The interview

There’s been a development. On Friday March 28, I did finally speak to parks and rec staff, and found out that the rink guards’ narrative had relocated my “assault” from outdoors beside my car to inside the building. I had supposedly gone over to the rink house skate room and shoved Jordan, and then followed up by hitting him with my cane.

Scary, if it were true, for a young fellow, being shoved and hit by an old woman armed with a cane.

But I did no such thing.

I talked to the city workplace harassment officer on Friday because on Thursday evening at about 9.30 I got an email from the director of Parks and Rec management services, Aydin Sarrafzadeh. He wrote: “We are reaching out, in one final attempt to invite you to an interview” -- which could be done by phone.

My lawyer friend Jacqueline Peeters had written to me the day before: “You’re dealing with a bureaucracy. Their ‘workplace harassment’ investigation is going to end up being decided without your input” and she urged me to set aside my refusal to fit into the parks and rec harassment narrative.

Jacqueline and I had worked together with Lily Weston to establish the rink snack bar back in the 1990s. That was an adventurous time, which I wrote up later in a little booklet called Cooking With Fire in Public Parks. The stories included Jacqueline making pizza for skaters, in the then-brand-new bake oven, with my help. So would I ignore the counsel of one of the earliest collaborators in this park experiment? And then David, my husband, said – “Normally, if anyone said they wanted to talk to you, you wouldn’t say no.”

So I thought I’d better heed their advice. Early Friday morning I wrote out a statement of a page and a half about what had happened on February 12, and sent it in with a “yes, I’m willing to talk to you.” Colleen Vandeyck, one of seven “Labour Relations and Investigations” staff in the Parks and Rec Division, called at 10 a.m. She hadn’t seen my statement, nor the reports I had posted on my blog. Like almost all current parks and rec management, she seemed to have no knowledge of what might have gone on at Dufferin Grove when there was a community/staff partnership. But she asked a lot of careful questions, pausing frequently to write down my answers. That’s when I found out that the rink guards' story had changed.

Colleen asked me whether there was any reason the rink guards would behave in the way I said they did. I told her some of what’s in this blog entry , and this one. At the end of the call, Colleen said that the staff would weigh what was said by all parties on “the balance of probabilities,” and would let me know their decision in a few weeks, probably after Easter.

I’ll report back.