STEPHEN RICCIO
MUNICIPALITY OF PONTIAC Nov. 10, 2020
The Municipality of Pontiac (MoP) will be pursuing legal proceedings against a Facebook account that it had previously banned from accessing the municipality page, citing derogatory and offensive comments as the justification.
The news officially came out during the MoP’s Nov. 10 council meeting as a resolution was passed with majority support. The resolution authorized . . .
the law firm RPGL “to prepare and undertake injunction proceedings, on behalf of the Municipality of Pontiac, in order to obtain an order for disclosure of information.”
The resolution also said that the account’s “comments are against the functioning of a healthy democratic society.”
Only councillors Scott McDonald and Nancy Draper Maxsom voted against it.
The account in question became active several months ago under the pseudonym Mick Mars, posting a variety of public documents while offering opinions that were frequently critical of Mayor Joanne Labadie and other municipal employees, both elected and unelected. While the account made many posts that were critical, it also frequently shared local job listings, community events and other things of that nature. On Nov. 7, the account made all of its posts unavailable. Several days later, the account was no longer visible when searched.
The council meeting’s public question period featured lively discussion on the topic of legal action, with two residents saying they believed the municipality should make an example of the account’s behavior, while three other residents voiced their opposition to the proceedings.
Diane Lacasse was one of the three who opposed it, telling the council that it would be a waste of taxpayer money. Lacasse was one of the organizers of a protest demanding the resignation of Labadie on Oct. 13.
“The goal [of the proceedings] is to reveal the identity and how we proceed after that, well we’ll probably mostly deal with who that person is,” Labadie said after the meeting. “Depending who the person is will determine the decision on how we proceed moving forward after that.”
She said that the person or people behind the account may not even be from the community, which could make further action difficult.
Labadie’s issue with the account is not that it shares public information on municipal expenses and other decisions, but how the account accompanies these posts with offensive and misleading context.
She said she did not intend to pursue a further defamation lawsuit, but simply wanted to identify the name of the person or people behind the account.
McDonald, who voted against the resolution to proceed through legal avenues, said after the meeting that he felt as though the municipality shouldn’t have control over how people “gossip” on social media.
“Harassment, it can be many different things,” McDonald said, after being asked whether harassment warranted legal action. “To some people it might not even bother them. [We are] elected officials, [so] sometimes you have to make a decision, and we chose to get into that thing. We knew it wasn’t always going to be easy and sometimes our decisions would be criticized.”
“I don’t follow [Mick Mars] normally but I just went over the past month of what he had posted, I didn’t see anything negative, it seemed more positive than anything, he posted a lot of good stuff,” he added.
However, he acknowledged that there may have been posts that he missed that were over the line.
“There might have been a couple of things that I didn’t see.”
Draper Maxsom said during the meeting that her vote against it was simply because she felt there were non-legal avenues to pursue first. THE EQUITY reached out to her, but she declined to comment further.
A similar situation was recently resolved in the nearby Municipality of Cantley. The municipality won two court injunctions that allowed them to go through the necessary channels to identify a social media user that had attacked two councillors and accused them of illicit actions.
Once successfully identifying the account, Cantley had them make a public apology, although they allowed them to stay anonymous to the public.
Labadie said that people within the MoP had communicated with Cantley officials to get an idea of the money they spent on the proceedings. She said it was roughly $9,000.
Asked whether the MoP might choose to reveal the identity of the Mick Mars account, Labadie said she is not sure.
