A judge has told a municipality in eastern Manitoba it cannot ban a resident it considers disruptive from attending council meetings.
Aaron Wiebe, a professional sport fisher who lives in Pinawa Bay, Man., has won a legal challenge against a pair of three-year blanket bans that prevented him from attending council meetings at the Rural Municipality of Alexander’s office in St. Georges — 120 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg — as well as contacting municipal staff and visiting the municipal office.
In a decision issued April 14, Manitoba Court of King’s Bench Justice Sadie Bond found the municipal council had no authority under The Municipal Act or its own procedures to issue the pair of bans against Wiebe in 2024.
After two years of complaints by Wiebe about a sewage lagoon near his residence, the R.M. of Alexander’s municipal council deemed his conduct at council meetings disruptive, his grievances to be unfounded and his communication with municipal staff to be hostile and accusatory, the decision stated.
Wiebe, meanwhile, considered his conduct to be a legitimate form of engagement with the municipality.
Bond concluded she did not have to decide whether the municipality or Wiebe was right about his behaviour. All that mattered, the judge said, is whether the R.M. of Alexander has the authority to issue the bans.
“Neither party should read my decision as an endorsement of their conduct in this situation,” she wrote.
Bond concluded that the council does have the authority to remove unruly residents from meetings, but it does not have the authority to ban them from attending meetings in the future.
The judge said the municipality could seek other means to exclude Wiebe from hearings, such as by obtaining an injunction or under The Trespass Act.
Wiebe, who ran for Alexander council in 2022 and may run again this year, said he chose to challenge his bans in court after two years of attempting to lift them via other means, including requesting an end to the bans, contacting provincial officials and by complaining to the provincial ombudsman.
“It wasn’t like I just immediately burdened the municipality with a lawsuit,” Wiebe said Monday in an interview.
Wiebe said he initially chose to drive an hour to St. Georges to attend council meetings in person because, he said, the municipality stopped recording them and made it difficult for residents to appear as virtual delegates to council meetings.
“In this day and age of information technology, to be going backward in what we’re providing to the public is shocking, to say the least,” Wiebe said.
“Yeah, we had a victory in this case, but I would be far happier to hear that they were going back to providing recordings of meetings and offering virtual attendance.”
Kevin Toyne, Wiebe’s lawyer, said people owe his client a debt of gratitude for standing up for the basic right to observe municipal council meetings.
The bans on his client, he suggested, were not Canadian and amounted to sort of abuse of power many people fret about right now.
“That is not the way that we conduct democracy at any of the four levels of government in Canada — federal, provincial, First Nations or municipal,” Toyne said.
“At the end of the day, if someone is being disruptive at a particular meeting, councils have the ability to put an end to that. But that person who is disruptive has the opportunity to come back to the next meeting, behave themselves, redeem themselves and be allowed to continue to attend and observe.”
Alexander Mayor Jack Brisco said the R.M. of Alexander does not intend to appeal the decision.
Wiebe will be permitted to attend the next council meeting, he said.
Brisco said elected officials and public servants all over Manitoba increasingly are being subjected to harassment and abuse.
He intends to ask the provincial government to amend the Muncipal Act to permit municipalities to take more action against people who harass officials, he said.
“It goes to some extremes,” Brisco said Tuesday from Brandon, where’s attending the Association of Manitoba Municipalities conference.
“I think it comes back to the way the internet works. If you have a problem, you can get a hold of somebody in a split second and say what’s in your mind.”
