A former justice of the peace, who was fired for sexually harassing women at the Whitby courthouse, should not have his $770,000 legal bill from his discipline proceedings covered by public dollars, a discipline panel has ruled.

It was the second time since he was sacked in 2015 Errol Massiah asked a panel of the Justices of the Peace Review Council to make a recommendation to the attorney general that his legal tab be covered by the public purse, which is a power granted to the panel under Ontario law.

Massiah was found to have made a number of inappropriate comments to women at the courthouse, including leaning in close to the ear of a female prosecutor and saying “Oooh, lady in red.” On another occasion, as she was walking by, he said “Looking goooood.” Massiah said the comments were part of his “management style.” A female staffer also reported him changing in his chambers with the door open.

In its decision to refuse to give a recommendation for compensation, released Thursday, the discipline panel noted that this was Massiah’s second discipline hearing for sexual harassment; he had also been found guilty by a separate panel in 2012 of sexually harassing women at the Oshawa courthouse.

In that case, he was suspended for 10 days without pay and ordered to take gender-sensitivity training. The public also picked up his $123,000-legal-bill from that proceeding.

“By the time this hearing was underway, this justice of the peace should have known that his conduct was inappropriate based on common sense and everyday experience, but especially so, once he had the benefit of the first panel’s findings,” the panel said in its decision Thursday.

The panel dedicated nearly half of its decision to calling out the conduct of one of Massiah’s lawyers, Ernest Guiste, who represented Massiah except at the discipline hearing, itself, which was conducted by a different lawyer.

“Among the many tactics employed to frustrate and delay proceedings, Mr. Massiah, through Mr. Guiste, filed a number of frivolous and vexatious motions interrupting the panel’s deliberations, as well as alleging, without basis, bias and various other acts of misconduct on the part of people involved in these proceedings,” the panel said.

“Mr. Guiste’s accounts for fees and disbursements, which exceeded a half a million dollars, are unreasonable on their face. More importantly, we are of the view that they are comprised almost entirely of frivolous and unreasonable actions taken in the hopes of defeating the public interest nature of the process.”

The panel went as far as calling Massiah himself a “vexatious litigant.” Guiste, his lawyer, told the Star he didn’t wish to comment as he had not yet seen the decision.

This was the second discipline panel to decide whether Massiah should be compensated in relation to sexual harassment at the Whitby courthouse. The panel that found him guilty and recommended he be fired in 2015 had also recommended he not be compensated, but that was overturned on appeal to Divisional Court. At the same time, the court upheld the findings of judicial misconduct and the penalty of termination.

By the time the compensation matter was sent back for reconsideration to the first panel, the chair, Ontario Court Justice Deborah Livingstone, had retired, and so the remaining two members, a justice of the peace and community member, tried to reach a unanimous decision but were unable to do so.

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A new panel, chaired by Ontario Court Justice Diane Lahaie, was then constituted to decide the compensation question.

Massiah is set to return to Divisional Court on April 3, to argue that the earlier court ruling upholding the judicial misconduct findings and penalty of termination be set aside.