Pickering councillor Lisa Robinson has been disciplined, again. Robinson has attracted no small amount of criticism since first winning her seat on municipal council in 2022 and has been repeatedly investigated by the municipal integrity commissioner and disciplined by her colleagues on Pickering City Council. This week was the fifth time that council has voted to dock Robinson 90 days of pay for her misconduct. For those doing the math at home, that means Robinson will have gone a full calendar year without pay as an elected official.
Robinson’s most recent infractions included, in the report of the municipal integrity commissioner, “flagrantly misleading or categorically untrue” allegations against the city, including falsely stating that local elected officials were allowed to take generous gifts from developers and that there was no accounting or oversight requirements. The city’s chief administrative officer lodged this particular complaint, in part because Robinson’s breaches occurred while she was holding a town hall meeting on a city property.
Robinson’s previous run-ins with the city’s integrity policy have gone to court; last month Ontario Divisional Court dismissed Robinson’s attempt to reverse two prior decisions by council, and ordered her to pay $30,000 in costs to the city. How she’ll manage that having not received her municipal salary for a year is an open question.
Robinson’s behaviour hasn’t just been costly and time-consuming, it’s been profoundly disruptive for the business of Pickering’s elected council, which moved meetings online-only this year in part because of security concerns. Mayor Kevin Ashe told CBC News in January that both council and staff had received threats from Robinson’s supporters.
The councillor has become the personification of a broader issue: the limitations on Ontario’s municipal councils in policing misconduct among their members. Under Ontario law, the harshest penalty a council can impose is the aforementioned 90-day suspension of pay.
At least, for now. Earlier this year municipal affairs minister Rob Flack re-introduced the Ford government’s Municipal Accountability Act, which is now Bill 9 in the current legislature. Bill 9 would, for the first time, create a power for municipal councils to expel council members whose conduct is beyond the pale, and hold new elections for their vacated seat.
But the process the government has laid out for maybe, possibly, someday holding municipal councillors to account suggests that the more immediate threat to Robinson’s tenure is the next scheduled municipal elections in October 2026.
Under Bill 9, councils have no power to simply expel a councillor who breaches their code of conduct. (In the federal and provincial legislature, members can be expelled by a simple majority vote of the assembly.) Instead, like today, first there needs to be an investigation by an integrity commissioner, and a finding of a breach. That alone takes months: for Robinson’s latest case, the inciting event was in November 2024 and the report was made public this month. If Bill 9 becomes law, the integrity commissioner would then have to recommend to the provincial integrity commissioner that a breach of the code of conduct is so serious that the councillor’s seat should be vacated. The provincial integrity commissioner is then required to conduct their own inquiry into the matter before sending their final decision back to the municipal council in question. Councillors must then vote unanimously (not including the impugned member) to in fact vacate the seat.
It's a long, cumbersome process and Bill 9 isn’t particularly close to becoming law. The bill is not an obvious priority for the government: Flack introduced it in early May, but the government used none of its substantial powers to get the bill to the Lieutenant Governor’s pen before the legislature rose for summer recess. Even after the bill passes, the government needs to write and pass regulations to give it effect, something that might take months.
On top of all that, there’s another hitch: Bill 9 requires that any inquiries by either a municipal or provincial integrity commissioner must be terminated if they aren’t completed by the opening of nominations for the municipal elections — in this instance, August 21, 2026. Even if the government demonstrates much more energy in getting this law passed than it has to date, it’s fair to ask whether it will actually get used before 2027.
Why such a cumbersome process? Flack’s predecessor Paul Calandra defended the government’s lagging on this file at last year’s conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, saying that it needed to ensure that any law it brings forward can survive the strictest scrutiny of the courts. Here I’ll note that Doug Ford’s government successfully argued all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada that there’s no constitutional right to municipal representation at all.
We can’t ignore Doug Ford’s personal history on this issue, and the history of his late brother Rob. Both men were investigated by Toronto’s integrity commissioner, and Rob nearly lost his seat at the head of council when a court found he’d contravened the province’s municipal integrity act (a finding that was overturned on appeal) by speaking and voting in his defense during a debate over a code of conduct violation. This saga is still remembered by conservatives in this province as a kind of injustice — the premier is at least skeptical that councils and their integrity commissioners should have anything like the power that nearly unseated his brother.
So we’ve arrived at a place where the government can’t keep ignoring the urgent pleas of municipalities forever, but it seems to have designed a bill that puts as many obstacles as possible in the way of these powers actually being used.
There’s no evidence that Ford is personally a fan of Lisa Robinson or that he’s trying to support her or the other councillors around the province who have caused problems for their councils. But Bill 9 is almost perfectly designed to ensure that none of them have anything to worry about before the next election. Councils that are groaning under the strain of their disruption will, it seems, need to wait — and hope, and perhaps pray.
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