Mayor Meed Ward gets very public about public safety for elected officials

By Pepper Parr

July 18^th, 2025

BURLINGTON, ON

OPINION

Last week, during a city council meeting, two members of Council spoke of personal safety issues.

Mayor Meed Ward said : “I had an individual threaten to set me on fire if I attended a public meeting related to a development application in  my city. I was advised it may not be safe for me to attend. This is doing my job. This going to public meetings about matters that council has to make a decision on is my job. I was advised for a period of time that it was safer for me to drive to work. I live four blocks from work.  I had a security detail for a number of months at every public meeting.”

Mayor Meed Ward during a webcast from her City Hall office.

Reprehensible is too kind a word to describe what happened to the Mayor.

Differences of opinion with elected officials is part of a democratic society.

Threatening to harm a person is, in our opinion, a criminal act and we trust that the police are involved in tracing the message sent to the Mayor.

There is an obligation on the part of the police to make events like this a priority and for the Crown Council to lay hate charges which can lead to long prison terms.  A responsibility as well for the judiciary to hand out stiff sentences, and for media to ensure that the public is made aware of the penalties for what is a hate crime.

This just cannot be tolerated.

If you want to get rid of a politician, there is a place you can do just that – at the ballot box.

Shawna Stolte: Needed security to keep Advisory Committee meetings civil.

Ward 4 Councillor Shawna Stolte required security at an Advisory Committee meeting. She explained that her personal safety was not the issue – saying that she needed security to prevent the members of the committee from going after each other.

We hope that the problem members of the committee have been removed.

During an interview in 1010Newstalk Mayor Meed Ward explained what she thought was happening:

“I think people got used to being keyboard warriors.  I was hoping that the decline of decorum, that that we all saw and faced. You know, I was a city councilor for eight years, a mayor for about a year before COVID, and I had never seen anything like what we all experienced during COVID. And that’s when the death threats started to come. People threatening to hang me, people threatening to make a CITIZENS ARREST.

“I was given a little key fob on my phone. That is a, I call it a screamer. If somebody were to approach me and throw me in the back of the car, I could open, I could use this screamer to draw attention. I mean, just really unnerving things.

“Maybe it’s the isolation, maybe it’s the fact that we’re all behind a keyboard. We were not interacting as humans. We hoped that once COVID passed and we could see each other, that decorum would return, but, but it hasn’t. In fact, it’s gotten worse, and it’s been enabled by people in elected office.

“The Elect Respect Initiative came out of what I call my support group of elected representatives. We call ourselves HER   – Halton Elected Representatives. We meet a couple of times a year to support each other, share stories. And at one meeting, someone asked: “Would you advise your daughter to enter politics?” And we were all kind of going, hmm, –  I’d have to tell them about the risks.  There are  25 – 30 of us  – all had a story of receiving death threats. This is very widespread at all levels of government.

“Elected officials take a pledge to be respectful to each other, to the public, and call out and support each other when they see each other under attack.

“There is a similar pledge for the public to say, ‘I’m going to elect people that are going to be respectful and focus on policy debates, not personal attacks.”