• Speaking of great newspaper pieces by elected officials, Burlington’s mayor Marianne Meed Ward had a piece in Star-affiliated papers last week calling on the province to step up and do more to help municipalities deal with the combined crises of homelessness, addictions, housing costs, and under-funded resources. Meed Ward rightly points out that municipalities can’t deal with these issues alone, especially with the limited taxation powers they have. Definitely give that one a read.

• British Columbia’s upcoming provincial election will be utterly chaotic. After changing their name from the BC Liberals to BC United, the province’s opposition party has plummeted in the polls, in part because people don’t know what BC United is (sounds like a soccer team) and in part because the party leader, Kevin Falcon, kicked an extremely right-wing MLA, John Rustad, out of the party. Rustad went off and joined the BC Conservatives, an extreme right-wing party that has been getting a bump in the polls because they share a name with the federal Conservatives. Rustad actually became their party leader and has led them to huge polling gains. So, a few days ago, Falcon announced he was dissolving BC United and supporting the BC Conservatives. lol. The whole thing is a mess, with centrist members of BC United saying they might run for or support the BC NDP and others threatening to start a new party. While the chaos is interesting, the fact that the BC Conservatives might win is terrifying. They’re a deeply regressive party with conspiracy-leanings and a Made-in-Canada-MAGA feel that could put BC on a violently right-wing path.