Nili Kaplan-Myrth, the outspoken medical doctor and trustee of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) has been barred from attending meetings for three months, following a unanimous vote by her trustee colleagues at a meeting on Dec. 19.

Trustees voted 11-0 to declare that Kaplan-Myrth violated the board’s code of conduct, later voting 10-1 to sanction the trustee by barring her from attending the next board meeting on Jan. 30, and from sitting on five separate committees for a three-month period between Jan. 1 to March 30, 2024. The maximum penalty under the board’s rules would have been for up to six months. (Kaplan-Myrth was not permitted to vote on the motions).

Kaplan-Myrth—who attended the meeting virtually, citing safety concerns—is the sole Jewish trustee on Ontario’s second-largest public school board.

Justine Bell was the only trustee who voted against sanctions for Kaplan-Myrth.

“In the report (by an independent investigator) it clearly states that she has been living with traumatic events consistently for months,” Bell said.

Kaplan-Myrth maintains her clear and repeated allegations of antisemitism within the board have been ignored.

“I don’t think I had any idea that stepping forward as a trustee, I would be dealing with discrimination against me as a Jew from the outside world, let alone from within the board,” she told The CJN in an interview after the meeting.

“I have done my job as a trustee. I’ve advocated for my constituents. I am guilty of unmuting myself when I was faced with overt antisemitism and also of speaking, to the trustees and to the staff privately, repeatedly, about the antisemitism and being met with silence, and then being met with reprisals for talking about the discrimination, talking about how toxic it is.”

This is the second time Kaplan-Myrth has faced a disciplinary vote.

A Sept. 11 special board meeting considered sanctions over an exchange with another trustee, Donna Dickson, who is Black, ahead of a board vote in November 2022 on masking in schools. In that exchange, Kaplan-Myrth shared fears “white supremacists” were threatening her and harassing her with antisemitic slurs.

Kaplan-Myrth has been in the public eye even before her election as a trustee in October 2022 as an outspoken advocate for masking and COVID vaccinations and has received a stream of misogynistic and antisemitic messages for her views.

Dickson found her language inappropriate. At that special meeting, seven trustees voted for sanctions, one short of eight required to approve censure, while four voted against.

Suzanne Craig, the independent integrity investigator whose report released last week found Kaplan-Myrth had contravened the code of conduct, stated that two other OCDSB trustees named in the investigation, including Dickson, had not.

Craig addressed the board about recommending sanctions for Kaplan-Myrth and acknowledged that the trustee has been targeted.

“There has been ongoing vitriol and despicable hate speech and threats directed at trustee Kaplan-Myrth. The authors of these despicable comments, threats and vitriol were not the other trustees named in this report,” said Craig.

In an interview with The CJN on Dec. 20, the day after the sanctions vote, Kaplan-Myrth said the charge against her is that she unmuted her microphone and objected at the Sept. 11 meeting to another trustee referring to her as “just a white woman” in a way she says sought to delegitimize or deny the trauma she’d experienced over the previous year.

“The other trustees could have objected but they didn’t, and so I unmuted myself where I wasn’t supposed to speak, and I said ‘I object, I’m a Jewish woman who’s been subject to harassment.’”

“That’s one of the charges against me, that I unmuted myself to object to being referred to as a white woman. I think it’s pretty well-established in the Jewish community that we are considered white when it’s convenient for people to say that we can just pass as white,” she told The CJN.

The vote to sanction her at the Dec. 19 meeting took into account both her actions and words at the Sept. 11 meeting and the social media post and interactions with other trustees around that event.

In her report and recommendation of sanctions, Craig noted that in some cases, the imposition of sanctions could be avoided.

“Generally, the jurisprudence has found that to decide inadvertence, or error in judgement in good faith, there must be some diligence on the respondent’s part, that is, some effort to understand and appreciate their obligations under the code,” Craig told the board.

“Outright ignorance of what their obligations entail, or not caring what the rules prescribed, will not suffice, nor will wilful blindness.”

In her comments, Craig mentioned mediation, including Kaplan-Myrth’s hesitations about participating, though the trustee ultimately seemed interested as long as it didn’t single her out.

Craig later concluded there “wasn’t an atmosphere conducive to mediation.”

In the nine months between when the complaint was lodged in November 2022 and the Sept. 11 special meeting, Kaplan-Myrth has received a deluge of antisemitic messages online, including death threats.

Two people have now been charged by Ottawa Police in connection with hateful phone calls, including one person from British Columbia who allegedly made threats to Kaplan-Myrth’s life. She points out that many of the most disturbing and threatening emails, which are not traceable, have not resulted in charges.

Meanwhile, Kaplan-Myrth has submitted an Ontario Human Rights Tribunal complaint against the OCDSB on the basis of differential treatment, which she says includes colleagues’ indifference to her calling out the antisemitic hate she’s received.

As of Dec. 20, Kaplan-Myrth says she has requested a leave of absence from the ministry of education, asking Minister Stephen Lecce to grant the leave based on the “persistent” antisemitism and reprisals she says she’s faced over speaking out.

“Anybody who’s experiencing discrimination should be able to speak about it and be protected from reprisals.”

Some of the threats have led her to avoid attending board meetings in person for fear over her personal safety. Kaplan-Myrth says she’s also received threats to her family, and shared emails filled with antisemitic language, including vile and cruel Holocaust references not fit for print.

“This has nothing to do with progressives or conservatives,” Kaplan-Myrth told The CJN after the vote. “It has nothing to do with vaccines or no vaccines. This is about me, as a person, who has been publicly active, not being safe because I’ve also been publicly Jewish.”