Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley is showing a visitor the City Hall office he has inhabited since 1988 – the very office that city council has ordered him to vacate, setting off a political uproar like nothing locals can remember.

He points to the pile of cards and letters telling him to stay firm. ("Hold your head high," one says. "This too shall pass.") He chokes up as he tells of how cashiers and customers at a local supermarket rushed up to offer him their support. He chokes up again as he points to a picture of Sarnia taken by astronaut Chris Hadfield, a local boy. Everyone turned on their lights to make the town glow when seen from space.

It's an emotional time for Mr. Bradley and a strange time for the 75,000 people of Sarnia, a Southwestern Ontario city on the southern tip of Lake Huron. To their chagrin, they found their normally retiring home in the national news this week after city council voted to boot the veteran mayor from his City Hall office.

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City councillors say they had no choice: a scathing investigative report found that Mr. Bradley had harassed and bullied four women, including the city manager, the top unelected official at city hall. The result, it said, was a "poisoned work environment."

The semi-repentant mayor admits he was "verbally strong" with the officials, but that doesn't justify exiling him to a "bus barn" – the office in the Sarnia Transit building where he is supposed to camp while they reorganize the office space at City Hall to keep him apart from senior staff. He is still going in every weekday to the corner office that he has called his second home, defying council and insisting he has the people on his side.

The people themselves seem to find the whole business ridiculous, even embarrassing. They wince to see their city compared with Toronto in the days of Rob Ford, when that city's councillors curtailed the mayor's power and cut his office staff in the midst of the crack-cocaine scandal. The Monday council meeting that ordered Mr. Bradley's exile grew so heated that the police showed up.

"My wife and I look at each other and say the Twilight Zone music should be playing right now because, like, wow," says Matt Mitro, one of the city councillors who joined in the 7-1 vote to exile Mr. Bradley.

When a customer of his garage-door-opener business asked him what in the world was going on down at City Hall, he said, "Got a while? Put the coffee on."

It is quite a saga. Until this year, Mr. Bradley was an extraordinarily successful mayor with no serious blemish on his long record. The son of a baker from Northern Ireland who landed in Canada after a stint in Australia, where Mr. Bradley was born, he won his first mayoral election at the age of 33, making him the youngest person to hold the office, according to his official website. When voters elected him to his ninth term in October, 2014, he brushed aside his rivals and took two-thirds of the vote.

Personable, well-spoken and a demon for work – he often came in on weekends, and even the middle of the night, until council took away his after-hours pass – he earned a reputation as a down-to-earth politician who, like Toronto's Mr. Ford, answered his own phone and helped residents with little things such as getting their trash picked up.

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Some simply call him "Mayor Mike." He keeps the mayor's chain of office looped around the neck of a stuffed kangaroo near his desk. He says he has never worn it himself. He came to work on Thursday in a turtleneck.

But he also has a volatile side. "What I consider passion," he says, "other people call harassment."

First, the city's integrity commissioner and then an independent investigator found he had crossed a line. The investigator's 43-page report, submitted in September, said the mayor was guilty of committing everything from verbal and psychological abuse to character assassination and "relational aggression." Among other things, he is purported to have insulted one official in front of others, called another a "media hog" and excluded another from a key meeting.

"This was not a matter of the complainants being unable to stand the ordinary pressures of their jobs," the investigation finds. "This was not a question of a strong leadership style. … I find that Mayor Bradley deliberately bullied and harassed the complainants."

Mr. Bradley, 61, says he is sorry and has agreed to take sensitivity training, but argues that the penalties have been excessive. Council docked him three months pay – a big cut, he says, for someone who makes just $52,000 a year. They banned him from communicating directly with most of the city staff. When they took away his weekend pass without warning, he was embarrassed to find himself locked out when he arrived at City Hall with a group of visitors.

"There was never anything sexual, never anything physical, never any swearing," Mr. Bradley says. "It was just people exchanging opinions." In one case, he complains, the investigator upbraided him for failing to say "good morning" to an official.

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He says that residents would rather see the city government dealing with issues such as the local economy or the rising use of opiates. Once a refining and petrochemicals dynamo that had some of the highest incomes in the country, Sarnia has been trying to reinvent itself as a pleasant retirement spot and a centre of innovative research.

Essentially, he argues the city government should be able to work through its internal quarrels as adults instead of banning him from his own office and renovating City Hall to separate him from city officials as if they were feuding toddlers.

Many Sarnia residents agree. "It's ludicrous. It's idiotic. It's off the charts," says Kevin Smith, 58, who runs an outdoor equipment store, Sharkskin Weathergear.

Across the street at Albert's fish and chips, in the shadow of the Blue Water Bridge carrying traffic across the St. Clair River to the United States, Rich Paterson, 81, says: "You can't print what I think about it. I'm ready to scream."

Not everyone feels that way. Wally Buniak, 71, says that the mayor "has always been an abrasive person." Perhaps, he says, Mr. Bradley's exile will give him time to reflect.

Mr. Bradley seems just as inclined to fight. If he can be turfed from his office, he says, every Ontario mayor should fear a coup. Supporters have organized a protest outside City Hall for Friday morning.

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The standoff leaves council in an awkward position, trying to curb a popular mayor who, along with everything else, has recently had surgery for skin cancer. Mr. Mitro, the city councillor who voted to exile Mr. Bradley and thinks he went way over the line, says that "In no way, shape or form am I doing anything I want to do," but Ontario law compels officials to act against harassment or face stiff fines.

So the confrontation seems likely to drag on. A plaintive headline on the front page of the Sarnia Observer asks: "Where do we go from here?"