DRYDEN – In a letter sent to Ontario's solicitor general and attorney general, Douglas Judson is asking why there has been no attempt from the Dryden OPP detachment to acknowledge an officer’s wrongful investigation into a “child grooming” allegation at a drag story time event at the Dryden Public Library in 2022.
The complainant took issue with a performer’s stage name, “Jack Doff.” The Drag Storytime was headlined by Mz. Molly Poppinz and Lady Fantasia LaPremiere, according to promotional materials.
Upon investigating the complaint, an officer pulled the former Rainbow Alliance Dryden (RAD) chairperson, Catherine Kiewning, out of her workplace for questioning.
“These interactions with police were not attempts to ensure the safety of RAD or its event participants – they were interrogational in nature,” Judson wrote in the letter.
Kiewning also acknowledged the officer's interrogational nature in a previous Newswatch article.
Acting as legal counsel for RAD, Judson advised the group to file a complaint against the OPP officer.
According to current RAD chair Caitlin Hartlen, RAD has met with a few Dryden detachment inspectors; however, “the offending officer who investigated these claims was not present.
"We had expected that we would at least get a written apology from the constable who was the offending officer, but there has been no such communication. We haven't talked to him at all since he stormed into my partner's workplace,” Hartlen said.
When news outlets picked up the story, a stream of hate speech flooded social media on a post defaming RAD and presenting the organization as pedophiles, which was shared by the administrator of the Real Thunder Bay Courthouse Inside Edition Facebook page, Brian Webster.
Judson wrote, “That post resulted in thousands of views and generated numerous hateful libels and threatening comments referring to our clients. Several of these comments were advocating violence towards RAD, their drag event participants, or the drag artists themselves.
“The most concerning comments came from an individual who lives in Atikokan. That individual stated, “Can we buy tags to hunt these animals??” and remarked that our clients’ events were a good opportunity for drag artists to be 'exposed' so that society could 'take care of them,' calling for people to 'get your wrist rocket out & start shooting them some hard food,' which appears to be advocating for the use of weapons against 2SLGBTQIA+ community members.”
To this date, the OPP has not officially charged the person who commented from Atikokan.
“We were the ones who faced police involvement, whereas he got off scot-free,” Hartlen said in an interview with Newswatch.
They said the OPP should implement training for officers in assessing myths based on homophobic and transphobic rhetoric that perpetuates stereotypes about the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
“The province of Ontario as a whole needs to develop better tools to respond to situations like this, because this whole matter honestly could have been de-escalated before an officer even stepped foot in the library or interrupted my partner's workday at her workplace,” Hartlen explained.
“But to have tools like that, it means improved training for officers of the OPP, better guidance for prosecutors on cases like this, and, for the online piece, there also needs to be more efficient processes for obtaining info on ownership of social media accounts and pages.”
Hartlen referred to RAD's defamation lawsuit against Webster, where a judge ruled that Webster's comments were not protected by anti-SLAPP law and labelled them as hate speech.
Hartlen admitted a particular problem RAD’s lawyers were up against was the “onerous process” of confirming Webster's identity due to online privacy protection policies, despite Webster being well-known as the administrator of the now-defunct Facebook page.
Ultimately, the purpose of the letter is to put pressure on the Ontario government to take hate speech and violence against the 2SLGBTQIA+ community seriously.
Hartlen said this kind of pressure comes at a more prudent time -- when hateful rhetoric and proposed legislation by the Conservative Party of Canada threaten queer and trans individuals by refusing access to medical care.
“The leader of the Conservative party himself, Pierre Poilievre, he's done nothing to condemn it. In fact, he's actually given fuel to the fire with his campaign for the so called Parental Rights Movement, which most would be able to recognize as a smokescreen for controlling trans youth and their access to medical care and just their general well-being.
“If we don't have our law enforcement and legal bodies backing us in the face of this hate, what other protections do we have?” Hartlen said.
For RAD, it is important to have a government that institutes policies to educate law enforcement and prosecutors on these emerging threats to 2SLGBTQIA+ community human rights.
If the OPP were “better equipped to deal with these matters and can dismiss bogus claims, they'll be wasting fewer resources and time,” Hartlen said.
“It's no secret that the police and the queer community have a contentious history, to put it mildly. But if they want relations between our two communities to be improved, then officers do need to have more training in these areas so they can recognize legitimate safety concerns and not further intimidate already vulnerable members of society by interrogating them unnecessarily.”
After reaching out to the OPP for comment, the OPP media spokesperson said, “the OPP Dryden Detachment has and continues to have an ongoing dialogue with the Rainbow Alliance Dryden. We value their cooperation and look forward to a continued positive relationship with RAD.”
The OPP explained that their officers are trained to be aware of hate-based crimes through the Basic Constable Training at Ontario Police College.
“Everyone, regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity/expression has a right to feel safe. The role of the police is to remain non-partisan and support community safety,” said the OPP
As for why the person in Atikokan has not been charged, the OPP stated that the investigation is ongoing.
This story has been updated with new information.
