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This week’s city council meeting was a short one, but the news is more about what didn’t happen rather than what did.
The council procedure and respectful spaces bylaw, which were amended to ban audio and video recording and photography, were both deferred due to a motion put forward by Councillor Paul Manly that asks for a staff report on how the city can build an accreditation process for journalists, including independent journalists, into the bylaws.
Councillor Erin Hemmens initially argued against the deferral because the bylaw as it stands would allow journalists to seek permission from the mayor to record, and the bylaw could be amended at a later date.
Councillor Hilary Eastmure disagreed and said it would be better to wait for Manly’s amendment before adopting the bylaws.
“I am concerned that without an explicit exemption for journalists from the time of adoption, this is an infringement under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms on freedom of the press,” she said.
Manly agreed with the deferral.
“I think that it's important to get the bylaw right, and I think that we should consider the amendment that I'm proposing before we adopt it,” he said.
Mayor Leonard Krog was the lone vote against deferring the adoption of the bylaws.
“I’m going to stick to my position, it’s time to get on with these things,” he said.
Councillor Tyler Brown, who was attending the meeting virtually, disconnected at the time of the vote.
After the meeting wrapped up, I spoke with Dean Leon Prop who has been filming Nanaimo council meetings for the past year and has been successfully sued for defamation by a city manager for calling them a pedophile on social media.
“This bylaw is to further silence the people,” he told The Discourse. “All I'm trying to do is just give fair representation and make them accountable for their actions. And if you've been here attending it all, you can see that the disdain the mayor has for the public oozes from his pores.”
He said that nobody from the city has ever sat down to talk with him, and that people don’t attend council meetings because they feel like talking to council is like “talking to a stone wall.”
Prop had a sign in the meeting asking how many “pedophiles” the city employs.
When asked directly if he equates 2SLGBTQ+ people with pedophiles, he replied that he thought the “majority of the LGBTQ population wants to sexualize children.”
In an article published in Psychiatry, Psychology and Law last month, researchers wrote that the sexual abuse of children is predominantly perpetrated by adult men on female children. The Zero Abuse Project, a registered charity in the United States that works to eliminate child sexual abuse, cited an academic study that found that 80 per cent of men who molested boys were heterosexual and said that it is a myth that men who sexually abuse boys are homosexual.
In a 2023 court case in Ontario, a judge found that a man who accused drag performers of “grooming” children at a drag story-time event was guilty of hateful defamatory speech and awarded the plaintiffs $380,000.
Manly's motion for a staff report on options that would allow accredited journalists to record council meetings will go to the next council meeting on April 7 for a decision.
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