Penetanguishene mayor sees community support after addressing staff harassment
By: Derek Howard, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Source: MidlandToday.ca, Sep 17, 2025
Penetanguishene Mayor Doug Rawson and CAO Jeff Lees spoke to MidlandToday regarding an update to an issue of harassment against town staff highlighted in a recent MidlandToday article (‘Rawson blasts ‘rude, belligerent’ residents for boorish behaviour’).
For two consecutive regular council meetings in July and August, Rawson had drawn attention to a small number of Penetanguishene residents that had escalated unpleasant discourse to members of town staff. Rawson addressed the resident comments as ‘rude, ignorant, distasteful’, ‘belligerent’, as well as ‘getting downright despicable’.
After the recent council meeting, Rawson cited a positive swell of support from the community.
“In the last year, that’s probably the one article I’ve had the most outreach on, where people came to me and said: ‘I had no idea’,” Rawson told MidlandToday. “I think it’s brought another level of awareness to people, that said: ‘it’s unfortunate’.
“These past couple of days,” Rawson added, “a person that toured the region from eastern Ontario shared with us how great it was to come here: friendly and warm, welcoming to people, how much they loved the environment. They even said they would consider moving to this area based on the response.”
Rawson stated that the visitor produced a copy of the MidlandToday article with compliments on how the municipality had handled the approach against harassment. He also reiterated that the complaints were from a small number of residents, and were not indicative of the larger town populace.
“We probably should do a little more to appreciate and applaud the ‘goods’, instead of just highlighting the few ‘bads’,” said Rawson.
Lees stated that since the original article had been published, Penetanguishene’s approach to handling the matter had been effective.
“The trend seems to have flatlined,” said Lees. “I think this is happening not only just in North Simcoe, (but) municipally across the province.
“I don’t think any municipality is sitting down and doing nothing,” Lees added. “I hope that collectively as municipalities we can work together to support one another, because I think this trend is not going favourably.”
Rawson offered that it wasn’t just a municipal construct but an overall behavioural sense of entitlement, and cited the hospital sector – specifically increases of physical abuse toward on-call paramedics.
“I think we as service providers have accepted that up to a point, and I think we’re at the boil-over point where we’ve now got to say: ‘hey hey, enough is enough’,” said Rawson. “I think it’s a societal problem, and we’ve got to stop accepting it. We’ve got to start saying: ‘no, you don’t have the right’.”