Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (20 page)

The pair headed to City Hall to sign out the Ford campaign’s thick stack of financial records. They sat at a small wooden table in the clerk’s office and spent two hours rifling through pages of receipts, invoices, time sheets, donor records, and official paperwork, and checked them against the monthly spreadsheets. They researched the Municipal Elections Act and realized what they were dealing with: penalties for some of the alleged offences included
removal from office. Neither of these rabble-rousers thought that would ever happen, but it could generate some headlines.

In May 2011, Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Reed submitted their findings to the compliance audit committee, a panel of three citizen experts. To the immense annoyance of the mayor, the three-member panel voted unanimously to audit Ford’s campaign expenses.

Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Reed ended up filing eight other audit requests against four councillors—including Doug Ford for his councillor campaign, a request that the compliance audit committee rejected—and four unelected candidates. The duo’s work inspired them to co-found the accountability watchdog Fair Elections Toronto.

ON JULY 13, 2011
, two months after filing the audit requests, Chaleff-Freudenthaler was at City Hall to watch a council meeting. He had just finished chatting with a councillor near the entrance to the council chamber and was making his way to the elevator when an angry Doug Ford spotted him.

“Hey, you’re the guy with the audits,” Doug said. Chaleff-Freudenthaler just stood there, startled. “Well, buddy, [you] better make sure you get your facts right.”

Chaleff-Freudenthaler tried to walk away, but Doug kept at him, demanding to know if he was the person launching all the campaign audits. Chaleff-Freudenthaler said he was.

“What goes around comes around,” Doug said.

“[Are you] threatening me?” Chaleff-Freudenthaler asked.

The councillor seemed to realize he had crossed a line. He turned and walked away.

Chaleff-Freudenthaler, true to form, responded. He wrote a letter to the integrity commissioner in which he accused the mayor’s brother of violating the Code of Conduct for members of council. “All members of Council have a duty to treat members of the public, one another, and staff appropriately and without abuse, bullying or intimidation, and to ensure that their work environment is free from discrimination and harassment,” the Code of Conduct reads. Six months later, on January 30, 2012, Integrity Commissioner Janet Leiper concluded that the mayor’s brother should formally apologize. It was one of those little Ford sideshows that gets a lot of attention on Twitter. But something much more serious came out of the integrity commissioner’s office that day. Something that would set off a chain of events that, briefly, cost Rob Ford his job.

The same day Leiper slapped Doug Ford on the wrist, essentially for his aggressiveness, she released a separate report reprimanding the mayor. In a meeting in August 2010, at the integrity commissioner’s request, city council had ordered Councillor Rob Ford to repay the $3,150 in donations he had solicited from lobbyists for his football foundation. Over the next thirteen months Leiper contacted Ford six times to see if this had been done. Ford finally responded in late October 2011 with letters from three donors indicating they didn’t want their money back. Leiper was not impressed. She wanted to bring the issue back up at the next council meeting and demand Ford “provide proof of reimbursement” by the beginning of March 2012. But there was one big difference between the council meeting in August 2010 and the one coming up in February 2012. Rob Ford was now the mayor.

It’s important to note that the City of Toronto has a fraught
history with lobbyists. In the aftermath of the MFP computer leasing scandal, a public inquiry revealed that city officials were being wined and dined—with lavish dinners, golf games, expensive hockey tickets—by MFP salesman Dash Domi, the brother of hockey star Tie Domi, the famous Toronto Maple Leaf. Madam Justice Denise Bellamy concluded that there had been “inappropriately close relationships” between lobbyists and public office holders. As noted earlier, MFP is the reason Toronto now has an integrity commissioner and strict rules about accepting gifts from lobbyists. That’s why Ford was sanctioned in the first place.

At the February 7 council meeting, Doug Ford was up first with item CC16.5, his forced apology to Chaleff-Freudenthaler. The young activist was watching in the chamber’s upper decks near the media. Doug grimaced as he stood up. He spoke directly to the speaker. “Just so this won’t continue on and it won’t drag out forever and ever and ever … I apologize if I acted unparliamentary. If I offended the complainant. Doug Ford apologizes.” The room applauded. Chaleff-Freudenthaler felt two hundred pairs of eyes on him—although none belonged to Doug Ford— and was eager for the moment to be over.

Now it was Rob’s turn, item CC16.6, which concerned his refusal to repay $3,150 in lobbyist donations.

“I want to explain how my charity works, because I think a lot of people don’t understand it. I—and it’s not about me, this is about kids, more specifically teenagers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—I’m very, very passionate about helping these kids. And I will do anything for these kids. And my foundation was set up to help these kids play football. And it’s not— We don’t pay coaches, we don’t pay gas, we don’t pay food.
It goes for the football equipment itself. And it costs about four hundred dollars to outfit one player.… So a team starts off with about fifty kids. So therefore fifty times four hundred, you’re looking at twenty thousand dollars. I go approach the school, any school.… If you wanna start a football team, I will pay between five thousand and ten thousand dollars to help you out.”

He continued, rhyming off twelve schools in eleven different wards that had received seed money from his program. His football work extended well beyond the boundaries of Etobicoke. The implication seemed clear for the councillors with Ford-sponsored teams in their areas: if you vote against me, you’re going to have angry parents knocking on your door.

“Folks, everybody I see I talk about my foundation. The money goes directly to the Toronto Community Foundation”—a not-for-profit agency that handles the collection and distribution of donors’ money so that they can get tax receipts—“I don’t touch the money … [the TCF] cuts a cheque. I do not sign the cheques. I have nothing to do with the money.… If there’s anything that’s more clear and above board, I don’t know what this is. And it’s the kids—and it goes on. There’s so many stories about the kids that have [come] out of these football programs. It would bring tears to your eyes.”

Ford argued that his foundation kept children in school, attracted post-secondary scholarships, and sometimes paved the way to a professional football career.

“If it wasn’t for this foundation, these kids would not have had a chance. So, and then to ask for me to pay it out of my own pocket personally? There’s just no sense to this. The money is gone. The money’s been spent on football equipment.… At the end of the day, I’ll leave it up to you. I’m gonna continue
coaching. I’m gonna continue to help kids. I’m gonna continue to fundraise. And my goal is to get a high school football team in every single school in the city. And we’re well on our way.… I’ve fundraised probably close to a hundred thousand dollars in the last few years. I don’t know how much, what else, I can say. It’s crystal clear.”

It was an argument that resonated—and not just with Ford Nation. It was easy to overlook the principle that politicians shouldn’t ask lobbyists for favours, because, well, the money went to help kids in poor neighbourhoods play football. What was the harm in that? The majority of council certainly didn’t see any. They voted 22–12 to rescind Leiper’s earlier sanction. The only problem was, one of those twenty-two was Rob Ford. Not only did he speak to a motion that directly benefited him, he voted on it.

Watching from his seat in the public gallery, Chaleff-Freudenthaler thought this was wrong. A lawyer he knew called a few days later with a tip: it wasn’t just wrong what Ford had done, it might be illegal. So what would you do if you were Chaleff-Freudenthaler and thought public officials were flouting the rules? You’d call up Max Reed, your lawyer friend, find a copy of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, discover that elected officials who broke the rules were automatically removed from office, and recruit a high-profile lawyer to take the case.

Clayton Ruby was their first pick. Ruby was one of Canada’s most respected attorneys and an expert in constitutional law, with a history of taking on high-profile cases pro bono. He was also already involved with Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Reed’s Fair Elections Toronto. Reed fired him off a two-page summary of
the case and the relevant sections of the act. Was he interested? The reply was simply, “Yes.”

THE MEDIA-SAVVY
Chaleff-Freudenthaler thought that, given his role with the compliance audit, it would be better if he and Reed watched this show from backstage. (He also didn’t want a judge to see his name, learn about the audit, and think the case was politically motivated.) He recruited an old family friend named Paul Magder to be the Joe Citizen face of the lawsuit. Magder had helped on Chaleff-Freudenthaler’s school board trustee campaign. He was a well-read, soft-spoken fifty-seven-year-old who managed an electronics manufacturing lab outside Toronto. The married father of two grown children had dabbled in civic activism just once before. The previous September, Magder filed a complaint with Toronto’s lobbyist registrar concerning Doug Ford’s botched waterfront takeover. Magder complained that the mayor’s brother had met privately with an Australian shopping-mall developer without properly documenting the meeting. (This requirement is another by-product of the MFP scandal.) The matter was dropped when the company belatedly registered the meeting.

When it came time for the press conference on March 12, 2012, Magder stood by awkwardly in a light-grey sweater vest, mostly staring at the carpet, while the eloquent Clayton Ruby laid out the mayor’s offences, punctuating each point with a jab of his pen.

“You can’t, as a city councillor, speak to a motion, vote on a motion, that benefits you personally,” Ruby said, standing in front of a four-foot sign that played on Ford’s campaign slogan: “Respect Taxpayers, Respect the Law.”

Yes, the act was strict, Ruby said, but it was strict for good reason. “Because if you don’t catch conflict of interest [on] the small things—and this is not that small—there’s a real danger that you will, in fact, encourage corruption on a wider scale.” As a veteran councillor, Rob Ford should have known better, Ruby said. “‘I’m sorry’ is not enough. It doesn’t get you off the hook for a minute.”

The media turned to Magder. Who was he, and why was he involved? “I’m fed up with all the stuff I see going on in politics, basically,” he said.

BY THE SPRING OF 2012
, Rob Ford was fighting for his job on two fronts. He was embroiled in one court case about his election expenses, and at the same time in another case about a possible conflict of interest.

Now, a third legal battle was making its way to court.

During the election campaign, city council had voted to extend the lease and exclusive vending rights of a waterfront restaurant for twenty years without taking outside bids. Technically, council had agreed to do this three years earlier, against staff’s advice. City bureaucrats wanted to put the Boardwalk Pub’s lucrative deal out to tender, but council had a soft spot for the father-andsons operation. The Foulidis family had secured the rights along Toronto’s eastern beach back in the 1980s. They had mortgaged their homes to finance construction and laid most of the bricks themselves. If another company—say a multinational restaurant chain—won the bid, the family would be forced out of their business, which was built on city parkland. Council voted with its heart, not its head, to extend the lease.

But by 2010, the agreement still hadn’t been signed. The city and the restaurant owners—their company was registered as Tuggs Inc.—were still haggling over the annual rent. Critics saw an opportunity to reopen the deal. It was a good issue for councillors looking to get their name in the paper. Many beach-going Torontonians had a beef with the Boardwalk Pub. Being a seasonal operation, the prices were higher. People liked to gripe about the food. But the main issue was political. During the first extension vote in 2007, the local councillor at the time, Sandra Bussin—the council speaker and a close ally of Mayor David Miller—spoke on the Foulidises’ behalf. Her political enemies in the ward pounced. They pointed out that members of the family had contributed to her campaign. It was common for businesses to donate to the local councillor’s re-election efforts, but not every business operated with exclusivity rights that banned little girls from selling lemonade on a hot summer day. Not that the Foulidises were shutting down lemonade stands, but that was one of the wild rumours going around. Soon, some people had the (wrong) idea that they weren’t allowed to bring their own food to the beach. Despite the bad press, the Boardwalk Pub was able to keep its deal in a 21–14 vote.

The lease extension might have been settled, but the Foulidises’ problems were just getting started. The fiasco was a perfect issue for the Ford campaign. Wasted money, the taint of campaign donations, a lefty maybe behaving badly, and— bonus—the public already angry. Rob Ford made a pledge to stop sole-sourced contracts. In July of 2010, he took it a step further. When asked by Newstalk 1010 radio host Jerry Agar if he believed anyone was getting money under the table, Rob
replied, “I truly believe they are, and that’s my personal opinion, and when I see all these donations, going through campaigns, it stinks to high heaven.”

The following month, the
Toronto Sun
ran a front-page story with the headline “Council ‘Corrupt.’” The story, by Jonathan Jenkins, began, “City council’s decision to award an untendered, 20-year contract to Boardwalk Pub operator Tuggs Inc. smacks of civic corruption, Councillor Rob Ford says. ‘If Tuggs isn’t, then I don’t know what is,’ Ford told the
Toronto Sun
’s editorial board. ‘I can’t accuse anyone or I can’t pinpoint it, but why do we have to go in camera on the Tuggs deal? These in-camera meetings, there’s more corruption and skullduggery going on in there than I’ve ever seen in my life.’”