Underdog (4 page)

What bothered me, virtually from the outset, was the tremendous lack of transparency in the school system and the coziness between the very entitled trustees and the bureaucrats they were charged with overseeing. Within weeks of being on the beat, I journeyed up to York Region to cover a protest by parents over a plan by the region's Catholic school board to lay off two thousand teachers in order to balance their budget. The protest took place in front of their brand new and scandalously expensive headquarters – shockingly bad optics that seemed to go right over the heads of the bureaucrats who ran the board and the trustees who rubber-stamped their decisions. It was a mild April evening, and when I pulled up, hundreds and hundreds of parents and teachers were marching in protest. The group subsequently marched inside the Catholic board's new twenty-two-million-dollar monument
to itself to attend that evening's public board meeting, only to find the meeting room doors locked and a phalanx of security guards barring entry to all. I was appalled that the trustees didn't have the guts to face their teachers and the taxpaying public head on. It was arrogant and undemocratic, and it suggested they had much to hide.

From that day forward, I promised myself that I'd force school trustees and those I started calling the “educrats” to come clean to the public who elected them. In mid-1994, I set about exposing the bloated salaries and the expensive meals at fancy restaurants and lavish junkets taken by the top brass at all Metro-area school boards – the same top officials who were crying that they had no cash for school programs and new textbooks or money to fix their facilities. As I hoped, it created such consternation and bad will among parents it forced the education brass into full damage control.

As is the case in the news business, one revelation led to another. When a group of “reform-minded trustees” decided to try to shake up the highly secretive Toronto Catholic board and shine a light on the overspending of its leaders, I was the “go-to” journalist. The group, which called itself the Sunshine Trustees, met in secret one weekend at trustee Mike Del Grande's home to discuss their concerns with their school board colleagues. Mr. Del Grande became a trusted and respected source both while at the school board and subsequently at City Hall. Whenever he called or e-mailed me with the words “I've got juicy juicies,” I knew he had something interesting to share. Mike and his fellow Sunshine Trustees were a ballsy bunch. They had their hearts in the right place and helped transform a secretive organization overseen by a not-so-benevolent dictator (education director Tony Barone).
For wanting what was best for the kids in the classroom, the Sunshine Trustees were intimidated, threatened, and even accused of not being Christian.

But it was always the same story with the entrenched school board bureaucrats and trustees. The kids were forever their lowest priority. Perquisites and power came first, and appeasing the teachers' unions and other special interests second. Little wonder there was limited money left to buy new textbooks and other resources for the classroom. Sadly, now, having recently delved back into affairs at the highly dysfunctional Toronto District School Board (TDSB) as an investigative journalist, I can vouch that not much has changed in the past twenty years. If anything, it has probably gotten worse. A shocking two thirds of the current TDSB is comprised of left-leaning trustees, many of whom could not have won their wards without heavy financial and campaign support from a variety of teacher and staff unions or the very public backing of an NDP city councillor. Take downtown trustee Ausma Malik, who captured her ward despite a checkered past that included being a keynote speaker at a pro-Hezbollah, anti-Israel “peace” rally in front of the U.S. consulate in July 2006. She had NDP councillors Mike Layton and Joe Cressy shilling for her when her questionable past came out, accusing those who dared criticize her – including me – of being Islamophobic. The unions are no better. They are well known to target certain wards where they'd want to take out a fiscally conservative trustee. Just ask former trustees Elizabeth Moyer or Mari Rutka, both of whom were bullied by the administration and then toppled in the October 2014 school board elections by heavily union-backed and NDP-leaning trustees. To try to silence Ms. Moyer before she lost her seat, several
members of the TDSB administration, I believe, cooked up an accusation that she'd sexually harassed two (male) bureaucrats. And what did Ms. Moyer and Ms. Rutka do to deserve this scandalous treatment? They both dared to bring to light the board's many fiscal issues and stood up to the former board's education director, Donna Quan, now shuffled off with a $600,000 package, by the Liberal government to a cozy gig within the education ministry. Naturally the unions, who expect their quid pro quo, are now calling the shots. The TDSB's collective inability to close underused and costly schools (a decision that could cost a few teachers their jobs) is proof of how beholden the trustees are to the unions.

The bullying and intimidation filters down from the top. For all their talk and the money school board bureaucrats and trustees have spent on anti-bullying campaigns, I am forever amazed at how many school principals and superintendents – right up to the top of the org chart – have tried to bully into submission or ignore parents who dare speak up, hoping they'll give up and go away. That continues to this day. I realized this when I wrote in March 2014 about the case of fourteen-year-old Mylissa Black, who'd been bullied for four years at her Scarborough public school – despite repeated efforts by her parents to get some resolution to the problem. The school board brass ignored their repeated calls, the principal did very little, the trustee was MIA, and the bullying continued until I did a story about it. And then there were the lousy teachers. Even with a College of Teachers and a formal complaints process in place, it is almost impossible to get rid of a bad teacher unless sexual assault, violence, or criminal acts are involved. It is well known in the system that the incompetent, the verbally abusive, and even the
physically abusive ones are just quietly shuffled from school to school.

During my time as the
Sun
's education beat reporter, I met many devoted teachers who just wanted to be left alone to teach and wanted nothing to do with the politics and the activism of their unions. But I also saw the deadwood – those who continued to teach almost by rote and felt no shame bringing their political views into the classroom, rather than retiring and freeing up a spot for someone with fresh ideas and a passion for the profession. I saw the deadwood at Queen's Park during the province-wide teaching strike (against then premier Mike Harris in 1997) and sadly, I still see the same kind of whiners protesting today against the possibility of not getting a raise, or being required to account for their sick days, or having their preparation time better controlled. I was shocked to see the uber-militancy among the teachers in the crowd at an Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) conference in August 2015. There was much talk from the entitled ones about “solidarity,” as they protested for their rights and for fairness, but almost no talk about the kids, whom they hold ransom whenever the provincial government doesn't give them what they think they are due. It doesn't matter which government is in power: the teachers' unions love to play one against the other to see who gives them the most.

THE TRUSTEES – PARTICULARLY THOSE IN TORONTO
– often use the school board as a stepping stone to enter municipal politics, and whenever they succeed they repeat the same patterns of mismanagement and overspending. It was a natural move for me to go from reporting on the school boards to covering Toronto
City Hall. But when I was asked if I would go to City Hall in 1998, I didn't see the link and wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea. I thought I'd be bored covering stories on garbage collection, water rates, road construction, and city planning. Because of my political background and my experience working for the province in the 1980s, I thought the Queen's Park beat would be more interesting. But my time at City Hall turned out to be fifteen years of incredible career and personal growth. I never forgot the advice of one of my mentors and a
Toronto Sun
founder, the late and perennially politically incorrect Bob MacDonald, who told me to get to know the real people who made City Hall tick, and not to run with the pack. From very nearly the day I began there, I was determined not to rely on the “party line” from the mayor's office or from the city's top bureaucrats, who knew that if they played the game well and waited it out, they could outlast any change in political leadership.

I took Mr. MacDonald's advice and got to know the people on the frontlines, and very well. I was interested not only in understanding how they did their jobs but in hearing directly from them what it was like to work in what I considered a top-heavy, bloated bureaucracy. The fact is, I like getting my hands dirty and hanging out with those who do, not with the rather drab bureaucrats who fill the offices of City Halls everywhere. I did a ride-along in the back of an ambulance, a stinky shift on a hot August day on a garbage truck, and another with a fire crew in heavy gear on a sweltering night in August. I rode with the bike cops down dark alleys off Toronto's Yonge Street, looking for drug dealers. The clerks in charge of the various City Hall committees became my friends and confidants. We met for coffee and shared
the latest gossip and personal milestones. When dear senior clerk Patsy Morris died of cancer at fifty-nine in the fall of 2011, we stood together at her grave mourning the loss of a trusted friend. The security guards were also my friends, ordinary people doing their jobs who knew everything that was going on.

I felt like I had nothing to lose, and hence it came naturally for me to ask unpopular questions, and to be willing to investigate a politician and then confront that politician the very same day my story appeared. It was as if I was making up for lost time. I loved – not too strong a word – taking on councillors and highly placed bureaucrats; the CUPE unions; the firefighters; the thin blue line and their thin-skinned chief, now-retired and Liberal MP Bill Blair; socialist mayor David Miller; the hateful Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) element that invaded the Pride Parade; the intolerant left; and any element of government waste that dearly cost taxpayers.

My job allowed me to become the voice for residents who'd been intimidated by the city and by politicians who'd abused their power. I championed openness and transparency in budgeting and fought against wasteful spending on everything from councillor office budgets to pet projects like the late Jack Layton's plan to build pre-fab housing costing fifty thousand dollars per unit for the 110 squatters living illegally on contaminated lands bordering Lake Ontario. Mr. Layton's and council's lack of political will to deal with Tent City squatters for years – until the encampment grew virtually out of control – earned Toronto an unflattering article in the
New York Times
in June 2002. Even with this wake-up call, it took the politicians three months to get up the nerve to turf the squatters from their campsite.

I tackled sacred cows like the billion-dollar revitalization of Canada's largest social housing project – Regent Park. My three-month investigation revealing that the poor had largely been kicked out of the community to make way for rich speculators and friends of the developer earned me a Sun Media investigative reporting award – and the wrath of left-of-centre media colleagues, who after my stories appeared took turns attempting to discredit my research and prop up the developer, Mitch Cohen of Daniels Corp. Like the poverty pimps who preyed on the poor and homeless, developers were largely considered off-limits for the media at City Hall.

My attempts to hold politicians' feet to the fire earned me a long list of left-of-centre councillors who refused to take my calls and openly bragged about it – Kyle Rae, Paula Fletcher, Janet Davis, Adam Vaughan, Joe Mihevc, Maria Augimeri, Sandra Bussin, and Howard Moscoe to name just a few. But this didn't stop me from pursuing them every time I had a story on them. I often joked that it was a good thing I took up running since I could often be seen chasing more than one politician and six-figure bureaucrat across the council floor or out of a committee room for a comment.

Mr. Rae was perhaps one of the best examples of a councillor notorious for trying to intimidate me into silence. Aside from the fact that by the time I got to City Hall, bullying attempts just made me more intent on pursuing a story or stories, for much of the time I was on the municipal beat, I was living in Yorkville. Mr. Rae was my councillor and I was very troubled by his attempts to put skyscrapers on every corner of what was once a charming neighbourhood of three-storey buildings and upscale shops. The residents' associations with which I was connected fought vociferously
against his attempts to “Manhattanize” Yorkville. It was an uphill battle. Mr. Rae was well known to be beholden to the many developers who were building the condo projects. All they had to do was donate the maximum amount to his election campaigns and their approvals sailed through the City Hall approval process. One project that was particularly contentious was the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto – a Menkes project – which included two towers of forty-six and thirty storeys containing both hotel rooms and pricey condos. No one was against the revitalization of the top of Bay Street, and the project is impressive, but at ten times the density rules, it set a terrible precedent for Yorkville. When I approached Mr. Rae during the council debate on the project in 2006 to question him about why he was ramming it through despite very public neighbourhood opposition, he went ballistic. He took the floor and alleged to everyone at the meeting that I had accused him of taking bribes. I had done nothing of the sort, but I suppose by denouncing me publicly, he thought I'd be censured, or intimidated into silence. When that tactic didn't work, Mr. Rae seemed to set out from that day forward to try to make my life at City Hall as difficult as possible. He called my editor whenever I tried to do a story on him, refused to come out of his office each time I endeavoured to interview him for an issue, and was heard regularly to make snippy and bitchy remarks about my weight (considering he battled his own pudginess, that was particularly ironic) and my integrity, or lack thereof. When I finally came out publicly in 2007 and Councillor Doug Holyday asked him what he thought of my revelations, Rae snipped that I may be a lesbian, but I'm a “bad” lesbian.