What’s behind City Hall’s redaction of Stevenson’s letter to fellow City Councillors?

A letter from a London councillor to a colleague was heavily reacted. CTV London’s Daryl Newcombe finds out why.

An almost fully redacted letter from Coun. Susan Stevenson was added to the agenda of this week’s meeting of London City Council, raising questions about the paragraphs that city staff decided the public wouldn’t be able to read.

“I still don’t have answers as to exactly why it had to be so heavily redacted,” Stevenson tells CTV News.

Four of the five paragraphs in the letter were completely blacked out by city staff prior to it being added to the online agenda of the March 3 meeting of London City Council.

The two unredacted sentences read, “I was pleased to read a professionally formatted Integrity Commissioner (IC) report without a lot of subjective narrative. I also appreciate that Aird Berlis followed our Code of Conduct protocols.

Aird Berlis LLP is the Toronto-based law firm acting as the interim Integrity Commissioner for the City of London.

Every word in the next four paragraphs is redacted until Stevenson’s signature at the bottom of the page, and two pages of appendices were withheld from the agenda.

According to the Stevenson, her letter explained that two previous complaints that accused her of violating the Code of Conduct had been dismissed because the IC determined they didn’t warrant an investigation.

Since the complaints received widespread attention in the news and on social media, Stevenson feels the two letters from the IC should become part of the public record.

“I had received reports vindicating me completely on two very critical and important complaints,” she said.

“I received letters from the Integrity Commissioner that are in no way marked confidential. So, I believed that it was okay for me to share those on the public agenda.”

Stevenson says she previously raised concern that Code of Conduct complaints against politicians sometimes receive greater attention from the public than the eventual decision by the Integrity Commissioner.

“If you receive a letter saying that there’s no finding against you, and I’m not even allowed to share it on the public agenda at Council, then it makes it very difficult to, quite frankly, clear my name,” she added.

City Hall’s response to CTV News is only one sentence and not attributed to any specific member of Civic Administration.

“The documents that were sought to be added to the Council agenda were not in the Corporation’s possession and not part of the public record.”

Small redactions are not uncommon on meeting agendas, most often obscuring the email address and/or phone number of citizens who submitted letters to Council.

“If they’re going to post the results of investigations that have been conducted, I don’t see why they couldn’t also post the notification saying that there were these kinds of complaints, but they were dismissed without an investigation,” said Political Scientist Dr. Andrew Sancton.

Sancton added, however, that having the IC’s letter posted on the city website might not achieve Stevenson’s goal.

“I would think people might actually be more likely to look at CTV News’ website than the City of London website for stuff like this,” he explained.

Stevenson acknowledges trying to work with city staff on the language of her letter and did consent to having staff redact what they felt was necessary but didn’t expect just two sentences to remain.

“I obviously wouldn’t have put it on if I didn’t think I could put the whole thing on,” she said.

“But upon (receiving staff’s) feedback, I would have thought maybe a dozen words, or something would be redacted.”

Stevenson has yet to decide if she will publish the unredacted letter on her social media.