Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  And this is the same logic process – my wish is my command – that led him to repeatedly violate council’s ethics guidelines. When he has been found by the integrity commissioner to have improperly used his office in a way that could look like influence peddling – as a mayor and as a councillor – in soliciting donations for the youth sports charity he runs, he has repeatedly defended himself by saying the charity is a good cause. As if that changed what donors who relied on the city for business might expect in return for a donation. And when, as a result of his refusal to personally repay those donations to lobbyists, as he’d been ordered to do by a vote of city council, council held another vote to consider excusing him of the fines, he made an impassioned speech and voted to absolve himself. Voting when you have a financial interest at stake is as clear as conflicts of interest get.

  This case arose from a seemingly small conflict, which itself arose from a seemingly small, perhaps understandable ethical issue, surrounding Ford’s charity-fundraising tactics. As a councillor, Ford had been using his city hall office stationery and one of his staff members to help run his youth football foundation, drawing donations from eleven companies who lobby for city business. Though it was for a good cause, the integrity commissioner said it was against the rules, and suggested as a punishment that Ford personally repay $3,150 in donations back to the lobbyists. While he was still a councillor, council approved of this penalty and ordered Ford to pay. Once he was mayor, the integrity commissioner came back to council to report that he still had not paid. In February 2012, Ford made a speech saying he shouldn’t have to pay and then voted with a council majority to excuse himself from the penalty. The Municipal Conflict of Interest Act clearly says that members of council should not speak or vote on matters in which they have a direct financial interest. Since this vote made Ford $3,150 richer, the conflict seemed clear.

  To hold him to account, one private citizen, a business owner named Paul Magder – whose disregard for Ford was apparent, and who had previously filed complaints about his election financing – finally began court proceedings against him. (Magder had apparently been recruited for the task by multiple complainant and labour-relations officer Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who also helped arrange for lawyer Clayton Ruby to represent Magder pro bono.) But even as a judge was deliberating on that complaint, other instances of Ford’s reckless disregard for the rules emerged. It appeared he had been using his office staff and resources to help with his football coaching – indeed, one assistant in the mayor’s office was the former quarterback of the University of Toronto football team and was always present at practices. It was reported that helping coach the football team, driving players and equipment around in a city-owned car, was the primary job of at least one mayor’s-office staffer. Even as the controversy swirled, Ford continued to duck out of important city council meetings for hours at a time to run practices. He called the process of extracting community benefits from ­developers through Section 37 of the Planning Act a ‘shakedown,’ yet it was reported he’d had a developer pay Section 37 funds to refurbish the dressing room of his football team. And in a refreshingly un-football-related development, he met with department managers and the deputy city manager personally to fast-track roadwork and landscaping around the property of his family business in time for the company’s 50th-anniversary celebrations. But by the time those allegations emerged, he’d already made it pretty clear, in court, that he didn’t understand where the ethical boundaries were.

  Watching Ford testify at Ontario Superior Court in early September 2012, at the hearing into the civil conflict-of-interest complaint launched by Magder, was supremely uncomfortable. He slouched in the stand next to Justice Charles Hackland in a blue suit, red-faced and pouting, his voice a fragile croak. The expansive mayor of Canada’s largest city appeared to shrink throughout the day, as two of the most famous and accomplished lawyers in Canada, Clayton Ruby and Alan Lenczner, argued his fate in terms he frequently claimed he did not understand.

  Ruby, acting for the complainant against Ford, reminded him of the oath of office he had sworn four times in ten years, solemnly promising to uphold the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. ‘What steps, if any, did you take to find out what the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act required of you?’

  ‘None,’ Ford said softly. There was then a long pause. Four, five seconds? The silence seemed to stretch on.

  ‘None?’ Ruby said. Another pause. ‘That’s your answer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ruby reminded him that the oath of office he swore as both councillor and mayor specifically contained a promise to uphold the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and that the council handbook he would have been given every single time he was elected contained information about the act, and about how to avoid conflicts of interest. Ford said he didn’t recall ever getting or seeing or reading a copy. Ruby reminded him of the councillor-orientation sessions available to help teach councillors the basics of the job – sessions that might have covered the act. Ford said that since his father had been a member of provincial parliament, he had not needed to go to any orientation.

  Had he ever asked for the free legal advice he was entitled to about conflicts? Or any legal advice? ‘I did not.’

  Ford had outlined, and would repeatedly outline, his own understanding of the Conflict of Interest Act – ‘How I define a conflict of interest is if it’s financially beneficial to the city and financially beneficial to me personally.’ Therefore, since the actions he was here to defend or explain, speaking and voting on a motion pertaining to whether he should be forced to pay a $3,150 penalty imposed on him by the integrity commissioner, had no financial implication for the city, they were not a conflict. ‘Because it doesn’t benefit the city. It has nothing to do with the city. This is my issue personally.’ Ford insisted he had held this interpretation for twelve years, and moreover he insisted that this was the correct definition.

  Ruby had Ford read the relevant passage of the act aloud in court. ‘It says nothing whatsoever about the city having a financial interest,’ Ruby suggested, and Ford appeared to acknowledge that this was the case.

  ‘I’ve never read it before,’ Ford said.

  ‘You have to have read it before! It’s the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act!’

  ‘I’ve never read it.’

  ‘I read it to you at the deposition,’ Ruby reminded him, as he started to leaf through his paperwork to find the relevant page of the transcript of that conversation from earlier this summer.

  ‘You read it to me. I’ve never read it,’ Ford said.

  A minute later, Ford repeated his understanding of the act’s contents. ‘I always thought, for twelve years, and I still believe, that a conflict is when the city has a benefit and when I have a benefit. This is a personal issue and had nothing to do with the city.’

  A little later, trying to show that Ford’s claim to always have believed his benefit-the-city/benefit-me understanding of the matter was disingenuous, Ruby played a video of Ford declaring a conflict of interest on another occasion. At that time, the matter was a report from the integrity commissioner suggesting Ford be reprimanded for an entirely different issue. There were, as laid out in the report, no financial implications from the City at all. Ford, on the video, stood at city hall and said that since the report was about him, he could not speak or vote on it, and he had to leave the chamber. He said it himself, simply and straightforwardly.

  ‘On that day, you understood the simple principle: if the report is about Rob Ford, you can’t take part in the debate, yes?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘No,’ Ford said.

  ‘I heard your voice. I heard you speak the words,’ Ruby said. ‘Did you understand the words as you were speaking?’

  ‘No,’ Ford said.

  And that sums up the gist of Ford’s bewildering testimony that day. He did not seem aware of what a conflict of interest was, or adhered to a definition that conveniently let him off the hook. When c
onfronted with inconsistencies in his own testimony, he shrugged and repeated his understanding of the conflict-of-interest laws, or claimed he couldn’t recall, or that he saw no inconsistency.

  Anyone with even a fleck of empathy in their heart felt humiliated on behalf of the mayor. I repeatedly felt the urge to translate the proceedings for him. It was not a feeling that the mayor was being treated unfairly, exactly, just a natural reaction to watching him being so thoroughly exposed. Another observer, a woman I met in the elevator, compared the experience to watching a caged animal being repeatedly stabbed with a stick, unable to escape or respond or even understand exactly what was going on.

  But at the same time, there was the perhaps more sickening realization that, however uncomfortable it was watching the mayor be subjected to this, he was the mayor. And the fact that he seemed unequipped to understand even the simplest levels of abstraction, to comprehend even the simplest pieces of terminology, to even try to learn anything about the procedures of city hall or the law or even to have prepared in any basic way for the questioning he was now undergoing was a shock to the system.

  The mayor’s own admission, to summarize the gruelling hours of testimony, was that he was – is – not just ignorant, but proudly so. That he will proceed, confidently and consistently, from a complete lack of any useful information and refuse to seek any insight or advice that will help dispel his ignorance or clarify his understanding. And that he will do so in the proud, unshakable certainty that he is correct. It wasn’t just a lack of expertise or even basic knowledge the mayor displayed, but an outright disdain for expertise and knowledge, coupled with an inability to even understand that this was the case. This was not built into the complaint against him or into Ruby’s submission. Ruby’s claim, actually, was that the mayor was being dishonest. It was the mayor’s own defence that he was not dishonest, but that he was belligerently ignorant: uninformed, unadvised, unwilling to even momentarily consider that his interpretation of things – matters he openly acknowledged he knew nothing about – were in error.

  The ethical principles involved in this case – conflict of interest and influence peddling – are important. But the complaint here also deals with cases where the harm is small and, at least in the case of Ford’s fundraising, it’s easy to see how he could make a mistake until it was brought to his attention. In any event, it seems like the kind of case that might be dealt with by a firm slap on the wrist, perhaps a fine. But the law does not allow for slaps on the wrist; the options are, essentially, no punishment at all or removal from office. If Ford was found to have violated the act, he’d automatically be removed from office unless he could show that he made a legitimate error in judgment or that the amount involved was inconsequential. Which kind of changed the view of the proceedings. There was some angry debate back and forth before the hearing. Ford supporters said it was irresponsible for his opponents to bring down the hammer over such a trivial issue (and besides, think of the youth who benefit from his football program!) and his critics thought the mayor needed to be called to account for his disregard for ethical principles (even though most that it was unfortunate that such a seemingly disproportionate penalty applied).

  I think most of us assumed he’d get out of it somehow – he’d say he was sorry, and that he misunderstood but has now changed his ways, or something. What we didn’t expect was for the mayor himself to turn it into a hearing about his own basic competency for office, and the competency – by incredibly uncomfortable implicit extension – of the city that elected him.

  In Ruby’s final submissions, he walked us through Ford’s repeated insistence that he had never read the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act or any of the many guides he’d been provided with explaining how to comply with the act, had never sought legal advice on conflicts, had no procedure in his office for trying to identify and avoid conflicts, and had at least once disregarded a friendly heads-up from a political opponent that he might be in conflict. ‘That is not good faith,’ Ruby said. ‘That is wilful ignorance.’ He went on, a little later, to say, ‘He is clearly not doing what any reasonable person would do. He is proceeding from reckless ignorance.’

  Ford sat, frowning, a few feet away. He did not visibly react to any of this. But it wasn’t apparent he even would, if inclined to display an emotion other than pouty boredom, react in the way you’d expect of someone accused of being ‘recklessly ignorant.’ Because here’s the thing: Reckless ignorance was the gist of his own defence testimony. Ruby suggested he was lying and Ford countering by saying that he was not lying, that he was just proudly ignorant – and believed he was in the right, besides.

  And this encapsulated Ford’s entire mayoral career. He claimed he could eliminate literally billions of dollars in waste – he ‘guaranteed it.’ He claimed that proposals to eliminate grants and slash funding for services and, for example, end snow removal on side streets were not ‘cuts’ but ‘efficiencies.’ On virtually every issue, this kind of thing. Wilful ignorance. Reckless indifference. He did not understand the words as he was speaking them. He had never tried to. And does not want to. This defence was far more devastating to sit through than any attack on him by an opponent.

  And even after it was all over, the legal problems continued to pile up. For a week in November, Ford was in court facing a $6 million libel trial over allegations of corruption he’d made on the campaign trail. At the same time, the results of the audit of his campaign finances was expected shortly. The city hall press gallery seemed to be spending as much time covering court proceedings (and high school football games) as they did writing about city council.

  On Sunday, November 25, the Toronto Argonauts won an upset victory in the Grey Cup, held downtown at the Rogers Centre. For a city that has often, in recent decades, simultaneously failed to win major sports championships and forgotten it even has a football team, it was a mildly joyous moment – Toronto seemed pleasantly surprised, more amused than ecstatic. Our football-fan-in-chief, however, was clearly overjoyed. Ford spent the weekend tub-thumping for the Argos and the night of the game screaming himself hoarse cheering them on.

  He would still be hoarse the next day, as the press lined up at the University Avenue courthouse to await the judgment on the conflict-of-interest case. I arrived a few minutes before it was to be delivered and found myself near the end of a queue that was more than a hundred journalists long. The judge’s decision was being faxed in, and then a clerk needed to make photocopies of it to be handed out, so the wait stretched on until after ten-thirty. In line, reporters cracked jokes about the old-fashioned technology involved – scrolls and stone tablets were invoked – and anxiously checked Twitter to see if, somehow, the decision had leaked.

  Finally the giant stack of copies arrived, and the joking stopped as we all filed quickly past the table to grab the decision. As soon as I picked it up, I began flipping through the last pages as I walked, and then saw it in plain type:

  [61] Accordingly, I declare the seat of the respondent, Robert Ford, on Toronto City Council, vacant.

  Holy shit. Rob Ford was losing his job. This was news I had half-expected, and still it was a shock.

  I began tweeting the news, typing into my smart phone as I walked and read. Hackland had suspended the ruling for two weeks to give council time to adjust, and had declined to bar Ford from running for office ‘beyond the current term’ – a point that led to immediate confusion about whether that meant he could run again for another term if a by-election was called or would have to wait out the end of the current council term in 2014. Either way, Toronto’s fever had broken – the strange mayoralty of Rob Ford was ending.

  My smart phone died then, giving me a moment to focus on reading the decision. And the more I read, the more it seemed that this story could not have ended any other way. Like Shakespearean tragedies and Greek myths, the real-life story revolved around a character whose flaws were initially perceived as assets. The same qualities that elevated Ford to power had fi
nally laid him low, and he ended where he began – an outsider shunned in the corridors of power but still beloved by the high school football players he coaches (he would leave a council meeting to coach them to a loss in the provincial championship game the very next day, and advise them, as they teared up, to hold their heads high). Ford’s career has been defined by elevating nickel-and-dime items to city-wide prominence – watering plants at city hall, serving dinner during council meetings, rented bunny suits, plastic bags that cost a nickel – so it was particularly fitting that he got removed from office due to a seemingly petty matter: a mere $3,150 in donations to be repaid.

  Hackland’s ruling laid bare in a few simple words those character traits that have defined Rob Ford’s career: the decision noted a ‘stubborn sense of entitlement,’ a ‘dismissive and confrontational attitude’ toward procedures and those who enforce them, ‘ignorance’ and a ‘lack of diligence in securing professional advice amounting to wilful blindness.’

  Those qualities are precisely what made him appear to be a scrappy and authentic outsider to voters who thought he might be what the city needed in 2010. They led him to early victories as he steamrolled council and Queen’s Park in early 2011. But it was those same qualities that inspired a citizen uprising over the budget, transit and the waterfront, that led city council to start routinely overruling him and, finally, that gave a judge no legal choice but to remove him from office. He erected a pigheaded barricade with stubborn, prideful ignorance, and manned that barricade to the very end.