Councillor Laura Ip, Niagara Region's DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Advisory Committee Chair, doubled down in a blog post saying that the Region's July 25 ban on “signs, props, placards or flags of any kind” (NOTE: “of any kind”!) is not a keffiyeh ban, when in fact the exact same rule is used to ban the keffiyeh at Queen's Park and, even closer to home, to ban “Justice for Johnny” Cronkwright clothing in local courts. No matter how many times the DEI Chair says otherwise it doesn't change this existing reality.
She then points to “reporting from a reputable media outlet that it is not,” but this reporting is merely quoting from staff that is not, which is self-referential. It's like when Dick Cheney pointed to the New York Times as evidence Iraq had WMD's when the New York Times had just been printing what they had been getting from the US government. In this case the DEI Chair is pointing to the St. Catharines Standard as a source backing her when all they did was quote the Region's own staff.
The DEI Chair says the ban started as being targeted at signs harassing staff. The original motion from the DEI Chair at the March 21 Council meeting said it was about “the display of signage in Council/Committee meetings that is contrary to Council’s position on and Niagara Region’s policies addressing Workplace Harassment and Violence...” So why did this then get expanded to “signs, props, placards or flags of any kind?” You can't go from signs that are “Workplace Harassment and Violence” to signs “of any kind” and claim this is just about workplace harassment. It's not anymore, it's clearly expanded into something much much bigger and one thing can't be used to justify the other.
This is at least the third time the DEI Chair has played fast and loose with the facts in connection to Anti-Palestinian racism. Though the sign rule started as being about workplace harassment it got included with other rule changes that come from the January 25 Council meeting where 18 pro-Palestine delegates were removed from the agenda as not belonging, though a pointless Ukraine motion for “self-sanctioning” Councillors from Russia did belong according to Councillors. The sign ban (same rules used to ban keffiyehs and “Justice for Johnny” clothing) is now part of Niagara Regional Council's doubling down on anti-Palestinian racism.
After an April Zoom special meeting of the DEI Advisory Committee was disrupted I was blamed for this by the DEI Chair, without naming me, saying I had taken it upon myself to share the Zoom meeting link when in fact I had got permission from the Clerk ahead of time who wrote “you may share with others.” The DEI Chair also said without any justification that the disruption had to be coordinated and led others to believe this was by me, when anyone can get the link from various ways and can disrupt the Zoom meeting just from one account, no coordination needed.
Earlier, before the January 25 meeting where pro-Palestine delegates were removed, and the debate on removing them was killed by the DEI Chair “calling the question” and perversely justifying it as “listening to Palestinians” (to not listen to Palestinians), the DEI Chair had promoted further misinformation: she cited the Immigration Minister saying there was no “hard cap” on Palestinian refugees even though his own department had said there was (“whichever comes first” - 1,000 applicants or a January 9 deadline). This is even more perverse and gross because hardly any Palestinians have been able to come to Canada on the Temporary Resident Visa because of the ridiculous rules they have to go through which were not applied to Ukrainian refugees, because of the clear racism and double standards. The DEI Chair was again misleading her constituents, using the Immigration Minister as cover.
The DEI Chair campaigned in the last election on integrity and transparency but she has been anything but. In the election before she had campaigned to “Reset the Region,” that I think is timely because the current Councillors are being undemocratic just like the “Caslin Cabal” of 2014-2018. Niagara Region Transit recently dropped the word “Region” from their name as the “number one recommendation” because of the negative connotation from the word “Region” because of Regional government. The DEI Chair's persistence in misleading her constituents isn't helping with the Region's negative name.
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