Underdog (9 page)

Aggressive panhandling was another untouchable subject in the city of Toronto. When the problem first became an issue under Mayor Mel Lastman, he claimed there was nothing he could do, even though the province's Safe Streets Act was already well in place. All he had to do was instruct the Toronto police to beef up enforcement. But he didn't have the guts to do so and the problem got worse. Obviously he was scared of how it would look politically if the cops were actually allowed to do their job and fine those who committed crimes, sometimes quite aggressively. When in 2006 a gutsy councillor and mayoralty candidate, Jane Pitfield, had the temerity to try to legislate an anti-panhandling bylaw – similar to one being used in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Moncton, Fredericton, and Montreal – she was harassed and threatened to the point of nearly being terrorized by the anti-poverty activists. In the spring of 2006, members of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee led by homelessness activist Cathy Crowe, a group I came to call the poverty pimps, would repeatedly show up to the city's homelessness advisory committee – headed by Ms. Pitfield – and try to hijack the proceedings by screaming and shouting insults at the councillor. They also made a show of attempting to oust Ms. Pitfield as co-chair. When that didn't work, they boycotted the committee's final two meetings. The NDPers on council – in particular former councillor and world-champion trougher Howard Moscoe – pandered to Ms. Crowe and her friends, and the idea of banning panhandling in Toronto quickly fell by the wayside. Instead, the Millerites put in place a feel-good, politically correct five-million-dollar-a-year plan, for which an army of social workers
were hired to get to the root causes of problem panhandling and to try to cajole beggars off the streets. That plan exists to this day and now costs more than six-million dollars. Judging from the number of panhandlers on the streets of downtown Toronto and other points beyond the downtown core, the program has proven to be an exercise in futility – just as I expected it would be.

As I was to discover in the fall of 2013, the senior brass of TO2015 – the group engaged to organize the 2015 Pan Am Games – made an attempt to put in place their own peculiar brand of tolerance and inclusivity. It started in 2011, when former CEO Ian Troop (who was ousted in 2013 following my front-page exclusive on spending abuses by the entire TO2015 senior management team) announced with great fanfare that diversity would be adopted as a standard practice in the day-to-day business of the games. “All of our procedures and decision-making criteria will embrace diversity, from how we purchase goods and services to how we hire employees and recruit volunteers,” Troop said at the time. Lo and behold, when various would-be suppliers went online to register with the games' database, they were required to declare whether theirs was a diverse business – meaning they had to report whether their business was 51 per cent owned and operated by women, visible minorities, Aboriginals, disabled people, or members of the LGBT population.

What in god's name does diversity have to with the business of selling, say, hotdogs, T-shirts, stuffed animals, bobble-heads, and soccer balls? After I took up one man's case (a white guy selling ribs), Pan Am officials, appropriately red-faced, relaxed their restrictions. But my goodness, what has Canada come to?

I have a number of theories on why political correctness – which most people claim to disdain – more often than not goes unchecked, but the media's underreporting of it is at the top of the list. Many of my colleagues are clearly more interested in being part of the in-crowd than in sticking their necks out and appearing politically incorrect if there is a price to pay from the Lib-left for doing so, as there so often is. After all, everybody wants to be invited to the Christmas party. For years at City Hall, many in the media gave David Miller a free ride, more often than not treating him like he was above reproach. Why? Because he was the exact antithesis of his successor, Rob Ford, and for that reason alone he was able to dupe the masses. He presented perfectly: full head of blond hair, tall, good-looking, articulate, smooth, Harvard-educated, and quick on his feet. He could answer the most difficult questions and sound like he really knew what he was talking about or wasn't avoiding the question altogether. It didn't matter that he was a weak leader who was bone lazy and who rarely, if ever, in his seven years in office had the intestinal fortitude to make the really hard decisions that a mayor of a big and changing city needs to make. The packaging was perfect, so much so that he used his hair and his appearance in his 2003 and 2006 campaign ads. “Same Great Hair, Same Great Mayor,” read one of his campaign signs in 2006. I can only imagine what the reaction would have been if Jane Pitfield had used her good looks to sell herself in that same 2006 mayoralty race. But the lemmings who voted for Mr. Miller trusted him implicitly and without question. An attractive Harvard-educated leader would never lie, would he? He had to be good at what he did because, well, he looked good and went to a prestigious school. Because he presented well and could reduce an easily
intimidated reporter to mush, most of my media colleagues lobbed softballs at him, letting me and a few other brave souls take the heat for asking tough questions. Because I have an MBA, I'd often ask him about his spending decisions or try to press him on contracts with his union friends. He'd never refuse to take my questions. But more often than not, he'd use his height to try to intimidate me. I'd get a standard terse reply before he'd turn his back on me. But before he did, I knew I had gotten to him whenever his face turned a shade of red. I constantly felt like a salmon swimming upstream trying to get at the truth. Nevertheless, someone had to call him out for what he was, and it wasn't going to be anyone at the
Toronto Star
or, god knows,
NOW
magazine.

There was another reason Mr. Miller was allowed to get off scot-free. He dedicated himself to politically correct causes. And what is more politically correct than the environment? To question the multi-millions of dollars he tossed into his eco-projects or his motives for doing so was one certain way not to get invited to a dinner party in the Annex, Margaret Atwood's neighbourhood and Toronto's version of New York's West Village. Like Al Gore, Mayor Miller was saving us from global warming, goddammit! There's no doubt in my mind that his soft landing as CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, where he would pull in upwards of $300,000 a year, was bought and paid for by taxpayers. It wasn't just the $120 million he cheekily took from the city's reserves to spend on green projects (instead of using it to pay down the city's debt or for transit infrastructure) around the same time that he imposed new land transfer, car, and garbage taxes on Torontonians. He also handed over more than a quarter million dollars of Toronto's tax money between 2008 and 2010 to subsidize an
environmental office in London, England, while he was chair of the C40 group of cities (nothing more than a gabfest of city officials claiming to be concerned about global warming).

Mr. Miller's most visible show of eco-political correctness had to be the asinine plastic bag fee initiated to make it look like he was actually doing something for the environment. Because the city's taxing powers didn't extend to charging an environmental fee, he and his like-minded environmentalists on council passed a bylaw allowing all retail stores to charge consumers five cents (plus one cent GST) for each plastic bag, presumably to reduce the number of plastic bags that go into landfill. The big chains – Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Winners, and so on – were quick to embrace this scheme and to extend it to stores beyond Toronto's borders. And why not? It was an absolute cash windfall for them. While Mr. Miller and his NDP supporters in council made some weak overtures about requiring retailers to donate some of their proceeds to the environment, he knew from the outset the city never had the authority or the resources to enforce any of it. They also were unable to enforce the section of the bylaw that mandated all retail chains to provide a recycled paper bag alternative to customers. Instead, it became a race by retail chains to see who could outdo the others with designer cloth bags costing $1.99 or more – yet more cash for them. In some instances, the cloth bags were proven to contain toxins and deemed unhealthy for carrying foods. It was all window dressing – lazy policy from a lazy politician done up in the guise of saving the environment. Plastic bags were never the big concern. As we heard repeatedly from city and environmental experts, plastic bags accounted for a fraction of 1 per cent of the waste that actually goes to landfill in Ontario.
Heavy durable plastic packaging and take-out food containers are far more harmful to our waste stream. These were all facts available to our eco-loving, Harvard-educated mayor. But over the years he was in power, virtually none of the media bothered to call Mr. Miller on them. The
Toronto Star
's writers and columnists rarely uttered a peep about Mr. Miller's self-indulgent and highly negligent use of public funds, until the 2009 garbage strike and his dying days in office. It was sad proof of the unconscionable media double standard.

AT QUEEN'S PARK,
it was even worse. I arrived there in 2013 with a mandate to “shake things up,” which is what I'd tried to do at City Hall. For ten years, most of the media – except for the
Toronto Sun –
had given Premier Dalton McGuinty a free ride as he repeatedly broke his promises not to raise taxes, imposing tax after tax and stumbling from one billion-dollar scandal to another. By the time I got there, Mr. McGuinty had skipped off to a cozy sinecure at Harvard (see a pattern?) with his $313,000 severance package, leaving a trail of cover-ups and a litany of costly messes in his wake – all the while claiming, like Sergeant Schultz in
Hogan's Heroes,
that he “knew na-sing and saw na-sing.” His successor, the then unelected Kathleen Wynne, was no better. Clearly loving the perks of being the first woman of Ontario and the first lesbian premier, but in way over her head and loath to call an election, she spent her time in office denying any ties to Mr. McGuinty and also pleading total ignorance as the scandals continued to mount (even though she'd held successive cabinet posts in his regime and been his campaign co-chair in 2011). I often thought the media was afraid to take on Ms. Wynne out of
fear of provoking the LGBT community. This I feel contributed immensely to her shocking majority win in June 2014, despite the fact that she was running a party steeped in scandals and ready to drive the province down the economic road to Greece. I often thought and continue to think that voters and the media give her a free pass because she is an out lesbian and Ontario's first lesbian premier. And this from a lesbian! Since she got elected, that free ride has continued, even as she puts the province deeper and deeper in debt, mucks around with Ontario's energy policy, gives entitled teachers and their powerful unions everything they want and more, and tries to manipulate public sentiment about anyone who dares oppose her lefty agenda.

Take those who have dared oppose her sex-ed curriculum, which introduces the subject of same-sex relationships in grade three and “sexting” in grade four. Some of the objectors were ultra-religious and included many of her own Muslim constituency. They were branded homophobic. I guess you could call me homophobic too since I happen to think grade three, or the age of eight, is too early to ram same-sex relationships down kids' throats. Whatever happened to letting kids be kids? Instead, with all the problems with bullying in schools, why not focus at that age on being respectful and tolerant of others, especially those who look different or may have a different point of view? Perhaps we might share those lessons with our very own lesbian premier since she doesn't appear to be very tolerant or respectful of those with points of view other than her own.

In return, there is very little I respect about Ms. Wynne. I'll concede she's cunning and she sure knows how to manipulate public sentiment. But I find her the most offensive kind of
political operative – and I use the word
operative
deliberately. Aside from the damage she's already done and continues to do to the province, when it comes right down to it little matters to her but ensuring the Liberals win at all costs – whether it means selling out to whatever group will prop up her fortunes (can we say “teachers”?), or changing the channel from her own sorry record to pick fights with Ontario's doctors, Stephen Harper or the late Rob Ford or Patrick Brown, or shilling for Justin Trudeau in the October 2015 federal election (surely her time would have been better spent running the province). I was extremely upset in June 2015 when Ms. Wynne quietly slipped off to Washington – for some ridiculous series of meetings that made her sound important and plugged in – and took time to sit down with Valerie Jarrett, President Obama's senior advisor. Ms. Jarrett is a highly dangerous woman who has made no secret of her loathing for Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet there Ms. Wynne was, barely three weeks later, cozying up to Toronto's Jewish community when she was feted at a Words and Deeds dinner sponsored by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the United Jewish Appeal. I didn't know who to be more disgusted with: Ms. Wynne for her hypocrisy or the well-resourced Jewish organizations for turning a blind eye to, or neglecting to properly investigate, the company our premier keeps. No doubt the media helped perpetuate this ignorance by failing to call her out for her visit to Ms. Jarrett. It got barely a mention, except by me on social media.

While she herself expects tolerance and respect for free speech, Ms. Wynne is a master at spinning the truth and at putting up roadblocks to those who try to dig beyond her party line – like me. When I was at Queen's Park, I would get a
daily visit from one of her press secretaries – acting on the pretext that they wanted to help me with whatever I needed, but really trying to discern what I was working on that could possibly embarrass their boss. I loved telling them I was just fine, thank you. I would contact them if I needed them. When I did seek out a comment on some story or other, it was always by e-mail – phone interviews were rarely given because I might throw a hard question at them – and the answers always arrived no earlier than 5 p.m. Clearly they thought the closer the answers came to my deadline, the less chance I would have to further question them. It was a well-crafted strategy by the premier's office to contain any perceived criticism of her policies. One afternoon, when I was working on a story about Ms. Wynne's wife and the one million dollars in consultant contracts she obtained with an agency that was supposed to be serving autistic children, Liberal godfather Greg Sorbara suddenly turned up at our office. My
Sun
colleague Antonella Artuso said she'd never before had a visit from him. Why this sudden appearance, then? We figured it was because he was trying to find out what I knew. But god bless Antonella. She spent so much time talking to Mr. Sorbara about growing tomato plants – deliberately diverting him from his intended conversation – that he completely lost track of his purpose for dropping by and left for a lunch appointment without getting anything out of me.