It appears Andre Cornellier doesn’t like Lowell Green. (To be fair, he’s probably not alone in this.)

In a press release on the ATU 279 website, the union announced that it has filed a complaint with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council over “the appropriateness of comments made by CFRA talk radio host Lowell Green”.

It seems that Green encouraged his listeners to picket the OC Transpo Annual Christmas Party. The union alleges that “Mr. Green made no effort to discourage the many callers who promoted violence against the members of the Union attending the Christmas Party”.

The final paragraph of their press release reads:

By making the public comments that he did, the Union alleges that Mr. Green has violated a number of sections of the CAB Code of Ethics. Both Mr. Green and CFRA have been found to have failed to meet the requirements of the Code of Ethics in the past for the very same reasons that have led the Union to file this complaint.

I wrote about people threatening Cornellier a couple of weeks ago and at the time said that such threats were crossing the line of acceptable behaviour and that people who made them should be charged, convicted and do some jail time. I stand by that statement.

However, simply encouraging people to picket the union’s Christmas party is really no more inappropriate than the union encouraging all of its members to picket the junior hockey games, which is what Cornellier was doing before the City obtained an injunction against the union. Cornellier should accept the fact that his union is not exactly the most popular group of people in town and not be surprised when people use some of the same tactics he’s employing against him.

Still, violence against either the drivers or the riders is not acceptable and shouldn’t be tolerated, regardless of one’s feelings concerning the other side’s position.

A tip o’ the hat to Public Transit in Ottawa for writing about this.