Halifax Restaurant Owner Feels Sick, Anxious After Maskless Patrons Harass Staff

HALIFAX — A Halifax restaurant says a group of maskless patrons who harassed and threatened its staff should be “ashamed” of themselves.

Management from The Wooden Monkey blasted the group on social media yesterday, calling their actions “hurtful and frightening.”

The incident happened on Sunday, on the heels of an anti-mask protest held at Citadel Hill.

According to Christine Bower, the vice-president and co-owner of the Wooden Monkey, a group of people without masks made their way past Wooden Monkey staff and sat at a table.

Bower says one member of the group flashed what they claimed was a vaccine exemption card, but the rest didn’t. She said staff couldn’t confirm if the card was legitimate.

She says she still remembers getting a call from a supervisor on Sunday, shortly after the group arrived.

“She called me bawling. My supervisor was bawling—and then she had to pass the phone to another server because she couldn’t speak, and he could barely talk,” she recalls.

“They don’t deserve that. And it upset me so much that my staff [members] were so upset. They were just trying to do their job,” she added.

Eventually, the maskless group left, but not before threatening to get staff fired and sue them for human rights abuses. Bower says she will review security footage today to get a better sense of what went down.

She said she doesn’t think her restaurant was targeted for any reason other than its location.

The Wooden Monkey’s Halifax branch sits just a stone’s throw from Sunday’s anti-mask protest at Citadel Hill.

Bower says the incident has left her sick and anxious. She says she hardly slept last night because she was so worried about what would happen today when the province’s vaccine mandate begins.

She says she doesn’t care if people are vaccinated and has no desire to tell people what to do with their lives. But she doesn’t think it’s fair for them to take their anger out on her staff.

“I just want to make sure my staff are happy and healthy and they want to come to work and have a good environment. People, if they don’t want to get vaccinated, that’s their choice,” she said.

“I just want to be a restaurant open for business and pay my bills and pay my rent and serve food and drink,” she said. “I didn’t sign up to go into politics or anything. It’s just a restaurant. Just go take this up … with the people who make the rules.”

Bower says the only reason she called the group out on social media was because her staff have faced other, less serious incidents in the past year and she’s worried it will keep happening.

Gordon Stewart is the president of the Restaurant Association Of Nova Scotia.

He says confrontations like this are happening across the province but that it’s not as bad here as it is in some other parts of the country.

He says groups like the one that harassed Wooden Monkey staff are more interested in forcing a confrontation than sitting down for a meal.

“They want to [cause a stir]. They want to go inside, they want to create confusion, they want to get people upset and take video clips,” he says. “For them, it’s a game, and it’s not a pretty game.”

He pointed out that frontline staff continues to shoulder most of the burden brought on by the government’s vaccine policy. That’s adding even more stress to employees who are already overworked thanks to a chronic labour shortage in the industry.

“The individual waiter or waitress is taking the brunt of that, and that’s not really fair at all,” he says.

RANS has asked the provincial government to give more support to restaurants to help implement the government’s mandate.

Premier Tim Houston hasn’t made any public commitments but has suggested more financial support for the food and beverage industry might be coming.

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