Ontario liquor inspectors used 'public safety risk' sanctions as payback against operator: lawsuit

For the second time in a year, the agency that runs the province’s liquor inspection system is being sued by an Ontario bar, alleging inspectors are using a loophole in the law to settle personal scores.

The new lawsuit, by the company behind the Fox and Fiddle in North Bay, says the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO) inspectors deemed the bar a public safety risk as payback for a tense interaction with its operator, Nathan Taus — a mechanism that stripped Taus of his livelihood with no appeal.

“This is consistent with the assertion that the ban on Mr. Taus has more to do with retribution than protecting public safety,” Taus’s lawsuit reads.

Taus said he wants to make sure there is an appeal mechanism for all license conditions, not just some.

"We don't think the punishment fits the crime," he said. "There should be a tribunal, a hearing, some kind of arbitration and in this case, there's none of that. We want to change that from the inside out."

The lawsuit says that during Taus’s 25-year history of operating restaurants in Ottawa, Toronto and North Bay, he had been reprimanded three times.

During an inspection at the Fox and Fiddle in October 2020, Taus told a liquor inspector, “Don’t mess with my livelihood and I won’t mess with yours,” the lawsuit says.

Nathan Taus, the operator of the North Bay Fox and Fiddle, speaks to CTV News Toronto in December 2021.

Taus told CTV News Toronto he apologized for the interaction almost immediately, saying COVID-19 measures that had hurt his bar’s bottom line had been wearing on him.

“I was emphatically apologetic,” Taus said. “With all the things going on in the world, I was frustrated and I felt like I was being targeted a little bit.”

But he claims the remark set off a chain of events that had him prohibited from operating the bar and banned him from the premises.

Then Taus faced other allegations of drinking at the bar and not wearing a mask, the lawsuit says. He denied those, but found himself banned from other businesses too, including cannabis retailer Real Boss Inc., even though he said he had no connection to them.

“How the alleged concerns for public safety resulting from Mr. Taus’ involvement in the Fox and Fiddle apply to the establishment operated by Real Boss Inc. remains unclear,” the lawsuit says.

Taus is not the only bar operator that has gone down this path. Anthony Greene of Castro’s Lounge in Toronto sued earlier this year after he was banned. He compared a liquor inspector to “Aunt Lydia” from the TV show “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

In that case, Greene was arrested by officers who later themselves faced discipline for failing to properly investigate. Greene sued, and the case was settled out of court.

Both bars have argued that if the AGCO had punished them for an infraction of the rules, they would be able to make their case to the License Appeal Tribunal. But in both cases, the inspectors went a different way, alleging the bar operators posed a public safety risk, and for that there is no appeal.

That lack of oversight could mean inspectors aren’t held to a higher standard in their day-to-day operations, said Jay Naster, Taus’s lawyer.

“You may be more inclined to make decisions that might not stand up to scrutiny premised on the notion there is no scrutiny available,” he said.

The AGCO says it doesn’t keep figures on how many times it deems a bar a public safety risk. That’s a problem that echoed a finding of Ontario’s Auditor General in a 2020 Value For Money Audit of the agency.

“Compliance officials,” Bonnie Lysyk wrote, “do not use a consistent approach to their selections and do not document their rationale.”

However an AGCO spokesperson told CTV News Toronto in a statement that it “does not hesitate to use a series of tools available to it in order to promote compliance and protect public interest and public safety.”

The AGCO said it would be filing a response to the lawsuit.

In the lawsuit, Taus requests that the decisions leading him to be banned from the Fox and Fiddle be reversed, and in the alternative, that the law that keeps a tribunal from removing conditions on a license be deemed unconstitutional.