A BC Supreme Court judge has quashed three resolutions to censure and sanction the City of Quesnel’s mayor made last spring.
Mayor Ron Paull successfully claimed that Quesnel city council’s April 30 decisions against him were made without procedural fairness. Councillors voted to withdraw Paull’s travel budget and remove him from city committees and the Cariboo Regional District board after his wife shared a book disputing residential school history.
The book offended members of the Lhtako Dene First Nation, which signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with the city in 2017.
“I do not mean to suggest that there was any attempt in this case to misuse powers for cheap political gain,” Justice William Veenstra wrote in his March 3 decision. “It appears to me that the actions of council in this case are more likely attributable to a confusing and ambiguous staff report, the difficulty of ascertaining facts given the information presented by Mayor Paull in the April 24 memo, and the sense that clearly motivated several of the councillors to believe that immediate action was required in order to preserve important relationships.”
The controversy began after Paull’s wife, Pat Morton, had shared Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools) with a parent of another council member. Veenstra said Indigenous communities saw the book as being “hurtful, hateful and harmful” to the cause of reconciliation.
Paull said at a March 19 council meeting that he had not read the book and he had no interest in doing so. On March 21, he attended a regional district meeting where there was discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity-themed books in the children’s section of public libraries. The next day, Paull showed his wife’s copy of Grave Error to two regional district directors, but claimed he gave no opinion about the book.
Veenstra said that the April 18 report to council, the basis for the April 30 decisions, did not meet procedural fairness requirements owed to Paull because it did not clearly set out the case against him. Paull understood the report to be an “informational document” containing general advice and a possible process to pursue censure and sanction.
“It seems clear that the only substantive and active allegation against Mayor Paull in the April 18 report was that he had personally ‘attempted to distribute the book at a Cariboo Regional District meeting’,” Veenstra wrote.
Veenstra ruled the council did not follow the code of conduct requirement to provide Paull with two weeks notice, purported to censure him based on a report that could be read as merely inviting his input and decided to act against Paull based on “alleged misconduct (or shortcomings other than misconduct)” different from events in the April 18 report.
Veenstra said Paull was entitled to seek reimbursement of his legal costs from the City of Quesnel.
