OPINION: The pile-on is not accountability

The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

A name goes up on a regulator’s enforcement page. Within the hour, social media has a jury, a verdict and a sentencing.

I watched it happen again recently. A referral to a discipline committee appeared on a public enforcement listing, and a Facebook group did the rest. Hundreds of comments. Careers pronounced over. Two people’s characters read into the record by commenters who had seen exactly one paragraph of information.

An allegation is not a verdict

Here’s what a referral to discipline actually is. An allegation. A hearing gets scheduled, evidence gets tested and a panel decides. That’s the entire point of the process. Every province runs some version of it, and every version exists because somebody understood that an accusation and a finding are not the same thing.

I’ve seen trust account problems that were fraud. I’ve also seen trust account problems that were a bookkeeping error, a timing issue, a reconciliation filed late in a brutal month. On day one, from the outside, you cannot tell the difference. Neither can I. Neither can a comment section.

The people demanding resignations before a hearing are often the same ones asking why the public doesn’t respect real estate professionals. Connect those dots. The public watches us tear each other apart over an allegation and concludes we’re exactly what they suspected. We keep asking to be treated like a profession while behaving, in public, like a mob. It’s a strange way to campaign for respect.

I’m not arguing for softness. For years I published regulatory discipline decisions with names attached, and I stood behind every one. But those were decisions. After the hearing, after the evidence, after a panel ruled. That’s the line, and it’s not a complicated one. Findings are the record. Allegations are the question. Publish answers, not questions.

What does real protection looks like?

Which brings me to the regulators themselves. In Ontario, the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO) publishes a registrant’s name when a matter is referred to discipline, before any hearing has taken place. I understand the instinct. Transparency reads as consumer protection. But publishing a name at the referral stage is not consumer protection. It’s a reputational sentence before a trial.

Where there is a live risk to the public, money at risk, a freeze order or conditions on a registration, then publish immediately and loudly. That’s what protection means. Where no such risk exists, the file can wait for a decision. A regulator that publishes findings protects the public. A regulator that publishes accusations outsources the punishment to a comment section.

There is one more cost here that should concern us all. This industry runs on volunteers. Board directors, committee members, the registrants who sit on task forces and advisory panels and give up their evenings so the rest of us get functioning associations and better rules. Every one of them attaches their name to an institution, and every one of them knows that if something goes wrong anywhere near that institution, fairly or not, the thread will find them.

The cost of the pile-on

Let me make it personal. As I write this, RECO is accepting applications for its new industry advisory council. I’ve spent years training agents on compliance, and I have plenty I’d want to bring to that table. I’m conflicted about applying anyway. Not because of the time. Because I’ve watched what this industry does to people whose names sit anywhere near a controversy, and a council seat means owning a piece of every unpopular outcome it touches. A mob that cannot distinguish between an allegation and a finding will not distinguish between advice and outcome either. That’s what I’m thinking about, and I put my opinions in print and social media regularly. Now imagine the thoughtful, experienced people thinking the same and concluding it isn’t worth it.

That’s what the pile-on actually costs us. Not just two reputations in one Facebook thread. It thins the bench. It teaches the most capable people in this business to keep their heads down, and it leaves the governing, the volunteering and the standard-setting to whoever remains.

You want a higher standard in this industry? Hold the process to it. Accountability and due process are not opposites. One is worthless without the other. If a hearing finds wrongdoing, the consequences should be real, and I’ll say so. Until then, the pile-on says more about us than it does about the people we pile on.

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