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Hawes, who is also a former mayor of Mission, is alleged to have defamed Summit Earthworks
Former Mission mayor and 12-year MLA for the region, Randy Hawes, is being sued in B.C. Supreme Court, with plaintiff Summit Earthworks Inc. alleging Hawes defamed the company ahead of a public hearing, scuttling its bid to build a soil remediation and recycling facility.
Summit alleged in its May 21 notice of a civil claim that Hawes wrote a since-deleted Facebook post that said Summit has been “sanctioned in the past for illegal dumping of contaminated soil in the Fraser Valley.”
Summit said in its lawsuit that “the statement is, in its entirety and in its context, false and defamatory of Summit.”
It added: “Summit has not been sanctioned in the past for illegal dumping of contaminated soil in the Fraser Valley, and Mr. Hawes knew or ought to have known this.”
Summit said in its lawsuit that it issued a demand letter telling Hawes to delete the Facebook post on the day of the March 2 public hearing.
Hawes confirmed to Business in Vancouver that he wrote the Facebook post and he said he stands behind the truth of the post. He said he deleted the post when Summit asked him to. Summit said that despite Hawes taking down the Facebook post, he has not issued a retraction nor an apology.
Neither Hawes’ alleged defamatory statement nor Summit’s allegation that it is untrue has been tested in court.
Hawes said his Facebook post was lengthy, and that it also contained many other reasons why he thought Summit should not, at that public hearing, receive city council’s go-ahead for a project to remediate soil on a site at 31828 Lougheed Highway in Mission.
“They’re trying to put in a soil-washing machine that’s reasonably close to the river,” Hawes said. “It’s reasonably close to Silverdale Creek, which is a salmon spawning creek.”
He said he was concerned that if something were to go wrong and contaminated water were to leak out of the facility, it would negatively impact those waterways.
Hawes added that the proposed facility would have also involved a large increase in the number of trucks in the area. The operation would also be noisy, he added.
“It got turned down, not because of [alleged defamatory] comments that I made, but because it’s the wrong location,” he told BIV.
Hawes made a presentation at the public hearing but did not mention the alleged defamatory statement that he acknowledged that he included as part of his Facebook post.
“The public hearing was a critical step in the municipal approval process, providing members of the public with an opportunity to make submissions to council immediately prior to council’s consideration of whether to approve the proposed project,” Summit said.
“Mr Hawes’ statement was made in close temporal proximity to the public hearing and was disseminated to members of the same community invited to participate in that hearing. The timing, content and manner of publication of the statement created a foreseeable risk that it would influence public opinion and opposition to Summit’s proposed project in advance of the public hearing.”
Summit alleges that Hawes’ alleged defamatory statement caused it pecuniary losses, including lost business profits and loss of opportunity and goodwill. It also caused loss and damage to Summit’s reputation, among other losses.
It did not specify how much money it was seeking from Hawes. Instead it listed that it is seeking general, special and punitive damages plus “an interim interlocutory and permanent order enjoining Mr Hawes from making, publishing, disseminating or broadcasting the statements or words of like or similar effect.”
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