Special Report: Integrity Commissioner Why 'The Shove' Is Not Going Away Any Time Soon The fact that the Basse report has been allowed to stand as the official word on what happened is a major reason why The Shove hasn't gone away just yet. By Ryan McGreal

Published August 24, 2015

This article has been updated.

In this past Saturday's edition, the Hamilton Spectator published an editorial calling for everyone to stop talking about the incident in which Ancaster Councillor Lloyd Ferguson grabbed and shoved independent journalist Joey Coleman.

The matter has been investigated and arbitrated. Common sense suggests it should be laid to rest before it consumes more airtime at the expense of more important matters.

But the issue has never been properly investigated or addressed, and the actual facts of the incident are still up in the air.

We need to go back and review the timeline of events to understand why The Shove is not going away any time soon, and why it does a great disservice to the truth to wave the matter away before it has been resolved.

On February 26, 2014, Council went in camera to debate the Ivor Wynne Stadium lease to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. After the meeting, a press conference was going to be held in a conference room at City Hall.

Coleman was carrying his recording equipment and following City Communications Manager and then-Councillor Brad Clark toward the meeting. At around 10:45 PM, Ferguson walked up and began talking to Clark and Kirkopoulos. He turned to Coleman, told him to move away and then grabbed him on the arm and shoved him back.

According to Coleman, his camera was turned off and the lens was shuttered and he was simply carrying it to the press conference.

The next day, Coleman posted an article on his website reporting the incident. Ferguson apologized privately to Coleman and publicly at the General Issues Committee meeting, and Coleman accepted the apology.

Basse Report

On May 27 and May 29, 2014, two Hamiltonians independently filed complaints against Ferguson to Earl Basse, who was at that time the City's Integrity Commissioner, alleging that Ferguson violated the Council Code of Conduct.

It took close to a year for Basse to finish his report [PDF] and present it to Council in February 2015.

Saturday's Spectator editorial describes the report as "admittedly flawed", but the report was worse than just flawed - it was an outright travesty.

Basse reviewed the City's video security footage of the incident and interviewed Ferguson. He did not interview Coleman, or any of the other witnesses to the event.

Basse provided neither a methodology for analyzing the issue nor any actual analysis. He merely reiterated Ferguson's description of the events, including Ferguson's belief "that Mr. Coleman has eavesdropped on private conversations in the past and that he had a recording device with him to record this private conversation."

Basse noted that the security video did not show whether the camera was turned on, but that Coleman was standing close enough to "be in in range of a sensitive recording device."

In his conclusion, Basse noted that Ferguson was Chair of the Stadium Sub-Committee and had a "contentious" meeting that day which had run very long, from 8:30 AM until 10:45 PM.

Basse found that Ferguson had violated Section 45 (a) and (b) of the Code of Conduct, but recommended no sanctions against Ferguson.

Basse also concluded that the complaints were "neither vexatious nor frivolous", though he implied that they may have been politically motivated.

When Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin saw the report, he took to Twitter to castigate it, giving it a grade of "F".



Andre Marin's notes on Basse's report

Marin pointed out the obvious deficiencies of the report, particularly the fact that neither Coleman nor any witnesses were interviewed, no analysis was provided, and there was no effort to weigh the evidence or compare alternative recommendations on whether to sanction Ferguson.

At the time, the Ontario Ombudsman did not have oversight on municipal integrity commision reports, though this will change once Bill 8, the Public Sector and MPP Accountability and Transparency Act, comes into effect in January 2016.

Marin concluded, "If #Bill8 had been in effect, I would have sent #HamOnt [Integrity Commissioner] report back [to the] drawing board. And not the grade 3 one it appears it was written on."

Justice Not Done

When the report was presented to Council, they merely voted to receive it. They did not reject it, send it back to be redone properly or seek to have it reviewed by a third party.

Only two councillors voted against receiving the report: Ward 3 Councillor Matthew Green, and Ward 7 Councillor Scott Duvall.

Council imposed no sanctions on Ferguson, and even allowed him to continue serving as the Chair of the Police Services Board and the Chair of the Integrity and Accountability Sub-Committee. This itself may be the most mindboggling detail in the whole sordid affair.

For his part, after Council received the report and outrage boiled up on social media, Ferguson voluntarily stepped down from the Integrity and Accountability Sub-Committee - but not the Police Services Board - and agreed to donate $1,000 to the Ancaster Community Services organization.

In March 2015, the Ontario Provincial Police opened an investigation into the incident, but completed their investigation without filing any charges. The OPP did not explain why, but it is likely because the assault was considered too minor to waste the Court's time on criminal proceedings.

Victim Blaming

The incident may not be serious enough to warrant criminal charges, but as a civil matter, it is egregious that the City's "Zero Tolerance" policy continues to run up against Council's unwillingness to demand real accountability from its own members.

The fact that the Basse report has been allowed to stand as the official word on what happened is a major reason why The Shove hasn't gone away just yet.

It is bad enough that the report partially excused Ferguson for shoving Coleman by noting that it had been a long, contentious day. Even worse, the report blames the victim by implying that Coleman was eavesdropping on a private conversation - in a public hallway of City Hall, no less!

Since the report was released and accepted by Council, Coleman has found it increasingly difficult to continue his journalistic work. City staff stopped cooperating with him on providing agendas for meetings.

He recently suspended operations on his website, The Public Record.

Release the Video

One thing that would help clear up what actually happened is the security video that recorded the incident.

The reason we still have a video recording is that, soon after the incident in 2014, Coleman sent a letter to the City asking them to retain the video instead of destroying it after 14 days as is normally the procedure.

He noted that he had personally accepted Ferguson's apology, but that: "As it relates to City of Hamilton policies and Council policies, those matters are not my decision to make." He had been advised by a Hamilton resident that they were planning to file a complaint to the Integrity Commissioner.

After Council accepted Basse's report, the City received Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from The Hamilton Spectator, CHCH Television and Coleman calling for the public release of the security video.

The report was supposed to be released on July 29, but one as-yet unnamed person who is identifiable in the video has objected to its release, so the matter must go to appeal by the Ontario Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Until the video is released, a cloud of uncertainty and suspicion will still hang over the entire affair, casting a chilling effect on citizens and independent journalists who seek to watch more closely what is being done at City Hall in their name and on their behalf.

'The Push' Documentary

Local film production company HamiltonSeen is producing a crowdfunded documentary about the incident, called, appropriately, The Push.

The documentary is set to be released in October but they have posted two teasers to YouTube, both of them clips from former Councillor Brad Clark, a witness to the original incident, who was interviewed for the program.

The first clip concerns the impact of Joey Coleman on City Hall:

It quotes Clark saying, "Where [Coleman] irritated people is he brought a camera into [smirking] public meetings. I say it with a smirk because I find it so comical that civil servants or elected officials would be offended by someone wanting to tape a public meeting."

The second clip asks how The Shove is still a thing:

In this, Clark argues that Ferguson should have stepped down from the Police Services Board and the Integrity and Accountability Sub-Committee. "It would have sent the message that he really understood his error and that he respected the institution in which he was the chair, and so much so that he was willing to step away."

Update: This article originally stated that the upcoming documentary is called The Shove. It is actually called The Push. RTH regrets the error. You can jump to the changed paragraph.

Ryan McGreal, the editor of Raise the Hammer, lives in Hamilton with his family and works as a programmer, writer and consultant. Ryan volunteers with Hamilton Light Rail, a citizen group dedicated to bringing light rail transit to Hamilton. Ryan wrote a city affairs column in Hamilton Magazine, and several of his articles have been published in the Hamilton Spectator. His articles have also been published in The Walrus, HuffPost and Behind the Numbers. He maintains a personal website, has been known to share passing thoughts on Twitter and Facebook, and posts the occasional cat photo on Instagram.

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