PEI Battle Ground for New Media and Journalist with a Disability

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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A raging human rights battle on PEI that highlights an ongoing battle for legitimacy between old and new media, as well as accessibility issues for the press, has garnered surprisingly little media attention.

It began in the fall of 2009, when the explosion of news blogging was a mere gathering of volatile gasses. After unanimously voting controversial news blogger Stephen Pate their secretary/treasurer, members of the Island’s press gallery booted him from their ranks. They claimed the issue was spurious content; Pate says it was his association with a disability advocate group—a violation of human rights law.

Pate’s supporters say that in barring him, the press gallery created sanctions against bloggers even as they took pains to herd media consumers onto their own websites, blogs and social media. Here’s the backstory:

On Oct. 19, 2009, PEI news blogger Stephen Pate rolled into the PEI Legislature committee room in his wheelchair to face his peers, the members of the new press gallery. Only weeks before, he’d been elected their secretary-treasurer.

The next day after the election when he called president Wayne Thibodeau, editor and senior correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. He was informed there was a problem. The gallery was taking issue with a phony news release Pate posted weeks before the election, entitled “Government announces solution for disabled access to Confederation Library.”

The post was typical of a writer who stokes political fires. It took on two of Pate’s favourite topics: accessibility for the disabled and political corruption. After trumpeting a new “private public partnership (PP3) with businessman Richard Homburg to solve the problem of disability access in the Confederation Centre Library,” the satirical piece states that the Province also lent $5 million to a locally notorious company with “the standard low-interest, no-repayment terms the Province of PEI grants to off-Island developers who promise to visit,” a reference to the Island’s Provincial Nominee Program scandal.

At the Oct. 19 hearing, Pate was called to explain himself. “Good satire cuts close to reality,” Pate says “with a few quirky elements. It’s not misleading – it closes by saying ‘This satire has been brought to you by no one.’”

Pate says the hearing quickly drifted without proper attention to protocol. Island publisher Paul MacNeill wrote afterwards, “[The press gallery] did not establish rules to govern who can and who cannot be a member and what professional credentials they must possess.”

Members of the press gallery piled on with criticisms, saying Pate was a blogger not a journalist, that he lacked knowledge of journalistic boundaries and morals and, most significantly, was a disability lobbyist. But the Guardian had recently approved Pate’s media pass, and he had been a paid journalist since the 1960s.

Pate hotly disputed being labeled a lobbyist, citing the Canada Lobbying Act. He told the members he was a volunteer advocate for a nonprofit organization, Disability Alert, whereas a lobbyist is paid according to the Canada Lobbying Act. “The CBC’s Donna Allen said this issue was her biggest concern,” Pate says.

The hearing was lengthy and Pate became too fatigued to defend himself. “Severe fatigue is part of my disability. I asked to continue at another time, a ‘request for accommodation,’ but was denied.”

The gallery voted 11-2 to revoke Pate’s press pass, which allowed him to record proceedings at provincial legislature. Pate says The Guardian and CBC ran damaging stories about the outcome without asking his side.

Pate has continued to blog, but says he can’t record proceedings in legislature or hear them properly from the public gallery, which he calls the “nosebleed seats with an echo.” His income as a business consultant ran dry following the Oct. 2009 hearing.

In Oct. 2010 Pate filed a 30-page human rights complaint for $330,000 for loss of income, pain and suffering and loss of reputation with the P.E.I. Human Rights Commission, claiming discrimination by the press gallery, CBC producer Donna Allen, and Guardian reporters Wayne Thibodeau and Teresa Wright, based on his association with a disability group.

“Until 2009 I’d been successful as a business consultant, but my reputation was tainted,” Pate says. “The human rights commission staff failed to take that into account and dismissed my claim.”

Pate appealed the dismissal and the commission’s Chair, Anne Nicholson, overturned it on April 4 of this year, giving him the right to be heard at a panel hearing. Less than a month later, lawyers for CBC and the Guardian (owned by TC Transcontinental) applied for a judicial review from a P.E.I. Supreme Court judge in the hopes of reinstating the initial decision to dismiss Pate’s claim.

“It’s a stall tactic,” Pate says. “I’m 65 years old and it could take two years for the court to settle it.”

He believes the treatment he has received from traditional media is part of a larger culture of exclusion of people with disabilities. “I became disabled in 2000,” he says. “Until then I’d had nothing but success, but I instantly became a second-class citizen. Certain MLA’s preferred patting me on the head to shaking my hand. If you sit in a wheelchair you get either abuse or pity.”

Chris Benjamin is an independent journalist, writer and a regular contributor to The Coast, Halifax Nova Scotia, and has contributed articles to The Chronicle Herald (Halifax) and the Globe and Mail among other publications on sustainability, culture and health.  His latest book “Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada”, published by Nimbus Publishing,  is available from Amazon.ca , the publisher and other fine booksellers.

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