Underdog (10 page)

By the middle of 2015, it had become clear that the Wynne government – desperately trying to manage an eleven-billion-dollar deficit that had nowhere to go but up because they couldn't stop spending – had developed a lingo all of their own to try to seduce the masses into thinking they
had their hands firmly on the tiller. My favourites were that promises they'd made were “stretch goals” and their contention that each deal they made – whether selling Ontario's Hydro One at a loss or inking a contract with the province's entitled teachers – had a net-zero fiscal impact on taxpayers. They tried to imply that the teachers' unions gave up something to get the 2.5 per cent raise handed to them over two years, which I can guarantee you did not happen. The unions have a history of giving up nothing, particularly with the Liberals in power. They must think we are all blooming idiots. How the hell can giving every teacher in the province a raise
not
cost hundreds of millions of dollars? I'll tell you where the money will come from: it will come out of classroom supplies, maintenance, and school operations. It is clear to me that Ms. Wynne couldn't care less how much she impoverishes the classroom or Ontario schools, as long as her teacher pals are happy.

Given the premier's almost obsessive efforts to keep a lid on any and all controversy (can we say “gas plant e-mails”?), I was not surprised in the slightest that the release of the behind-the-scenes documentary done on her by White Pine Pictures was blocked by her office for months and months. A somewhat watered-down version of
Premier: The Unscripted Kathleen Wynne
was finally shown in October of 2015. Despite the edits clearly at her direction, it still came across loud and clear who is really running the show in this province: her aggressive wife Jane Rounthwaite, whom Ms. Wynne trots everywhere. I know what Ms. Wynne is all about. She may be a lesbian, but I shudder to think that this kind of lesbian is a role model for other women – gay or straight – in politics.
Every time anyone cozies up to her or lauds her for being openly gay, I want to shout that she's the furthest thing from being open, respectful, tolerant, or empathetic of the poor, the old, and those who are suffering. Her last name is very appropriate. For Ms. Wynne it's all about winning and power, nothing more, nothing less.

In 2012, I was asked by the
Sun
to follow the money on the one-billion-dollar revitalization of the Regent Park social housing development in downtown Toronto. Billed as the most ambitious revitalization in Canada, all of the initial legwork on the six-phase project had been carried on for the previous six years under the direction of a CEO, a management team, and a board that ended up leaving in 2011 after serious purchasing and spending irregularities were revealed by Toronto's intrepid auditor general, Jeff Griffiths.

While tenants were living in squalor – having been told there was not nearly enough money to fix their often decrepit units – Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) brass enjoyed $50,000 Christmas parties attended by 800 staff, $6,000 “bonding” sessions in Muskoka, and $1,925 planning
meetings at a Toronto spa, where they availed themselves of mani-pedis and other such services at taxpayer expense. Mr. Griffiths also highlighted purchasing irregularities in a $5-million sole-sourced contract with China for fixtures, flooring, toilets, sinks, and solar panels. But that was merely the tip of the iceberg. Through the diligent digging of Councillor Mike Del Grande, a chartered accountant by training, it was revealed that the same players were also entrusted with a $75-million handout from Mayor David Miller in 2009, which was supposed to help alleviate TCHC's $750-million backlog. But they promptly squandered $41.4 million of it on high-risk stock market investments, and it took the persistent digging of Mr. Del Grande to discover it two years later. The TCHC board had either not cared or had turned a blind eye to the high-stakes investment strategy. It wasn't just that the TCHC brass performed an act that was unacceptably risky, considering they are only supposed to invest their reserves in bonds or highly risk-averse equities. They also tried to bury the loss in their audited statements.

To make matters worse, the whistleblower – Mr. Del Grande – was berated by TCHC board member Paula Fletcher for having the temerity to read through the audited statements and ask questions on the losses. She stood up at council and called his questioning the “Spanish Inquisition,” claiming dramatically that Mr. Del Grande had put TCHC officials “on the rack in the 1400s.” Her ridiculous attempt at trying to silence him only proved the lengths she and her fellow board members, who'd also ignored the TCHC culture of entitlement, would go to cover their tracks.

No wonder. It was all so neat and cozy. It did not come as the least bit surprising to me – given what I'd observed about
the leftist politicians on council and how they flushed public money down the drain on their self-serving pet agendas and on their own perks – that most of the brass overseeing these disgraceful and highly negligent acts were NDP supporters. Yet this was the very group that continually presented itself as champions of the downtrodden. It made me absolutely sick to realize that while those politicians, bureaucrats, and media types who aligned either with the far left or the left-of-centre Liberals politically made a great show of being the voice of the poor, it seems most couldn't have cared less how they treated these people. Let's start with NDPers Paula Fletcher and Olivia Chow, who were on the TCHC board during the David Miller era and clearly sat on their hands as the brass they were charged with overseeing took care of themselves and let tenants live in squalor. I saw CEO Derek Ballantyne driving into the City Hall garage in his late-model Audi wagon many times for one meeting or another, where he would – in an arrogant tone of voice – talk about his grandiose visions for TCHC while the repair backlog kept climbing and climbing to $750 million. That's not to criticize Mr. Ballantyne's choice of cars to drive, but I sized him up as one of those champagne socialists who would rarely, if ever, lower himself to leave his Rosedale office to mingle with Jane-Finch residents, and who saw the housing portfolio as merely a means to an end – his end being moving to yet another six-figure social housing job or making money as a consultant off the backs of the poor. None of this mattered to the NDP set, who lauded him for his great vision – so much so that he was handed the Jane Jacobs prize in 2009 by a group called Ideas that Matter. (I don't suppose it mattered to them either that Mr. Ballantyne wasn't doing a darn thing to improve the quality of life of
his tenants by repairing their dilapidated homes – except to whine that all levels of government needed to cough up ever more money that could be squandered.)

Former councillor Adam Vaughan, a nasty journalist turned politician and another alleged champion of the downtrodden, was a prominent member of the NDP until 2015 when he ran for the federal Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau – hedging his bets that the Liberals would be more likely to win a majority and he'd end up with a cabinet post (they did, but he didn't). Mr. Vaughan is never one to miss an opportunity. Nevertheless, when Mr. Griffiths released his damning report on TCHC, Mr. Vaughan aimed his vitriol not at the housing officials who were taking care of themselves instead of their poor clients, but at Mr. Griffiths, for heaven's sake.

Right in lock-step was the left-wing media – the
Toronto Star
in particular – who made and continue to make it all too easy for these NDP supporters to get away with what they do. When Mr. Ballantyne left his sinecure at Build Toronto following the serious spending, investment, and procurement irregularities that occurred under his watch at TCHC (he had left TCHC for Build Toronto by the time Mr. Griffiths' report came to light),
Toronto Star
reporter Dave Rider started his story with “Celebrated until recently as a public housing ‘genius,' Derek Ballantyne finds his reputation in tatters as the latest casualty of the Toronto Community Housing Corp. spending scandal.” Mr. Rider seemed to imply that Mr. Ballantyne's reputation was in tatters because somebody else – most likely Rob Ford, considering it was the
Toronto Star –
created his problems. It probably didn't hurt that Mr. Ballantyne was by then keeping company with
Toronto Star
editorial writer
Kerry Gillespie, who had quoted Mr. Ballantyne in her stories about Regent Park ten years earlier.

Mr. Toronto Housing himself,
Toronto Star
columnist Joe Fiorito, a one-trick pony who spent much of his time finding the TCHC weeper of the week, depicted Dipper and long-time councillor Maria Augimeri as a heroine for wanting to stay on the housing authority board when then Mayor Rob Ford tried to clean house as one way to make changes after the spending scandal.

It has become clear to me over the years during which I've investigated these abuses that there is one common theme: the social housing agencies are run largely by the same group of industry insiders who, after messing up and treating themselves to the spoils at one non-profit agency, simply coast to the next cozy sinecure, ensuring they negotiate themselves contracts that provide extravagant severance clauses. At best they are dreamers who don't have the first clue how to operate a going concern in an efficient manner without a massive influx of public cash; at worst they are motivated by self-aggrandizement. Take as a prime example disgraced TCHC CEO Keiko Nakamura, who was forced out in 2011 for allowing the spending abuses revealed by Mr. Griffiths to occur under her watch. She walked away with a $320,000 severance package and promptly landed at Goodwill Industries, where she made $230,538 in salary and taxable benefits in 2014 – more than she'd made at TCHC before she left! In January 2016, Ms. Nakamura stood in front of the media crying the same tears I saw five years earlier at TCHC as she blamed the difficult retail landscape for forcing her suddenly to shut down sixteen Goodwill stores and ten donation centres, leaving
430 employees without jobs. A few weeks later, under a cloud of secrecy, Ms. Nakamura filed for bankruptcy.

With this culture of deceit and entitlement as a backdrop, my task on the Regent Park story was to trace the purchases of a series of condos in the first two high-rise buildings by members of the project's management team. The condo buyers in question included former TCHC CEO Derek Ballantyne and his partner Kerry Gillespie, then a member of the
Toronto Star
editorial board (who'd presumably met Mr. Ballantyne while covering the social housing beat a few years before); the well-entrenched developer Mitch Cohen of Daniels Corp. and some of his management team; and the long-time local councillor responsible for pushing through the heavily subsidized development, Pam McConnell. With the help of my dear friend real estate lawyer Martin Gladstone and a private investigator working with me on the story, I discovered through a search of sales records on file with the Ontario Land Registry Office that all of these insiders had bought in on the ground floor of an investment that had nowhere to go but up. Initial buyers are probably looking at increases of 30 per cent or more in value. Indeed, how could that not happen, given Toronto's ongoing housing boom? The fifteen-year gentrification of Canada's oldest and largest social housing project, located just east of Toronto's downtown core, aimed to transform it from an isolated community of decrepit war-torn houses and apartment blocks where drug dealers and crime was rampant to a mixed-use socialist Utopia. This Utopia would contain three thousand units of spanking-new upscale market-value condos, a bank and grocery store, a Tim Hortons, an aquatic complex, a park, and the Regent
Park Arts and Cultural Centre. The poor would be living cheek by jowl with the more upwardly mobile.

Or would they? Figuring where there's smoke there's fire, and knowing full well that the same players who left TCHC management and the board the previous year had their paw prints all over this project, I was not content to simply investigate the condo purchases alone. I realized very early on that my investigation would be an uphill battle. TCHC was a highly secretive organization, so secretive that even the names of employees were not listed either online or in any sort of publicly accessible place. This lack of transparency was deliberate and, sadly, it continues to this day. The pompous TCHC brass, most of them champagne socialists if there ever were such a thing, seemed not to believe for a minute that they had to be the slightest bit responsive or accountable to tenants, or to the public and the media, who for the most part let them get away with it. The TCHC brass exerted their power over the tenants, many of them down on their luck, vulnerable, and not terribly sophisticated about their rights. Most of the information about the Regent Park project – and it was extremely limited – was contained on the TCHC website or from Ms. McConnell herself in a series of highly sanitized, self-promotional press releases. Over three months, investigating the Regent Park deal became a crusade for me. I was determined to find out where the public dollars were going, if taxpayers were in fact getting the best value for their money, and who was truly being served by the development – the poor who were supposed to be recipients, or the more upwardly mobile.

Hampered by my inability to get around easily (I had broken my ankle just as I started on the assignment), I spent many
long hours at my computer researching condo values and the sales history of the Regent Park condos from 2009 to 2012, and trying to trace the history of the development itself, the City's approval process, how the Daniels Corp. came to be involved, and Mitch Cohen's career in the affordable housing development business. Mr. Cohen called himself “the developer with a heart,” which raised a big red flag. It felt like I was peeling away the layers of an onion, as one tidbit of information led to yet another. Unlike the
Toronto Star,
for example, which is well known for pouring tremendous resources (staff teams and big budgets) into its investigative projects to further its agenda or to win National Newspaper Awards, I was a team of one who had to be creative about doing research and about how I spent the paper's money on that research. To get a feel for what units would have been available to Ms. McConnell and other purchasers, I asked a real estate agent friend of mine to take me to see a few of the condos listed for sale in the same building where Ms. McConnell had purchased her prime south-facing 1,200-square-foot corner unit with its wraparound balcony from which she could wave to her loyal (and poor) subjects. Because I only had apartment numbers for the purchasers, I enlisted Martin Gladstone to help me obtain the title search documents from the Land Registry Office, plus the registered floor plans pinpointing where each condo would be located and its square footage, along with the parking spots assigned to each owner.

To try to discern whether the purchasers had a conflict of interest, I spent hours searching online city reports to trace the timing of Ms. McConnell's involvement advocating for the development in city council and how the various development companies for each Regent Park phase were structured.
Ms. McConnell never once raised the issue of conflict of interest when she advocated for the project, before, during, or after her purchase because she didn't think there was one. That is just how business seemed to be done at City Hall. I also discovered by reviewing the MPAC tax rolls that the developer's various companies, as well as Mr. Cohen and his chief lieutenants on the project, purchased a total of eighteen condos in three of the first market-value condo buildings. Yet when confronted in the final days before the stories appeared, Ms. McConnell admonished me for daring to ask her about the conflict or even suggesting there might be a perception of one. She behaved as if I was out to get her, claiming my questions were very “typical” of me (she was right on both counts!). The developer maintained that by purchasing so many suites they were just expressing “confidence” in the revitalization, as they did with other development projects – clearly not understanding or caring that this project was being built with one billion dollars in public money, tax, and development concessions, and that the rules were different. Mr. Cohen's front man on the project, Daniels Corp. VP Martin Blake, contradicted himself in a subsequent interview by saying that 100 per cent of the first four buildings were completely sold out. My review of sales data for the first two market-value condo buildings also showed that 10 per cent of them had flipped in the first year at prices up to 20 per cent higher than the original investment.