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The City of Greater Sudbury is taking a big leap into the future.
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Greater Sudbury councillors approve social media policy – The Sudbury Star
‘We need to eliminate that grey zone by not allowing councillors to post content about their positions on sites from which they profit’
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During the most recent council meeting, members voted unanimously in favour of implementing a social media policy, which will guide councillors as they navigate the digital sphere.
Ward 1 Coun. Mark Signoretti and Ward 6 Coun. Rene Lapierre originally introduced a motion last fall, asking staff to chart the way forward.
The two councillors said they noted a lack of consistency and confusion around proper protocol – not all members of council have maintained a presence on social media and those who do use the tools in different ways.
They said last year they were introducing the motion to encourage “openness, transparency and proper conduct” from their peers, and to ensure no one was profiting financially from their position on council.
“We’re elected representatives, but we have to play by the same rules,” Signoretti said. “We all get comments from constituents that may not be favourable or may seem unfair, but we put ourselves in this position. You take the good, the bad and the ugly.”
While Signoretti and Lapierre said they have no problem with councillors earning money from social media, both said they should not marry the personal and political.
“When the content of that social media relies on their councillor’s position, it has crossed into a grey zone,” Signoretti said in October. “We need to eliminate that grey zone by not allowing councillors to post content about their positions on sites from which they profit.”
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While Ward 11 Coun. Bill Leduc asked for a deferral – he said the next council should formalize the way forward – his peers did not agree and council voted to enact the policy.
Ward 5 Coun. Robert Kirwan, who has been in hot water with the integrity commissioner over his use of Facebook, endorsed the social media policy.
“A great deal of the proposed policy seems to have been taken directly from the terms and conditions my wife and I have maintained for our Valley East Facebook group for more than 12 years. I am extremely pleased to see these standards are going to apply to all city councillors moving forward,” Kirwan said in June in a column printed in The Star.
“I am so delighted with the policy I am going to ask to be the mover of the motion. My wife even asked if she would be able to second the motion. She figured that since the integrity commissioner indirectly reprimanded her for creating a second Facebook account to help manage our site, she should qualify as a seconder of the motion. I told her I didn’t think the city clerk would approve.”
While there has been significant discord around the council table for a few years – Ward 7 Coun. Mike Jakubo cited it as one reason he is not seeking re-election – the policy should promote unity amongst the cohort, the police said.
“It is essential that residents understand and trust the decision-making process of their elected representatives,” the policy indicated. “While members in their individual capacity are not required to agree with all decisions made by the council, they shall accurately and adequately communicate information regarding such decisions when using social media.
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“Members shall not malign a debate or decision or otherwise erode the authority of council. Members shall clearly identify where they are expressing personal views, and not necessarily the views of the city.”
The social media policy – an appendix of the Code of Conduct – will be overseen by Robert Swayze, the city’s integrity commissioner. In September 2019 and again in September 2021, Swayze recommended Kirwan be reprimanded for his behaviour online; council agreed both times and issued the reprimands.
(Swayze has also investigated Ward 3 Coun. Gerry Montpellier twice, but those reports did not concern social media).
Most recently, it was discovered Kirwan and his wife, Valerie, were using a fake Facebook account under the name Jessie Timmons to administer their Valley East group, which boasts more than 19,000 members, and to engage members. They had not made it clear Jessie Timmons was an extension of the Kirwan household.
In 2019, Swayze delivered a report to council in which he said Kirwan had gone too far over the line. He pointed to three specific statements Kirwan made in the Valley East group – one against David Robinson, an economics professor at Laurentian University; another against Tom Price, an adviser to Ward 2 Coun. Michael Vagnini and an outspoken critic of many city decisions; and a third against an unnamed individual who participated in the Greater Sudbury Politics Facebook group.
Swayze accused the councillor of being rude and harassing towards the three individuals.
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Kirwan said he hopes moving forward, the new policy will ensure that discussion on any social media site is “constructive and does not include personal attacks, discrimination, harassment, intimidation or insults.”
Kirwan suggested it could mean more work for some councillors – not everyone administers their space as closely as he and his wife – but it will ensure accurate and factual information is shared with the public.
“Councillors are not only going to be held responsible for material that we post, we are also going to be responsible for material made by others. This will include comments and sub-comments,” he pointed out.
“As it stands now, some councillors avoid making personal attacks or insults themselves, but they leave those types of posts or comments up if they are authored by others. That will no longer be allowed.”
mkkeown@postmedia.com
Twitter: @marykkeown
Facebook: @mkkeown
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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