David Israelson
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

Is Bob Gale a Nazi? Absolutely not, I’d say.

But in the digital, social media age, that’s the kind of unfair judgment people tend to make when they glance at a screen and see that some public figure did something dumb or out of bounds.

Certainly I don’t like that Gale, who resigned as Niagara’s regional chair on March 12, included in his “broad collection of historical art and artifacts” a copy of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” signed by the evil führer himself.

It’s creepy. And it’s understandable why many people find it offensive for a public figure to collect what many would consider to be history porn.

But it’s also a distraction. As long as they’re not breaking the law, people are entitled to be as weird as they want in their private lives. This is so as long as their private weirdness does not seep into their public decision-making.

The irony is that Gale’s resignation leaves Niagara Region better off, but not for the reasons he resigned. These reasons relate to his job, not his peccadillos. That’s what people should focus on.

In the Insta-era, our attention is being hijacked by emotional reactions, or triggered by gotcha moments or driven by algorithms. We get outraged by ridiculous or awful things that people in the public eye often do.

There are enough stupid things available to offend us 24 hours a day. But we should pay more attention to the bad decisions people make in their jobs that actually can make our daily lives worse.

The problem is that it’s harder and harder to distinguish actual harm from gratuitous insult. Cynical politicians have figured out how to whip up instant outrage to take our eyes off what’s really going wrong.

We need only look south of the border to see this. One outrage leads to more outrage, until all of us are always angry about some perceived slight. Often, we can’t tell the difference between what really ought to make us angry and what we should ignore.

In this context, we can recognize that it’s easy to disapprove of Bob Gale’s book acquisition — Hitler was the worst, and Gale didn’t really explain adequately why he apparently paid thousands of dollars for a signed copy.

But what happens in more ambiguous situations, for example, when people are doing research and have nasty materials on their desks or in their hard drives? Are we ready to rifle through every public figure’s files to make sure they don’t have something we disapprove of?

Public figures should recognize that they will be under scrutiny. But the public should also recognize that public service requires hard work, dedication and that even public figures we don’t support deserve respect for boundaries.

Otherwise, we become beholden to special interest groups with their own agendas, who bring people down or cancel them simply by disapproving what they read, watch or do on their own time.

What really merits our disapproval more than his history collection is Gale’s performance as regional chair, a position he was plopped into by Premier Doug Ford.

Thanks to Gale, in Niagara, we’re now facing a sudden push to amalgamate local governments — something we did not ask for and do not seem to want.

It’s an idea that may or may not be worth considering. But Gale’s unwanted, pushy approach has left Niagara-on-the-Lake and other municipalities scrambling to figure out a rational way to look at the pros and cons.

It’s unclear what, or who, motivated him to undertake his letter-writing campaign aiming to foist amalgamation on us. But the unwanted campaign is what’s really out of bounds.

His apparently unsolicited attempt to do away with our town (and other communities in Niagara) raises the real question: did this person belong in his job?

I think we got our answer without having to go through Bob Gale’s bookshelves.

David Israelson is a writer and non-practising lawyer who lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake.