Christie Blatchford writes:
The same day as the force issued a press release about Johnston’s arrest, it also issued a public safety advisory about a Kitchener woman who had been convicted a few years back of four counts of poisoning young children at the daycare she ran, and was now being released from prison and moving to Mississauga. You can guess which heinous offender got the most media attention. (…)
And yet, last October, Crombie filed a hate-crime complaint with Peel police after the Gazette website published a bizarre, genuinely unpleasant and rambling article claiming, among other things, that the mayor was trying to convert the city to Islam so “they can kill her son just for being gay”.
It doesn’t appear from the news stories back then that Johnston wrote the article but rather that, as the site’s webmaster (and, Johnston said, the co-owner), he simply posted it.
In any case, all that happened last October, and in its press release the Peel force referred to the charge against Johnston being laid after a “lengthy investigation”, later described by a force spokesman as a five-month-long probe.
The timing could mean Crombie’s complaint was the catalyst for the investigation and the charge. Certainly, it lends an overt sheen of politicization to a prosecution which is inherently politicized by the unusual requirement that the AG must first consent.
