Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  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, bega
n, “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.’”

  Ford brushed off the Foulidises’ demand for an apology. George Foulidis, on behalf of his family, filed a six-million-dollar defamation suit against Ford just before the election. Representing Foulidis was Brian Shiller, a litigator with the boutique law firm Ruby Shiller Chan Hasan.

  Yes, that Ruby.

  (And for the real conspiracy theorists, Shiller was the lawyer who negotiated Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler’s twentythousand-dollar settlement with Toronto police after his wrongful detention.)

  NINE DAYS AFTER CLAYTON RUBY announced that “sorry” wasn’t an adequate response to breaking municipal conflict-of-interest laws, news got around that Rob Ford had hired one of Canada’s most skilled and expensive lawyers to defend him. Alan Lenczner was a sixty-nine-year-old living legend known for his ego, creativity in the courtroom, and ability to win when a loss seems unavoidable. As retired Supreme Court of Canada judge Ian Binnie explained the night Lenczner was named Ontario’s civil litigator of the year, “He is the lawyer you go to when your goose is just about cooked.” Lenczner’s former clients included Conrad Black and one half of the feuding McCain brothers of french-fry fame. When the Fords recruited Lenczner, it was the first indication that the conflict-of-interest business might be more than a media stunt.

  The morning of the trial, September 5, 2012, saw reporters lined up outside the court building at 361 University Avenue long before the doors opened at 8 A.M. Courtroom 6-1 is supposedly the largest in Ontario, and every seat was occupied, as journalists, Ford-watchers, university kids, and city staff crammed inside. Chaleff-Freudenthaler was there too, off and on.

  Ruby’s team arrived first. Then Lenczner’s. They unpacked their legal boxes with gusto, smiling and relaxed, obviously anxious to get in the ring. The mayor looked less enthused. He wore a dark suit, geometric-patterned tie, and blue shirt. He seemed anxious. He sat at one of the front tables and immediately pulled out a pen with which to fidget. His newly minted chief of staff, Mark Towhey, press secretary, George Christopoulos, and brother Doug sat with him. Hearing the case would be Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland, who was brought in from Ottawa to avoid any perception of bias. At sixty-one, Hackland was the senior regional judge in his area—one of eight in the province—and the go-to choice for politically sensitive cases. “In most disputes both sides are happy to get him because they know they’re going to get a good hearing,” Ottawa defence lawyer Mark Ertel told the Star.

  Hackland won over the media when he announced that “Twittering” would be allowed. Audio recording was also approved for the purposes of accuracy in reporting, not broadcast, but there would be no photography, which is standard, or phone calls, obviously.

  Ruby was up first. He set the stage with a quick rehash of the MFP scandal—“Toronto has suffered from the activities of lobbyists”—then cast Rob Ford as a character who delighted in flouting the rules. The mayor, Ruby said, would argue that he’d made an honest mistake and that he hadn’t realized he was in a conflict-of-interest situation. But how could someone with twelve years of experience on city council argue he didn’t know the rules? “Mayor Ford wants this hearing to be about the kids and the good work he does by directing donations to the high school football teams that work with them. That is not what this hearing is about.… The only person hurt in all of this was Rob Ford. He had to pay back the money to publicly correct his breach of city integrity and he just did not want to do that.”

  Lenczner’s turn. “My submissions to you at the end of the case will be more about the law.” His defence strategy hinged on a complicated legal dance around jurisdiction. Lenczner explored how the three sets of rules in the case—the City of Toronto Act, the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act, and council’s Code of Conduct—worked together and how they didn’t. Two gave council authority to punish rule breakers, but the penalties outlined in each of those were different. One said council could only hand down a reprimand or suspend pay, the other gave five additional options, including “repayment or reimbursement of moneys received.” Lenczner argued that council referred to the wrong set of rules. And so, if council didn’t have the authority to make Ford repay $3,150, it didn’t matter what he did later on. And just in case Hackland didn’t buy that argument, Lenczner fell back on an “error in judgment.” Ford would testify that he didn’t realize he was in a conflict of interest. (If Judge Hackland believed there was an honest mistake, or that the amount of money was too small to influence him, he could let Ford off.)

  At 10:51 A.M., Robert Bruce Ford put his hand on a Bible and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Things got tense in a hurry. As Ruby grilled him, Ford kept coming back to the same rehearsed statement: “How I define a conflict of interest is if it’s both financially beneficial to the city and financially beneficial to myself or there’s a financial interest with the city and a financial interest with myself.”

  Ruby challenged him on this, noting that in Ford’s twelve years on council he had a duty to be well aware of the rules. Ford had been elected four times—in 2000, 2003, 2006, and 2010— therefore, he’d sworn a declaration four times to “disclose any pecuniary interest direct or indirect in accordance with the MCIA.”

  Ford testified that he had never read the councillor handbook and didn’t even remember getting one. And he had never attended orientation as a councillor, because “some councillors like myself … the son of an MPP, knows how the provincial government works and knows how City Hall works and knows how the federal government works, so I didn’t think I needed to attend.”

  RUBY: “What steps if any [did you take] to find out what the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act required of you?”

  FORD: “None.”

  RUBY: “None, that’s your answer?”

  FORD: “Yes.”

  At one point, Ruby read Ford a passage from the Conflict of Interest Act. When a member of council had a “pecuniary interest direct or indirect in any matter,” read Ruby, they should “disclose the interest” and “not take part” in the “discussion” or “vote.”

  RUBY: “You’re familiar with that?”

  FORD: “I’ve never read that before.”

  RUBY: “You had to have read that before. That’s the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act.”

  FORD: “I’ve never read this before.”

  The courtroom erupted in giggles.

  Judge Hackland: “Excuse me, we don’t need any outbursts. Thank you.”

  Ford changed his shirt during the lunch break. But things didn’t get any better for the mayor. By the time the trial ended, most legal experts were predicting that Judge Hackland was not going to buy the “honest mistake” argument. The “insignificant amount” exception was also dead in the water, because other Ontario politicians had been kicked out for far less and Ford himself had testified that he thought $3,150 was a significant amount of money. As for Lenczner’s assertion that the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act somehow didn’t apply to all code of conduct violations, well, “that’s ridiculous,” said one prominent lawyer I was consulting at the time. Lenczner’s final gambit, that Ford’s vote in his own favour on February 7 didn’t matter because council should never have imposed the fine in the first place, was interesting but still a long shot.

  Hackland promised a quick decision and was true to his word. On November 22, 2012—less than three months after the hearing—an email went out to reporters: Hackland had reached a decision. It would be released Monday morning.

  On November 26, dozens of journalists lined up outside
the clerk’s office at 361 University. We killed time rehashing the case and speculating on the ruling. “Do you think he’ll actually be removed?” we asked each other, over and over again. Most, myself included, were skeptical.

  Shortly after 10 A.M., a court staffer—with an excellent poker face—emerged carrying a stack of papers that came up to her chin. We pounced like jackals. The Star was second in line. I grabbed mine and flipped to the back.

  Page 23: “I declare the seat of respondent, Robert Ford, on Toronto City Council, vacant.”

  “Whoa. He’s gone,” I said.

  The mandatory removal provision was “a very blunt instrument,” the judge wrote, but there was no wiggle room. He did not buy Lenczner’s argument that the act didn’t apply; he believed council had broad authority to impose a financial penalty; and he rejected the “error in judgment” claim.

  “There must be some diligence on the respondent’s part; that is, some effort to understand and appreciate his obligations. Outright ignorance of the law will not suffice, nor will wilful blindness as to one’s obligations,” he wrote.

  Everyone—journalists, councillors, the Twittersphere, even Ford himself, according to sources—was shocked. It wasn’t that people thought it was the wrong decision; it was that few thought a judge would take the political risk. Reaction was mixed, but most seemed to think Ford had brought it on himself.