I’m not the kind of person to just let things go, which can be a blessing and a curse.
Five years ago, I sought to tell the story of a wastewater operator who worked for the Town of Bradford West Gwillimbury and blew the whistle on the municipality to the Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP). Less than a month after the MECP formally charged the town and its then-manager of wastewater, the whistleblower was terminated from his job, leaving him, his wife and four children with an uncertain future.
I wish I could have told you that story in 2019, when the charges were fresh in people’s minds. However, the provincial government’s freedom of information request process got in the way.
I filed a freedom of information (FOI) request to the ministry regarding this issue on Aug. 8, 2019, asking for water sample reports, emails between the whistleblower, the MECP and the Town of Bradford West Gwillimbury and documents that were used in the MECP’s case against the municipality.
On May 9, 2024, those records were finally released to me.
At this point, it has been eight years since the events that were the subject of the story transpired in Bradford.
Long-time residents of Bradford may recall when the town and its former manager of wastewater, Brad Sullivan, were charged in December 2018 under the Environmental Protection Act, alleging improper sampling of the effluent water leaving Bradford’s wastewater plant at 225 Dissette St. during an event that took place in December 2016, and improper reporting of the incident to the MECP.
At the end of July 2019, the municipality pled guilty to a single charge of breaching the conditions of the Environmental Compliance Approval, and all charges against Sullivan were dropped. The town was fined $65,000.
Following that story on the outcome of the charges, an email came to my inbox from Kyle Williams, an Oro-Medonte resident and former Town of Bradford West Gwillimbury wastewater employee since 2009.
Williams said (and the FOI documents now confirm) he blew the whistle on the municipality for failing to report significant ammonia nitrogen levels in the wastewater effluent discovered in December, 2016, for not informing the ministry of this finding until mid-January and for moving the test sampler to a different area.
Williams alleged that following his whistleblowing, he was fired.
On Dec. 27, 2018, Environmental Protection Act charges were laid against Bradford, and according to internal town records, Williams was first spoken to about his job performance the same day. Williams was officially terminated from his job with the town on Jan. 22, 2019.
The town’s CAO Geoff McKnight denied in an interview with me in 2019 that there was a link.
“It’s coincidental,” McKnight said.
“His termination was done separately from the other incident, and it was not related to it,” said Rebecca Murphy, director of corporate services, town solicitor and clerk, in the same interview. “We can’t speak to why Kyle is no longer here.”
I applied for the FOI in August 2019 to gather the ministry’s copies of documents I already had in part – but to ensure none of the copies I had were doctored in any way. Then the waiting began. I wrote a column in 2020 (one year in) about my frustration with the FOI process through the ministry in regards to this request, linked here.
It has been four years since I wrote that column, and the ministry stopped responding to my emails after that point. That was, until one Monday afternoon last month when I received an email from the ministry out of the blue, wanting to know if I was still interested.
I confirmed that yes, I still wanted those documents. And, a month later, I had a link in my email to the documents, sent through the government’s secure system, and a bill for $59 still owed. The 1,200 pages returned to me contain emails confirming the town did delay reporting, did move the sampler and it was Williams who blew the whistle to the ministry.
So where do we stand?
I reached out about a year and a half ago to Williams to see how he is now, however he has changed his phone number and didn’t respond to an email I sent to his address. When I interviewed him in 2019, he was unemployed and had serious concerns about how he was going to support his wife and four children.
From my interviews with the town at that time, officials said they had made major changes to its policies and procedures to ensure something like this never happens again. According to most recent reporting from the town, it appears all is well these days on the wastewater front.
However, there are a few serious issues with this situation to take away.
Since the provincial government did release the documents, that means they determined the information fits into the category of public information as defined by the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
I feel the provincial government taking five years to fulfil a $118 FOI request is the bigger story, and should alarm anyone who cares at all about openness and transparency of governments.
Transparency is required to maintain a democratic system. The freedom of information process exists to help people get information that will enable them to remain free and self-governing, but it’s clearly not doing that, in practice, all of the time. This makes me wonder; has it ever?
Documents are also key when it comes to presenting accurate, fact-checked stories and information. In a world where misinformation is not only widespread but manufactured for political manipulation, it's unacceptable that they would be withheld for so long.
There was both a provincial and municipal election in 2022. Had these events been made fully public in 2019, might you have voted a different way in either election?
If this is how FOI requests are dealt with, how will you ever know if anything like this happens in the future, not only in Bradford, but in any municipality?
I have felt the gamut of emotions in regards to this one story over the past five years – it became my white whale.
What I’m left with now is simmering frustration. The ministry putting off this request for so long meant Kyle Williams’ story was never fully told. The residents of Bradford were never fully informed of what was happening at their wastewater treatment plant while it was happening.
Please get angry along with me.
Jessica Owen is a reporter with CollingwoodToday who, five years ago, covered stories across Simcoe County.
