Silence is not an option – Mayorgate Reawakens

To all my Mayorgate readers I apologise for the lengthy absence, Mayorgate has been silent for a reason. As author and publisher of Mayorgate I had been thrown the challenge to survive a serious set of events that threatened my health culminating in amputation. The road to recovery had taken time, for many days it felt like I had been transported into the painting by Edvard Munch, and I was simply screaming. According to Munch himself, The Scream was a picture he painted to represent his soul, for me that inward scream became more deafening and demanded the reawakening of Mayorgate. During recovery the legal battles continued and there was no care that I was shorter on one side. Yet it was not the battles that had an effect but what those battles revealed, and that needs to be spoken about. All our values of equality and law are simply a farce. The corruption and intimidation within our court system cannot be allowed to continue in silence. The issues that Mayorgate had exposed relating to the Paderewski Society Home (Niagara), its lawyer at the time, Rachel Goerz (nee Slingerland) have compounded dramatically.

We Canadians believe that our courts are transparent in every aspect. We expect our judges to be unbiased and free from all influence. Those of us who may choose to self-represent ourselves before the courts believe that equality will be a guarantee. Sadly, these lofty ideals are nothing more than pie-in-the-sky. Traditional media rarely questions the status quo, but silence is not an option for Mayorgate.

Mayorgate has faced legal threats in the past for bringing the light of day on issues that traditional media, in particular local Niagara media, had stayed silent on. One such threat came in the form of a defamation lawsuit filed by Debbie Zimmerman, a former Niagara Regional Councillor and previous Chair in the Regional Municipality of Niagara, after allegations of an affair she had with former St. Catharines Mayor Brian McMullan, who also had a seat on Niagara Regional Council. Affairs and divorces are literally a dime a dozen but these both sat on Regional Council and questions of possible conflict of interest were troubling. The source of the allegations came to Mayorgate by way of copies of the divorce papers filed by the former Mrs. Pat McMullan. As an update the defamation claim filed by Debbie Zimmerman has been dismissed by the Superior Court of Justice. Maybe Debbie became hesitant or concerned with what a trial would make public.