“I’ve been called a dictator and a tyrant”: Pickering mayor Kevin Ashe on city council’s descent into chaos

Pickering city council’s first meeting of 2025 will also be its first in a virtual setting. The decision to go online was made to protect city employees, who have faced several months of disruptive demonstrations and threats from alt-right protesters. At the centre of the protracted debacle is Lisa Robinson, a first-time councillor whose antagonistic behaviour toward her colleagues—and motions against everything from drag queen story time events to family change rooms inside rec centres—has become a catalyst for security concerns and a giant time suck.

Since 2023, Robinson has been sanctioned four times following investigations by the Integrity Commissioner and has been docked a total of nine months pay. Robinson calls the sanctioning a witch hunt; mayor Kevin Ashe says he and his fellow councillors just want to get back to work. Here, Ashe talks about the rise of extremism in local politics and his recent decision to file criminal charges against Robinson: “We have tried to rein it in, and it has only gotten worse.”

The decision to take Pickering city council meetings online followed months of conflict and growing safety concerns. Where does this story begin? I think the recent rise of far-right ideologies in Canada goes back to the pandemic, with lockdowns, vaccine mandates and then the Freedom Convoy demonstration. In 2021, before Lisa Robinson became a councillor, she ran for the federal Conservative party in Beaches–East York, but she got dropped by her party based on some Islamophobic social media posts that she claimed were faked. In 2022, she attended the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and addressed the crowd. The same year, she ran in Ontario’s provincial election as an MPP candidate for the Ontario Party, which many view as an extremist party. But I don’t recall any extremist sentiments coming up in her 2022 election campaign in Pickering. She ran on a platform of small-c conservative stuff: smaller government, less waste of taxpayers’ money, that kind of thing.

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After she was elected, she started to make waves on council in the spring of 2023, when she proposed putting an age restriction on drag queen story time events and took issue with city buildings flying the Pride flag. The Integrity Commissioner found that she was promoting attitudes that were transphobic and homophobic. Ultimately, council voted on her 60-day suspension in October. That was a little over a year ago, and it has been chaos ever since.

What kind of chaos are we talking about? In February, she wrote an op-ed in the central Durham newspaper denouncing Black History Month. There was a response from the Black community, who were quite rightly offended by her comments, but then there was a counter-protest in March that just kept going. People started showing up at our monthly council meetings, where we normally discuss day-to-day matters and hear from members of the community who put their name on our agenda to speak. But suddenly the agenda was dominated by speakers who had no interest in local politics. Instead, they used their time to rail against 15-minute cities (which are the focus of a popular conspiracy theory in the US), the UN globalist agenda, geo-engineering, chemtrails and all kinds of other stuff that has no basis in fact and certainly no place at our meetings. In early summer, after we realized that most of these people were coming in from other locations, we issued a directive that only Pickering residents could put their items on our agenda.

And everyone lived happily ever after, right? Ha—I wish. Certainly that is the goal, but it feels like any attempt to rein things in just riles up this small but extremely vocal contingent. It’s probably only about 10 or 15 people who are very active on social media and started showing up at our meetings. They call me a dictator and a tyrant, and that’s nothing compared to the things they are willing to say online, where they called us Nazis and Hitlers. I invite you to listen to some of the voicemails that we got calling for my day of reckoning and threatening my family. Others use offensive language to attack women councillors: the c-word and that kind of thing. We restricted who was able to speak on the agenda, but council meetings were still open to the public, so there was still constant disruption. The way the room was set up, you had these disruptors who were hanging over their seats in the front row and getting right up close with our city staff who sit in the first and second rows. We put up Plexiglas for protection. Security, overall, has become a big concern.

Because your safety has been threatened? Last year alone, we issued 14 trespassing notices. We have upped our security budget for council meetings by $30,000 after councillors were followed by these protesters into restricted areas. And we spent an additional $35,000 giving councillors the option to install cameras outside of their homes. This was after several councillors were followed to their private residences. It was also after Robinson appeared on the Live with Kevin J. Johnston podcast—a podcaster who called for a violent dog to be unleashed against myself and members of council. He also called us pedophiles, all while publishing our pictures and contact information. So safety is a very real concern, but so is efficiency. Councillor Robinson and her supporters are constantly derailing the work we’re here to do.

One example is a debate that broke out over the gender-neutral change rooms at children’s sports facilities. In 2023, we renovated our Pickering rec centre, and the new public change room was converted to family style. The idea was that a dad could go in with his young daughter or a mother with her son. We also had a family change area at the older facility—the only difference is that now the men’s and women’s rooms are for members, although non-members just have to ask to use them. We really were trying to ensure the comfort of everyone, but of course Councillor Robinson filed a motion to reinstate gendered washrooms. She didn’t get the support of council, so it didn’t go anywhere, but she won’t let the issue go, which takes up time, and we get all of this outrage or mock-outrage.

You don’t believe that the concerns underlying her motions are genuine? What I will say is that, before I was mayor, I was the councillor for the same ward that Councillor Robinson represents. I was in constant contact with residents of my ward, and not once did someone come up to me to express concern over drag queens or the fear of pedophiles in family washrooms. I think it’s fair to say that Councillor Robinson is appealing to a wider audience than her riding. In September, she hosted a town hall meeting at the George Ashe Community Centre. There is video footage where you can see that they were handing out flyers promoting extremist alt-right views. There were people there from all over Durham, Oshawa, Whitby, Mattawa. One guy took the stage and said, “I’m so happy to be here in the town of Pickerington”—he didn’t even know where he was.

We’ve seen alt-right groups infiltrating local communities and local councils in the US for the past few years, and now, more and more, it’s happening here. I think we can partly attribute it to the pandemic, when people were isolated and angry and came together in online echo chambers. It also reflects a Trumpification of politics, where overblown rhetoric has replaced a more civil level of disagreement and discourse. I’ve heard from a number of mayors in Ontario and in BC who are dealing with infiltration by alt-right groups. The mayor of Sarnia has been managing similar difficulties with a particular councillor who has repeatedly violated the council’s code of conduct. They took their meetings online nine months ago, which is the decision we came to in December.

What happened to prompt such an extreme measure? Our December council meeting was when things really came to a head. For months, we have had our proceedings disrespected and distracted by Councillor Robinson and her supporters, but this was next level. Rebel Media showed up. There was a representative from Canada Cop Watch, considered by some to be an extremist organization, in military garb. A producer of Kevin Johnston’s show was sitting in the gallery. That was the program, on which Robinson appeared, that suggested we “deserve a baseball bat to the face” and that called for a dog to rip myself and other members of council to pieces. For me, that was the final straw. We decided we had no choice but to protect our staff and our citizens and take our meetings online. This was not an easy decision. I understand that anything limiting public access diminishes our democracy, but having people feel unsafe in their council chambers diminishes democracy too.

Last week you filed criminal harassment charges against Robinson on behalf of yourself and the rest of Pickering council. What are the charges based on and what do you hope to achieve? The other members of council and I are plaintiffs in the criminal charges, but it was the Integrity Commissioner who determined that Councillor Robinson’s actions may reach a standard of being criminal. The charges are specifically about her appearances on Johnston’s show. Police will investigate, and if criminal charges are not filed, the issue will come back to council. My hope is that by introducing criminal charges we will actually see some real consequences. Right now, a 90-day suspension is the most severe recourse that we have, although the provincial government has recently introduced new legislation that would give a provincial Integrity Commissioner the power to remove a councillor who violates the code of conduct.

Councillor Robinson apologized for her podcast appearance. Does that make a difference? It would make a difference if I thought she was sincere, but since her apology she’s been a guest on the same podcast multiple times, so I don’t believe that she has any real regret.

She has also said that she is the victim of a witch hunt and that the disciplinary actions against her—four in total to date—amount to the suppression of opposing views. How do you respond to that? I have been a public servant for 18 years, and I have never had a problem with healthy disagreement. Councillor Robinson calls city staff corrupt without any evidence to support that claim. She alleges that she is the one being bullied and harassed. None of it, in my view, has any basis in fact. She has said that she will be on the ticket in the next mayoral race in 2026. There’s no question that her antics are building her profile outside of our city, so I guess we’ll see.

In a statement to Toronto Life, councillor Lisa Robinson wrote: “Mayor Ashe and council going virtual has nothing to do with me. This whole charade is a propaganda stunt to silence dissent and protect their fragile egos.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.