The official letter (back to the drawing board)

Aydin Sarrafzadeh, the new interim citywide recreation director, came to Dufferin Grove on Friday August 25 with a letter for me to sign.

“Based on the investigation, your actions towards City of Toronto front-line staff have been deemed inappropriate…”
“The investigative team reviewed significant amounts of negative content on-line, targeting front-line staff, which has led to staff feeling unsafe in the workplace, following other community members seeking them in the Clubhouse, and/or asking about their involvement.”

The letter seems to focus on what happened after my ban. It says that there is to be no specific criticism or even questioning of front-line staff – not online and not in person. I was asked to agree to immediately remove all critical content from the web if it could be linked to a specific person, and to promise not to say anything face to face either, about what staff could do to fix a problem, because that would be “directing” staff. The full letter is here.

I could not agree with the letter and so I did not sign. Therefore I continue to be banned from the Dufferin Grove rink building (the pre-renovation “community club house”).

Jane Price (president of our little charity, the Centre for Local Research into Public Space – Celos) came to the meeting with me. We asked the director and the new manager, Caitlin Wainwright, who was also there, to reopen their investigation, and this time:

1. To look into the actions of the police in agreeing with the rink guard and his immediate supervisor to give me a lifetime ban from the building.

2. To look into the actions of parks and recreation management
a) in immediately (Feb.13) restricting their investigation to the single issue of harassment of their staff;
b) in going along with the police ban until they found out that it was not legal, and even afterwards; and
c) in advising the city councillor and the public that there could be no discussion of the Feb.12 event until management gives the all-clear.

3. To recognize the investigation staff’s failure to talk to the two senior front-line staff at Dufferin Grove. This means that management did not find out what was going wrong at the rink during the winter, including the planning and carrying out of some of the rink staff’s actions against me, and culminating in their assault on me on Feb.12.

Response:

The recreation director said they will now reopen their investigation, and will talk to the senior frontline staff who were not questioned by the workplace harassment team. They will also ask police to let them see the police notes and transcript to see what was actually said.

Maybe what they learn from these sources will help parks and rec management paint itself out of their corner: so at some point after that, my ban can be removed.

Meantime, I’ll send Dave Hains, the new recreation supervisor, the information I recently got through a Freedom of information request about last year’s Dufferin Grove Park budget. It shows that, in 2024, recreation program staffing of Dufferin Grove Park cost just under half a million dollars ($494,058), not counting wading pool staff (their wages come under a central budget). Despite this expenditure, only a token amount of the pre-renovation park programs returned.

City management is putting in place new supervisory staff and they say they want to start fresh. However, at the moment there are no job listings on the city’s job site for Dufferin Grove. That’s a problem. The yet-to-be-determined “community recreation programmer” (CRP) needs to hire summer staff suited to the former liveliness of the park, and not only teenagers. Dave Hains, who is the CRP’s supervisor, needs to mend some broken community connections.

At the end of the Friday meeting, I asked if a few of the remaining rec staff could start the new era by supporting Skylar Hill-Jackson’s May 10 park-gardens/pizza oven event. Skylar is in her fifth year as the volunteer coordinator of the park’s community gardens. She wants to showcase the gardens and food made with the many spring greens in the gardens – campfire greens soup, pizza oven focaccia, park cookies baked in the new kitchen.

The director and the manager both said it sounded good. Let’s see if they come through. That would be a good occasion to start a lively community conversation about what comes next.

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