Groundhog Day: the Wiarton Willie Festival and the Scope of Municipal Conflicts of Interest Legislation

Big news in Québec at the moment is the attempt to remove the embattled mayor of Saint-Rémi. New legislation provides that elected municipal officials charged with certain criminal offences may be removed from office by a Superior Court judge. The judge has discretion in determining whether to remove the individual, which is a marked (and welcome) difference from the situation in Ontario. Regular readers will remember the Rob Ford saga.

My previous posts on Rob Ford

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford won his appeal this morning, as I predicted.

You can find my previous posts here:

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/11/the-mayor-bias-procedural-fairness-and.html

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2012/12/municipal-powers-another-look-at-ford.html

http://administrativelawmatters.blogspot.ca/2013/01/mayor-ford-collateral-damage-from.html

And a Financial Post op-ed here:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/12/11/divisional-court-should-overturn-flawed-rob-ford-decision/

Mayor Ford: Collateral Damage from the Doctrine of Collateral Attack?

I have written quite a bit about the saga surrounding the removal from office of Toronto's Mayor, Rob Ford: see here (principally on the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act), here (principally on the City of Toronto Act) and here (an overview of why the Divisional Court should allow Ford's appeal). Hackland J.'s decision at first instance is Magder v. Ford, 2012 ONSC 5615. For those of you fed up with Ford, I promise that this will be my last post until the Divisional Court makes a decision!

Warning: this post might not make much sense if you have not read the first-instance decision and my previous commentary.

The Mayor, Bias, Procedural Fairness, and Democracy

Plenty of cyberink has already been spilled on the removal from office yesterday of Toronto mayor, Rob Ford. Hackland J.'s decision has aroused surprise, support, calls for reform of Ontario's Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and, worst of all, bad sporting metaphors. While Hackland J.'s conclusions and interpretive approach are perfectly respectable, I do not think they are correct, as I will explain in this post. On first reading, I thought Hackland J.'s findings of fact were damning enough to give Ford little leeway on appeal. I am now not so sure.

To preview my argument, I think that Hackland J.'s interpretation of some of the statutory provisions is questionable and that his interpretive approach does not properly take account of context and the purposes of the Act. I will address the interpretations I disagree with in the context of explaining the facts of the case and then turn my attention to context and purpose. I should note that there are other questions too, in particular, whether the Act applies at all, but I won't address them in this post.