Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Prince William and Boomers on the Plains

By Jonathon Gatehouse, Martin Patriquin and Jaime J. Weinman - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 3:34 PM - 0 Comments

Jochen Luebke/Zuma Press

A regime vacation

Jay-Z and Beyoncé Knowles’s choice of Cuba for a few flashbulb-streaked days off raised hackles in the U.S., which has had an embargo against the island country since 1960. Though the trip was cleared with the U.S. Treasury and therefore legal, critics wondered why one of the most famous couples in the world would visit a country with such an appalling human rights record. “There are a lot of better places they could go where they’re not feeding a monstrous regime,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, of Florida.

The bloom is off

Prince William may have to brush up on his ability to appeal to children before his wife has a baby. On a trip to Glasgow, Scotland, the prince tried to kiss a four-year-old Scottish girl in a princess costume, and the girl pulled away from him and hugged her mother for support, refusing to allow him near her or to give him the flower she was holding. William laughed it off and the girl handed the flower to Kate. The girl’s mother claimed she didn’t have anything personal against William, but simply “got really shy.”

Today’s special: prejudice

Dave Claringbould says rural Manitoba is not the friendliest place for an openly gay businessman. Claringbould and his partner started the Pots N Hands restaurant in the small town of Morris, near Winnipeg, only to announce four months later that they were closing down: they had received insults, including a customer who asked if he would catch sexually transmitted diseases from their food, and other customers stopped coming after finding out about their relationship. The publicity might save the restaurant, though; the premier of the province, Greg Selinger, has announced that he will eat there as a show of support for tolerance.

Continue…

Rob Ford’s truth

By Ivor Tossell - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 8:54 PM - 0 Comments

Rob Ford, of course, denies everything. Up he got on Tuesday, for his 39 seconds of rebuttal.

“Number one, it’s an outright lie,” he stammered to a City Hall press gallery, in response to a Toronto Star report that claimed he’d been asked to leave a function and, what’s more, had a drinking problem. “It’s the Toronto Star going after me again, and again, and again,” he said. “They’re relentless, that’s fine. I’ll go head to head with the Toronto Star any time. Let’s just wait, just let’s wait, let’s just wait ’til the election is, and then we’ll see what happens. It’s just lies after lies and lies. And I’ve called you pathological liars, and you are, so why don’t you take me to court? Let the courts decide. You guys are liars!”

At this point, his press secretary got him off the podium. Rob Ford subsequently went to ground, and hasn’t been heard from since.

Where do we go from here? It was the kind of performance that could have ended the career of a lesser man, but not Rob Ford. By now, citizens of Toronto have evolved a natural immunity to their mayor saying or doing something completely humiliating, followed immediately by the mayor insisting that it was everybody’s fault except his own. A visitor without such immunity might be shocked into some kind of uncomfortable awareness, but we’ve been desensitized into safety. It’s a good thing. It keeps the invaders out.

Ford is faced by some pretty damning evidence. One of his most reliable allies, Councillor Paul Ainslie—a genial scout leader from Scarborough with a true-blue voting record—felt compelled to ask that the mayor leave a military ball Ainslie had co-organized after at least eight people complained about his behaviour. This is not an anonymous source making an allegation; this is something that an elected and allied member of council says he did, before documenting it by e-mail.

The broader allegations of a drinking problem are harder to prove. The Star here relies on anonymous members of the mayor’s staff, present and past, which are credible given the newspaper’s track record of accurate (if hostile) coverage, but less saleable in the court of public opinion. Still, Ford’s erratic behaviour is on the record, and calls out for explanation.

In the last week alone he was reported to have shown up “disheveled” at a Shabbat gathering of Orthodox Jews, and pounded out a pro-casino speech that, by the Toronto Sun’s account, left other politicians cringing in embarrassment. Then he risked causing a mistrial in a first-degree murder case by spontaneously calling a legal affairs talk-show and—in a clarion call for personal responsibility for the accused—insisting that “you can’t defend that.” The lawyers on the show were left scrambling to explain the law to him.

In most places, the playbook for public officials caught in the mess is to come clean, stop the bleeding, issue a carefully worded apology, and then declare the matter closed. Canadians are a forgiving bunch. This is John A. Macdonald’s country, after all. Gordon Campbell had a DUI mugshot taken while he was premier of BC. Ralph Klein, who was the mayor of Calgary before becoming Alberta’s premier, drunkenly yelled at the homeless at a shelter; he thereafter admitted to problem drinking and swore he’d curtail it. Even here in Toronto, councillor Ana Bailao, after a false start, issued a tearful apology for her own DUI, pleading guilty and paying a fine. (At the time, Ford issued a statement. “Councillor Ana Bailao did something wrong and she’s taken full responsibility for her actions.”)

What did Rob Ford do this time? Well, he called everyone a liar. As a solution to his problem, it has a certain elegance. There aren’t a lot of moving parts to it: No fuss, no muddle, no explication and, as a bonus, perfect congruence with all the other times he’s lashed out at accusers.

This week, he gave only two refutations to the evidence presented against him. The first was his “I know you are but what am I?” legal strategy: Instead of suing the well-prepared Star for libel, he called them liars and demanded they sue him instead. But the second refutation was more telling: “Let’s just wait, just let’s wait, let’s just wait ’til the election is, and then we’ll see what happens.”

This is Rob Ford’s truth. The facts will be decided not by reality, but by the people, on election day. The visitor from abroad might think that a pile of damning evidence might sway the vote against Rob Ford, but that is to misunderstand Toronto. In Toronto, Rob Ford’s voters will absolve him of the pile of evidence.

It’s a schoolyard view of the world, in which truth flows from popularity and power. He’s used it to run his administration like a radio phone-in show, talking to just one crowd with a mix of pandering and fabulism. It’s also the outlook that’s landed him in a ditch, with his budget chief quit in disgust, his transit chief rebelled, his inner circle falling away, his influence gone.

And it’s a view of the world that many of us have enabled. Ford was resoundingly elected despite a widely reported history of both intoxication and denial. It had a legitimizing effect: Initially, even his foes in politics and the press deferred to the people’s decision that this was acceptable. For Ford, tragically enough, it was a mandate to keep doing what he was doing.

He seems resolved to keep doing it. The only way forward for Rob Ford is straight to the election. Only the popular vote can right his wrongs, and only the people can prove beyond a doubt that anyone who doubted him was simply telling lies.

Rob Ford supporters deny report that Toronto mayor has an alcohol problem

By Emily Senger - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 10:43 AM - 0 Comments

Jon Blacker/Reuters

Those close to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford are denying a report in the Toronto Star that alleges that Ford has an alcohol abuse problem and was asked to leave a military fundraiser last month because he was too intoxicated.

A report from Toronto Star city hall reporter Robyn Doolittle and investigative report Kevin Donovan cites numerous unnamed sources who say an intoxicated Ford was asked to leave the Toronto Garrison Ball in February, an annual military black-tie dinner that raises money for the Wounded Warrior charity. Toronto Councillor Paul Ainslie also goes on the record in the story to say that he asked Ford to leave the ball, but he does not comment on why he thought Ford should leave.

The report also quotes former staffers who say they urged Ford to seek treatment for his drinking, but were unsuccessful.

The mayor’s brother, Coun. Doug Ford, responded to the report soon after it was published in Tuesday’s paper and online early the same morning. Continue…

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford back to court as lawyer challenges appeal decision

By Emily Senger - Friday, March 15, 2013 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

(Chris Young/CP)

Lawyer Clayton Ruby is taking Toronto Mayor Rob Ford back to court to appeal the appeal decision made by a panel of three judges in a conflict-of-interest case against the mayor.

Ruby said he hopes the Supreme Court of Canada will hear the appeal, telling The Globe and Mail that the matter is of “national importance.”

“When the most powerful politician in Canada’s biggest city ignores everyone – his own integrity commissioner, the council, his own supporters – and hits up lobbyists for money for one of his private interests, well, are we supposed to sit back there and do nothing? Are we supposed to just let it go? Well, we cannot let it go,” Ruby told the Globe on Thursday. Continue…

Sarah Thomson vs. Rob Ford: The court of public opinion is often unfair

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

David Cooper/Toronto Star

On the eve of International Women’s Day last week, Sarah Thomson, the publisher of Women’s Post magazine, attended a party for the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee, where she was allegedly groped and propositioned by an “arrogant” and “outrageous” Rob Ford. The Toronto mayor grabbed her buttocks, Thomson claims, and expressed regret that she didn’t join him in Florida the week before, when his “wife wasn’t there.” She went even further—suggesting on morning radio that Ford might have been high on cocaine at the party because he was “talking fast.” Thomson went public with her claims via Facebook the morning after the alleged groping, and has since been deemed a thoroughly unreliable narrator. Not only because there are problems with her story (two other municipal councillors claim to have heard her telling a friend about a plan to entrap the mayor) but, considerably more disturbing, because people just don’t like her. She’s obnoxious, she has unconvincing political slogans, she’s too skinny: these are just a few of the completely unrelated Sarah Thomson criticisms circulating the Internet at the moment. Tarek Fatah, the writer and activist, criticized the Toronto publisher for being rich (he assumed, incorrectly, on Twitter, that she is “from the richest family in Canada,” those other Thomsons). Others have attacked her for her employment of the word “ass” in describing the incident (as in, “the mayor grabbed my ass”) and even for speaking publicly about the incident in the first place.

In other words, being modest—and not rich—would seem to be the preferred prerequisites for someone who is groped. Oh, how far we’ve come. But it doesn’t stop at modesty. Once you’ve been groped, there are, apparently, exactly two things you can do about it. Here’s Christie Blatchford, spelling out those two things, in the National Post: “If Ms. Thomson believed she was sexually assaulted, she should have complained to a traditional body with the expertise to conduct a proper investigation, like the police. If she believed the mayor had just been a boor, she should have kept her mouth shut; wherever did the notion of discretion among ostensibly capable adults go?”

Press charges or keep quiet. Surely there is a happy medium in such a situation.

My ass, for example, has been grabbed more times than I can count, mostly in clubs and bars, and I haven’t once pressed charges. For me—and I suspect Thomson feels the same way—public groping is a momentarily perverse invasion of privacy, not an act of sexual violence. (It’s also incredibly hard to prove.) It makes me mad, not necessarily sad. But quiet? Never. In fact, on the particular ass-grabbing occasions I can recall, I sought out my girlfriends and we tried as best we could to publicly shame the guy responsible. We even had a technique at nightclubs—where dancing has devolved into arrhythmic mounting—of banding together and collectively remounting the guy who had groped us. It was the biblical solution to public groping: an ass for an ass.

Women have many choices in exacting revenge in the event of a public groping. They can be as immodest as they like—and yes, Tarek Fatah: as perversely rich, too.

And the notion that all sexual assault claims made by women who don’t go to the police are automatically false or at the very least suspicious is outrageous. According to a survey last year, 83 per cent of women who are sexually assaulted choose not to report it to the police because, ironically, they are convinced their attackers will never be brought to justice.

Still, as much as it pains me to say, some critics are right about one thing: Sarah Thomson may have made the wrong choice. Not about speaking out, but about with whom she is currently speaking. She didn’t go to the police with her accusation, perhaps because of the reasons outlined above. And she didn’t go to Rob Ford, to confront him directly. Instead, she came to us, the media. (And we aren’t, traditionally, known for our fair-minded and reasonable judgment.)

She chose to air her grievances not in a court of law but solely in the court of public opinion, where she is subject to the same scrutiny as her alleged abuser. She chose to deal with the incursion privately but in the most public setting, thereby forfeiting the protections of both realms. She chose the shaming route. She took the route of the 22-year-old at a nightclub, which, while it works in that realm, doesn’t work as well for the publisher of a magazine and a former contender for mayor.

I tend to believe she’s telling the truth, but because of her potentially libellous finger-pointing, refusal to consult police and utter lack of proof, the truth is something we may never discover. In a court of law, we might. In a court of law, Rob Ford would be innocent until proven guilty. But in the court of public opinion, Sarah Thomson is, unfortunately, guilty until proven innocent.

Rob Ford and Sarah Thomson: What we know and what we don’t know

By Ivor Tossell - Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 3:23 PM - 0 Comments

We do not know for sure whether the Mayor of Toronto grabbed one of his female opponents’ behinds at a gala function this week, nor whether he suggested that she should have been with him in Florida on account of his wife being gone. Nor do we know if the mayor is being truthful in his categorical refusals.

When allegations like these erupt, knowing things with any certainty is at a premium. The alleged placement of Rob Ford’s fingers on Sarah Thomson’s body are now the kind of thing that radio hosts are parsing through in detail, as if waiting for a Zapruder tape to emerge. It doesn’t seem that one will.

So let’s talk about what we do know.

Here is one thing I know: This kind of thing happens to women in politics. It’s not news; it’s not scandal; it’s more like background radiation, which many of the women in politics I know deal with as a deadening cost of doing business in that environment.

“When I heard what Ford said about the vacation, my very first thought was, ‘I have heard almost that exact kind of statement more times than I can remember,’” a political staffer on Parliament Hill wrote to me today.

“Ass-grabbing, suggestive glances, sexual innuendo, comments about clothing – it’s all treated pretty nonchalantly, both inside the workplace, and also at hybrid social-professional events,” she said. She described an MP who messages her in meetings they attend together, commenting on her appearance and asking to see her outside of work, to her immense discomfort.

Others tell of hands slipped into hands, hands on hips, hands on thighs, fingers in bellies, enquiries about underwear, enquiries about sex lives; and always, a decision between pushing back or letting it slide. The problem isn’t just the garden-variety lechers: It’s the assuredly “nice guys” who keep their hands to themselves but introduce themselves by asking about boyfriends, or insert themselves into women’s personal lives with solicitousness, pestering and favours.

Is harassment worse in politics than in other fields? Maybe not (another former staffer told me she’d had a worse time in finance, for instance). Does it incriminate Rob Ford by association? Not at all. But it’s the world that both he and Sarah Thomson inhabit.

Here’s the second thing we know: How Thomson’s complaint was received. Inevitably, the complainant became the target.

Let’s first say that if Ford has lied to cover his failings too many times to be given any credit, Thomson isn’t beyond skepticism either. She’s presented her share of contradictions. She lamented the media circus while appearing on nearly every radio and television outlet in town. As she herself tells it, she followed up on Ford’s alleged lewdness by acceding to a mind-boggling plan in which her assistant would pose with Ford to see if any groping could be photographed. (I find this so weird and ill-advised as to actually be credible.) She decided to try this case in the court of public opinion, and public opinion has every right to feel conflicted about this.

But this weirdness wasn’t the nub of the attacks on her. To listen to her critics, her sin was going public in the first place. On talk radio, the hosts of the John Oakley and Jim Richards shows were busy wondering why Thomson didn’t go to police and press charges if Ford laid a finger on her, as if they wouldn’t be screaming “overreaction” if she had done just that. Their callers, as always, were grimly edifying.

“How convenient is this? Sarah Thomson is leveraging the social media and mainstream media to draw attention to her women’s publication on International Women’s Day,” said Mark.

“Big girls keep their mouth shut,” said John, another caller.

“Her colloquialism she used towards her own anatomy was pretty lowbrow for a person who’s considered to be some sort of professional in this town,” said Mike, who disapproved of the word “ass.” Later: “I just wonder about some of the people that try to assume office in this city.”

“Listen, what a joke,” said Bernie. “C’mon, we’ve had a couple pops here and there and if he was feeling good and having a good time – which he should because, y’know what? He’s got a lot of responsibility taking care of the city – and he wants to undo his tie, and if he kinda got a little tipsy or whatever you may wanna call it, no problem.”

If a woman takes an assault seriously, said Christie Blatchford, she should call the police. “If you don’t take it seriously, and you’re not mortally wounded, then you shut up and you deal with it privately,” she spat at Jim Richards. “What happened to that?”

“Just to confirm,” said John Tory, when Thomson finally come round to his show, “that you’d be willing to go to any place that’s agreeable to the mayor… and take a lie detector test?”

To recap, then: Sarah Thomson should have let it go because the mayor is entitled to relax, should have reacted immediately, should not have been ambitious, should have dealt with it privately, should have pitched a fit, should have said nothing, should have called police, and above all should not have said “ass.” Clear?

So I will tell you what I know with confidence. Women in politics have to deal with an appalling amount of garbage. Regardless of what Rob Ford did or didn’t do, it’s safe to say that at this moment, another mayor, or senator, or MP, or senior staffer, or riding association president, or student leader, or blithely bellicose volunteer is busy making a young woman squirm. And if that woman does not deal with said garbage in the exact right way—a way so bizarrely proscribed I’m not sure it even exists—then her honesty, motives, ambitions, maturity and gender itself will get called into question.

I am willing to take Sarah Thomson at her word. But Rob Ford, as ever, is not the real problem.

Why Rob Ford should be charged with sexual assault (if what Sarah Thomson says is true)

By Anne Kingston - Friday, March 8, 2013 at 8:27 PM - 0 Comments

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford leaves a courtroom on Jan. 7, 2013. (Chris Young/CP)

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been publicly accused of many of the Seven Deadly Sins, but until last night Lust never figured among them. That’s when Sarah Thompson, publisher of Women’s Post and former mayoral candidate in the 2010 election, took to social media to accuse Ford of unwelcome come-ons and then sexually assaulting her at a public event. In a Facebook post, Thomson intimated Ford grabbed her behind while a photo was being taken, one that shows her smiling broadly and the mayor looking totally out of it. (Making the media rounds today here,  here, and here, Thomson was more explicit, saying the mayor “grabbed my ass.”)  In a statement, Ford blasted the allegations as “completely false.” He called Thomson a liar who put a damper on International Women’s Day: “What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.”

Now we’re mired in the he said-she dynamic said that often underlines accusations of sexual assault, a fluid term under the Criminal Code that includes everything from unwanted touching to rape. The sort of “touchy-feely” assault Thomson accused Ford of is a fact of life for many women (and men), so routine it’s brushed off, not regarded as the criminal offence it is.  (Tellingly, by noon, the controversy was jokingly dismissed as “Assgrabgate.”) Thomson says she has no plans to press charges; she just wants an apology from Ford and to “move on.” She believes using the kangaroo court of social media to air her allegations is adequate remedy: ”If I sweep under the carpet, I’m not doing what I should as a woman leader in Toronto,” she said.

Thomson’s utterances over the day revealed the spectrum of contradictory attitudes about sexual assault. On one hand, she seems sympathetic to Ford, noting he already “had enough lawsuits” (maybe she was worried hers would get lost in the pile). She explained she also didn’t want to lay charges  because, as the chair of the Transit Alliance, she has “to work with him” (her venting on Facebook and today’s media whirlwind might also put a crimp in that). She acknowledged the behaviour was out of character, noting Ford was always “a professional” and “very courteous.” She even attempted to diagnose the problem, suggesting “he may have substance abuse issues,” a comment she rescinded. Her first instinct was to counter his alleged assault with one of her own, she wrote on Facebook: “I wanted to punch him in the face.” She even downplayed the import of the grab: “I know I shouldn’t be pissed but after spending 10 months on the campaign trail together you expect a little bit of respect at the very least for my husband.”

But if Thomson’s allegation is true, she should be “pissed”–for herself and the community. Sexual assault is serious. Accusing someone of sexual assault is serious. It’s also a continuum, a point made clear during the global “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” backlash against sexual assault seen on International Women’s Day. Today we paid homage to Jyoti Sigghn Pandey, the woman whose brutal rape and murder in India exposed systemic acceptance of heinous attacks on women. On CBC’s The Current this week, journalist Sally Armstrong, who covered female subjugation the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa long before it was on mainstream media radar, discussed the rise-up movements women are staging in Afghanistan and Egypt, drawing attention to sexual assault in the streets. And we also saw media coverage of Ellie Cosgrove, a British woman who staged a protest in the London Underground to draw attention to the creep who ejaculated on her leg when she was riding the subway.

Comparatively, laying charges against someone groping a female behind may seem inconsequential, making a mountain out of a molehill and a waste of dwindling public resources. But that’s the wrong way of looking at it, says Toronto criminal lawyer Susan Chapman. Sexual assault is not a private matter, she says: “It’s a crime against the community. It’s demeaning to a woman, undermining her autonomy and the respect she should be held in. We don’t pay enough attention to that. Women don’t need to put up with that crap in 2013.” Changes were made to the criminal code in 1993, Chapman points out, to take out the notion that “penetration” is the only way to interfere with someone’s sexual integrity.

Chapman would like to see Thomson take her complaint to police. “This is not some crazy on the subway who grabbed your ass,” she says of the allegation. But laying charges can be a no-win for women, she admits: “They get a rough ride. If you lay charges, you’re a bitch and you have to do testify at trial and you get ripped apart. Or you go light on the guy and give him a warning and then people say you should commit to it.” But charges don’t have to be laid for police to investigate, Chapman says. Whether police should proceed to criminal charges is another matter: “They have to take into serious account the view of the plaintiff.  She does pay an awful price to go through the process. But that’s not a reason not to investigate.” The fact a crime is common is a reason for the police to prosecute, Chapman says, as seen with crackdowns on impaired driving or cabbie robberies.

Thomson wants to believe “publicly talking about it will change the way people behave.” Chapman thinks that’s optimistic, and the partisan mob mobilizing seen today suggests she’s right:  ”To do it on social media diminishes the significance,” she says.  ”It’s going to get people talking. But is it going to persuade them of the impropriety of the conduct? Not necessarily.”

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies allegations of inappropriate touching

By The Canadian Press - Friday, March 8, 2013 at 6:50 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – Toronto’s controversial mayor accused a former political foe of crying wolf Friday after she accused him of making suggestive comments and touching her inappropriately at a political event.

Rob Ford released a statement denying Sarah Thomson’s allegations, which were made via Facebook and in a series of interviews with local media outlets.

Ford said he was “shocked, dismayed and surprised” to learn of the claims from Thomson, who ran against him for the city’s top job in 2010.

He described the allegations as “completely false” while also criticizing her for launching her allegations on International Women’s Day.

“What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe,” Ford said in the statement.

Continue…

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies allegations of inappropriate touching

By The Canadian Press - Friday, March 8, 2013 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – Toronto’s controversial mayor accused a former political foe of crying wolf Friday after she accused him of making suggestive comments and touching her inappropriately at a political event.

Rob Ford released a statement denying Sarah Thomson’s allegations, which were made via Facebook and in a series of interviews with local media outlets.

Ford said he was “shocked, dismayed and surprised” to learn of the claims from Thomson, who ran against him for the city’s top job in 2010.

He described the allegations as “completely false” while also criticizing her for launching her allegations on International Women’s Day.

Continue…

Updated: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford expresses ‘shock, dismay and surprise’ at accusations

By Emily Senger - Friday, March 8, 2013 at 8:21 AM - 0 Comments

A mayoral candidate who ran against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in the last municipal election used her Facebook account to accuse the mayor of making lewd comments toward her at a party hosted by the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee Thursday night.

Late Thursday, Sarah Thomson used Facebook to publish a photo of herself alongside Ford, who had ditched his tie, had his eyes closed and had a large stain on the front of his white dress shirt. Under the photo she wrote:

Thought it was a friendly hello to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford at the CJPAC Action Party tonight until he suggested I should have been in Florida with him last week because his wife wasn’t there. Seriously wanted to punch him in the face. Happy International Women’s Day!

The photo drew hundreds of comments and had been shared nearly 500 times by 8 a.m. Friday morning.

Thomson added more comments underneath the picture, saying:

I’ve never seen him so out of it. I know I shouldn’t be pissed but after spending 10 months on the campaign trail together you expect a little bit of respect at the very least for my husband.

And: “…guess where his hand was in this picture? I must go shower….” and “Is grabbing someone [sic] ass assault?”

The mayor’s office has yet to respond, but a source who was with the mayor at the party told the Toronto Star that he did not hear any such comment.

The mayor did issue this tweet last night:

Great night meeting some wonderful ppl@cjpac action party #toronto #cjpac

— Mayor Rob Ford (@TOMayorFord) March 8, 2013

Update: Early Friday afternoon, Mayor Rob Ford released the following statement —

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful event to support the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee.

This is an event that is attended by numerous political leaders and where I have been a guest in the past.

Early this morning, false allegations were made regarding a number of disgusting actions.  I am shocked, dismayed and surprised.  I can say without hesitation that they are absolutely, completely false.

What is more surprising is that a woman who has aspired to be a civic leader would cry wolf on a day where we should be celebrating women across the globe.

This is a day we should all take the time to reflect upon the women in our lives and in our society.  It is a day when we can envision the changes we want to make in our communities to ensure that all people are equal and that violence and discrimination against women comes to an end.

MP Olivia Chow for Toronto mayor? ‘I’m considering it,’ she says

By Emily Senger - Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 8:38 AM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Olivia Chow at a news conference in Ottawa on Oct.1, 2012. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Toronto MP Olivia Chow has, once again, opened the door to the possibility of challenging Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in the city’s next civic election.

The MP, who represents the downtown riding of Trinity-Spadina, made the comments on CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight during an appearance Wednesday with actor Sook-Yin Lee to promote the CBC film Jack, about Chow’s late husband Jack Layton.

The exchange went like this:

Stroumboulopoulos: “Do you foresee a time when you’ll be doing the sequel? And it’s called ‘Olivia: Mayor of Toronto.’ Could you ever see that?” Continue…

Councillor calls for investigation into Rob Ford’s football charity, again

By Emily Senger - Friday, March 1, 2013 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford addresses reporters at City Hall in Toronto on Nov. 27, 2012. (Chris Young/CP)

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s football charity is again at the centre of a debate at city hall, just a month after the mayor was cleared in a conflict-of-interest lawsuit involving his charity.

This latest controversy comes after the Toronto Star reported Thursday that Ford was still sending out letters to registered lobbiests soliciting donations for the Rob Ford Football Foundation.

In its report, Star reporters said they had obtained at least two letters sent by Ford to registered lobbiests in the past two months.

Now, even Ford’s allies on council are advising the mayor to back away from his charity. Continue…

Rob Ford floats

By Ivor Tossell - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Jon Blacker/Reuters

Yesterday, Rob Ford’s lawyers succeeded in extracting him from the last snafu that threatened to remove him from office. This time, his campaign finances were under scrutiny. It seems Ford’s 2010 mayoral campaign took some liberties with their accounting. For instance, an auditor testified that the campaign took a $77,722.73 loan from Doug Ford Holdings, Ford’s family company, while the law says candidates can only get loans from the bank. It had the family printing firm do up signs and buttons before the campaign started and took its sweet time paying them for it. It counted campaign events as fundraisers, which, you’ll be fascinated to learn, are very different things under Ontario election law.

In other news, a Forum poll of 806 Torontonians showed that the mayor is more popular than he’s been in months, with a 48% approval rating. I’m here to tell you that the age of miracles is not yet ended: Rob Ford’s gift of political anti-gravity has not left him yet.

Yesterday’s session was a tribute to low expectations. Ford and his team faced a three-person committee of venerable lawyers and election officials whose job was, in essence, to decide whether to press charges against him. Had the panel voted against Ford, the case would have been prosecuted before a judge.

For all the apparent contraventions, the auditor reported that Ford’s campaign finances were, on the whole, professionally run and well-documented. On the other hand, Ford’s lawyer, Tom Barlow, offered a lengthy defence that went something like this:

a) Not knowing the difference between personal funds and company funds was a definite oops, but Ford has learned his lesson;

b) The infractions didn’t make a difference in a handily-won vote;

c) It was a big $2-million campaign and mistakes happen. Whaddaya gonna do? [elaborate shrug]

Finally, Barlow looked meaningfully at the judges and summed it all up: “The perfect should not be permitted to be the enemy of the good,” he said. Then: “Nor should the Act be permitted to become an electoral weapon for those who wish to have a second chance.” For all the accounting, it was the classic Ford story: Rob Ford is a hard-working guy who makes a lot of honest mistakes and is victimized by his enemies.

The first member moved to prosecute Ford, but the other two refused. Ford, who had been sitting almost stone-still for hours, got up, shook his lawyers’ hands and hastened for the exit with his brother, pursued by a dozen reporters.

So how is Rob Ford doing in the face of all this? Just fine, by the looks of things. His enemies continue to do their part for him. This financial audit, of course, comes thanks to some of the same antagonists who brought you “Let’s Kick Rob Ford Out for Conflict of Interest.” Depending on who you ask, they’re either citizens bent on doing the hard democratic work of holding politicians to account, or partisans who will stop at nothing to bring down their enemies. (I rather sense they’re both at once.)

And here, Ford’s popularity is rising again, despite everything, or perhaps because of it. A series of legal proceedings, each one harder to explain in a soundbite than the last, has supplied him with all the persecution he needs. In Montreal, they stuff safes so full of cash they can’t be closed. In Toronto, the mayor gets investigated for renting an $840 bus just before filing his nomination papers. Public sentiment mysteriously fails to ignite.

You can take two views about the nature of Rob Ford. One is that he is doomed by his own vices. The other is this: Contrary to all laws of nature, Rob Ford floats.

When negatives refuse to stick to a politician, we typically start talking about Teflon. With Ford, I prefer to think the man has a natural buoyancy. When he is not actively weighing himself down with self-destruction, his support will rise.

The catch with Ford, of course is that the more he tries to govern, the more he self-destructs. So to achieve maximum buoyancy, all he has to do is nothing: Cut ribbons, fulminate on talk radio, lose stunt votes against community spending. The good news for him is that the vaguaries of the mayor’s job description make this entirely workable in practice, and reasonably saleable at the polls.

And if Rob Ford floats, it’s because he lives in an environment where the standards are low. And perhaps this is his greatest political talent: To lower the expectations in whatever contest he enters. Just as he’s redefining the mayor’s job downwards, he’s now managed to pull campaign finance under his spell. Are future campaigns now being told that it’s passable to blunder as the Fords did? Or that it’s okay, only as long as one can act as generally helpless in the face of details as Ford does?

“The perfect should not be permitted to be the enemy of the good,” said Ford’s lawyer. As if we’ve been at risk of approaching either.

Toronto’s mayor gets another big legal victory

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 25, 2013 at 9:22 PM - 0 Comments

Rob Ford is on a big winning streak with his legal battles. The Mayor of Toronto found out Monday that he will not face any charges after an auditor allegedly found discrepancies in his campaign finances from the 2010 election.

The city’s compliance audit committee voted 2-1 in Ford’s favour, opting against any prosecution.

“It’s a great day for democracy,” Ford said after the decision was announced. “Any time there was a doubt, we asked for clarification from election officials and we followed exactly what they said.” He did not take any questions afterwards.

An audit from his 2010 election campaign found that he exceeded spending by $40,168, which is approximately three per cent over his authorized limit, as well as other violations.

Ford’s lawyers have had plenty of work so far 2013. The mayor won an appeal in January, overturning a conflict of interest ruling that could have kicked him out from office.

Police break up homeless protest outside Toronto mayor’s office

By The Canadian Press - Saturday, February 16, 2013 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – Police removed members of an anti-poverty group who set up a makeshift homeless shelter outside Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s office, but the protesters vowed that the last word hasn’t been said.

More than 50 demonstrators from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty brought sleeping bags and blankets to City Hall Friday afternoon to protest a lack of space in Toronto homeless shelters.

Authorities told them they must leave by Friday night and when they refused to comply, officers started removing some of them from City Hall one by one.

The protesters had threatened to stay until the city deals with the problem in homeless shelters, but did not resist as officers led each one out of city hall by the arm.

“Nobody’s been detained, they were all co-operative with us,“ said Inspector Howie Page.

As the demonstrators were being removed OCAP spokesman John Clarke warned they will be back.

“We’re not going to live in a city where human life is lost on the street to social abandonment and neglect, it’s going to be challenged,” Clarke said. “I think the mayor has to respond.”

Toronto’s recommended operating budget for 2013 shows a decrease of 41,172 bed nights — one-night stays in a shelter by a single person.

Ford was not in his office, but earlier Friday told reporters at the Canadian International Auto Show that there are “plenty of beds.”

A better way to build public transit?

By Ivor Tossell - Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 1:49 PM - 0 Comments

How do you get 2.7 million people’s heads around the idea of paying for transit? Here’s a start: Nobody say “subways.”

Both the City of Toronto and its provincial overlords are on a mission for 2013: Sell the public on the idea that if they want less gridlock—which is to say, more public transit—then they’re going to have to pay for it with taxes, tolls or levies.

But what the city’s not doing this time around is even more telling. Historically, transit expansion starts with politicians drawing hopeful lines on a map and then trying to find ways to pay for those lines. This has led to decades of transit fiascos as plans got drawn, redrawn, hacked to bits and then finally half-built.

So now, the city is taking a smarter tack: It’s starting with asking how taxpayers are going to pay for transit, while deferring talk about what exactly that money would pay for. It’s counterintuitive—all stick, no carrot—but it makes a great deal of sense.

“What we’re trying to do right now is focus on principles, which is a good place to start,” Jen Keesmaat, Toronto’s new chief-planner told me, as she rolled out “Feeling Congested,” the city’s new consultation. Those principles involve some general talk about priorities, but the nut of the issue is choosing (lucky us) how we’d like to be taxed.

So, despite the protestations of Toronto’s increasingly sidelined mayor, both city and province are making a full-court press to get this through to the general public, in a blitz of live consultations, op-eds and media hits. The city has also put up a website with an online budgeting exercise that’s worth taking a poke at. It assays 14 “revenue tools,” ranging from a sales tax to development charges to parking levies. Among other things, the site hammers at the idea that no single revenue option will be enough; we’ll probably need a combination. And not all revenue tools are created equal: development tools, for instance, yield nowhere near the returns of parking levies.

(Pointedly, some would-be revenue tools the mayor’s office likes to talk up just didn’t make the list. These include vaguely defined “public-private partnerships,” which, for money-losing projects like transit expansion, are more often a method of administering public funds, than of generating them.)

It’s quite a conversation to be having with an electorate that, less than three years ago, voted in Rob Ford on the explicit premise that he’d cut taxes like the Land Transfer Tax and the now-defunct Vehicle Registration Tax. The difference now is the promise of dedicated funding.

“Before, with the LTT, the VRT, it was just another bloody tax,” says Keesmaat. “What we’re doing right now is saying, hold on a minute, what if that tax got you all these transit lines? Then are you willing to pay it? Does that seem worth it to you? That’s very different than kissing your money goodbye and not knowing where it goes.”

But before they start naming all these projects, the city’s bureaucrats want to talk money. It’s a refreshing reversal of the way transit planning has been run for decades, putting politics first and planning second. For the moment, it keeps the unfortunate “subway vs. streetcar” debate at bay. It shouldn’t be complicated: Toronto needs both, but built in the right places for each. Yet there’s no surer way to turn transit planning into a political football, then to start talking about which citizens “deserve” a subway. (“It’s an absurdity to be debating, at a city-wide level, subways versus LRTs,” said Keesmaat.)

The money-first approach is even more meaningful in the long-term. Since the municipality is so limited in the ways it can legally raise money, trying to fund big projects has long meant begging senior levels of government to cough up huge sums.

It hasn’t worked terribly well. In practice, it’s meant waiting for transit-building ambitions to line up with political fortunes. It means waiting for three governments at three levels who are willing to work together, which is like waiting for three gold bars at a slot machine. It also means waiting for the right people to take the right important roles: When the MPP for Vaughan became Ontario’s Minister of Finance, a $2.5-billion subway extension to a scrubby local field managed to become reality.

And then there’s timing. Politicians like legacy projects, but transit schemes take so long to implement that they become ideal targets for cuts when their successors take over. Even if governments survive, their willingness to spend might not. Governments start looking at megaprojects when they want stimulus spending, then lose interest when the economy recovers and the government is left in the red. The result is that we make half-hearted stabs at building transit when the economy tanks, but never keep pace when development’s booming. Toronto’s transit map is dotted with projects that were conceived for bad reasons and cancelled for worse ones.

After all this, the technocracy is fighting back. Shifting transit funding from top-down to bottom-up—cutting a deal straight with the taxpayer—helps depoliticize the process, setting up revenue streams that could survive from one government to the next. Even Ontario opposition leader Tim Hudak, speaking at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, wouldn’t rule out revenue tools, even as he launched once again into how Scarberians deserve subways in order to be “full citizens.”

The irony, of course, is that Rob Ford himself, who wouldn’t talk money, was the one who led us to talk about nothing but. His campaign for subways, subways, subways helped stoke the public appetite for transit expansion, even as he insisted that taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay extra for it. Ford’s rude encounter with reality helped foster a rare consensus that more transit is needed, but that there’s one way to get it built, and it’s not wishful thinking.

“We’re kind of calling that out,” said Keesmaat. “We’re being very clear: There’s no pot of gold. If we want to invest in public transit, we have to find the revenue tools to pay for it. It’s that simple.”

Ford campaign expenses audit released; says Ford overspent by $40,168

By The Canadian Press - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 5:09 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – Just a week after Toronto’s mayor won his conflict of interest appeal, Rob Ford is facing a new challenge.

A forensic audit of Ford’s 2010 election campaign finances determined he “overspent during his campaign by $40,168″ — an apparent contravention of the Municipal Elections Act.

The audit was based on allegations Ford’s 2010 campaign exceeded the $1.3 million limit and that he broke the law by borrowing about $77,000 in campaign expenses from his family’s company.

A three-person panel will now analyze the violations under the Municipal Elections Act and may bring in a special prosecutor.

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50 ways to leave a mayor

By Ivor Tossell - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 3:56 PM - 0 Comments

Toronto Rob Ford overspent on campaign by more than $40,000, an audit released Friday afternoon revealed. A panel is now looking at the results that could eventually see him removed from office. But any observer of the gladiatorial municipal sphere knows that it’s hard to get rid of a mayor: The magic ingredient is stick-to-it-iveness. Walking along the Annex, I came across a crumpled sheet of paper in a pile of slush outside Clayton Ruby’s law office. A few items were crossed out in evident frustration. Others were furiously underlined. The paper was titled “ORDER OF BUSINESS.”

1. Sue him for conflict of interest.
2. Sue him for general lack of interest.
3. Sue him for constant conflict.
4. Audit his campaign expenses.
5. Audit his lunch expenses.
6. Audit his mind.
7. Audit his soul.
8. Appeal!!
9. Complain to the integrity commissioner.
10. Change that law to let the integrity commissioner take other “other actions”: remedies; fines; exile.
11. Give the ombudsman a Taser.
12. Appeal his existence at OMB.
13. Listen to his show on the radio. Complain to CRTC until black helicopters arrive.
14. Complain to Supreme Court.
15. Complain to Landlord-Tenant tribunal.
16. Complain to PETA.
17. Say that, because his election platform was nonsense, everything since then has been a nullity.
18. Gerrymander his house out of Toronto.
19. He was born in Kenya.
20. He was born downtown.
21. Hanging chads???
22. Over-water the plants at City Hall; whisper the horticulturalists are moving against him.
23. Tell Giorgio Mammoliti we know who tapped his phones, but can only tell him in secret code: Ob-ray Ord-fay.
24. Invite him to “really good house party” in Sudbury but give him the wrong street address.
25. Lose him in a cornrow maze.
26. Insist he sign in every day.
27. Create a Potemkin football league for him.
28. Tell him council’s feeling tired, and will probably just stay in until 2014.
29. Call every day for the next two years, asking him to inspect a pile of dirt in North York that somehow changes address every day.
30. $5 cover charge on council meetings.
31. Throw Pride parade every month. Hold council meetings exclusively on a float going up and down Church St.
32. Gay premier. [triple underline; checkmark]
33. Make him bet his job on the Leafs.
34. Make him bet his job on the Raptors.
35. Make him bet his job on the Jays.
36. Make him bet his job that he can fund a $2 billion a year in transit funding through private-public partnerships.
37. Rock-Paper-Scissors.
38. Game of riddles; all answers drawn from the municipal code of conduct.
39. Early retirement: Argos mascot.
40. Engineer Senate appointment.
41. Goodwill visit to Chris Hadfield.
42. Form production company; stage “Mayor Swap” reality show with Calgary.
43. Stage an intervention with 2.5 million people.
44. Delay him with a pile of “Mayor Seed” at the foot of a cliff; drop an anvil from the top.
45. Paint a black tunnel entrance onto a rock face with a sign saying “SUBWAY HERE”; hope he can’t magically go through it.
46. Rocket-powered roller-skates.
47. Make him a folk hero until he cracks under the weight of his Nation’s expectations.
48. Let him render his title and office irrelevant to every significant policy decision until he vanishes from public view.
49. Lie in wait for him to make a mistake and then scour the law to find some way, any way to remove him from office, dragging the city’s entire bureaucratic, legal, media and political apparatus along with it.
50. Wait until the election and beat him.

Audit into Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s campaign financing due

By Emily Senger - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 8:59 AM - 0 Comments

An audit into Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s campaign expenses may be released Friday afternoon and, depending on what it finds, the report may put the mayor into legal trouble once again.

The report from the city’s auditor looks into how Ford financed his successful run for mayor in 2010.

There are concerns that he may have contravened the Municipal Elections Act. If the audit finds this has happened, a city compliance audit committee could decide to hire a special prosecutor, who could consider non-criminal charges against the mayor, reports the Toronto Star. One of the penalties could be removal from office. Continue…

Rob Ford and the campaign ahead

By Ivor Tossell - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 5:47 PM - 0 Comments

Jon Blacker/Reuters

We all returned today to the member’s lounge beneath the sweeping dome of city council, where two months earlier, the mayor of Toronto stood, blotchy-faced, broken-voiced, and apologizing. On that day, he had been ordered from office for breaching conflict-of-interest laws – pending an appeal. Rob Ford was in a better mood this morning. At 10:30 a.m., the courts announced he’d won the case on appeal, and that his mayoralty would survive.

Today Rob Ford braced himself behind the same podium and looked, for a moment, like he was about to turn a page. He said he was humbled. He said he’d found support “at every gas station, at every restaurant,” his preferred method of taking the city’s pulse on any given file. Then he explained that he was running the city better than any administration ever has, that “95 per cent of the people out there supported me,” and that he’s going to be mayor for the next six years. It was like listening to a greatest-hits album.

So the fresh start will have to wait. To the undisguised delight of journalists everywhere, we get more Rob Ford. However, despite the fact that he’s still in charge, there’s not much of his mayoralty left but one long campaign.

Today’s appeal win wasn’t exactly a vindication: A three-judge Divisional Court panel let Ford off the hook on a jurisdictional issue, not on any question of whether he was right or wrong. In essence, the court ruled that Toronto’s council didn’t have the authority to ask Ford pay restitution for dubiously-solicited football charity donations, so everything that followed, including Ford speaking and voting not to have to pay, was a nullity.

“Nullity”–just one of the fun new words we’ve learned in this saga–also describes the mayor’s remaining political clout. He’s spent the last two months in a state of limbo, on the heels of a term that was calamitous enough to begin with. Just last week, after a year of deliberations, Ford impulsively voted against his own penny-pinching budget; a loose cannon on council proposed a spur-of-the-moment tax freeze and, like a retriever after a squirrel, Ford couldn’t resist. His budget chief quit in frustration. It would have been a good-news week for him otherwise.

Nor does he have smooth sailing ahead. Clayton Ruby says he’s going to seek leave to appeal this case to the Supreme Court, which seems like a long shot. And, as you’ve no doubt read, some of the same foes who launched the conflict-of-interest case have triggered an audit of Ford election finances, which is due out next week. This, too, could see him removed from office.

It is almost certainly better for the city that Rob Ford didn’t get turfed. The next two years would have been constant calamity–even more so than whatever Ford himself has in store for us next. All the same, regular mayoral races in Toronto last almost a year; the start of the 2014 election season is just 11 months away. Anticipating his possible removal, candidates across the city were assembling teams, hatching plans and bagging bagmen. The prospect of Ford’s ejection revved up the election machine a year early.

The mayor himself is going to have to start campaigning immediately just to assert his own relevance. Ford’s successful appeal is unlikely to give him much of a boost. In Rob Ford’s world of diminished expectations, victory is not self-destructing in one way or the other. But not getting fired is not the same as a renewed mandate.

For a populist, the ideal scenario is to get thrown out by the courts and then reinstated by the people. Ford’s hand actually would have been strengthened had he lost today, so long as he was either reinstated by council, or, more plausibly, returned in a by-election. As it stands, he’s been publicly humiliated, but denied the martyrdom that could have reignited his support.

His ability to lead derives from his public support and his ability to do the hard work of politics. That was never Ford’s strong suit; it can’t be transacted at the gas stations and restaurants of the city, conducted solely with people who come up to him on the street, or want him to pay a housecall.

Which leaves him with the only lever he ever had: Being the voice of Ford Nation, the man chosen by 383,501 as their guy at City Hall. His people, as always, will be with him, the core of support that he can’t be alienated from, and probably can’t grow past. He can rightfully claim to be hounded by foes who’ll stop at nothing to throw him out of office, a fact that hasn’t done any favours for the political climate in the city. But without an election to rally around, there’s not much outlet for that support.

The mayor himself isn’t much interested in changing. When reporters asked what he’d learned from this experience, he said he’d learned how popular he really is. “Even a lot of them said, I didn’t support you last time, but you’ve proved me wrong,” he said.

Rob Ford isn’t changing. The mayor may have kept his job, but there’s nowhere left for him to go but to the people. His opponents are already in motion. The 2014 mayoralty campaign has already begun.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford says he’s humbled by court fight to keep his job

By The Canadian Press - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 1:28 PM - 0 Comments

TORONTO – Toronto’s combative mayor says the legal fight to keep his job has been a “humbling experience.”

A Divisional Court ruling today overturned a lower court decision that ousted Rob Ford from office for violating conflict of interest laws.

Ford says he has “enormous respect for the judicial system” and he is thankful for the decision.

An earlier court decision ordered Ford turfed from office for taking part in a council vote that he repay $3,150 raised for his private football foundation.

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For the record: Full appeal decision in Magder v. Ford

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 11:08 AM - 0 Comments

Magder v. Ford: Ontario Superior Court of Justice decision by

Related links:

• Rob Ford wins court appeal, will remain as Toronto mayor
• Twitter reacts to Rob Ford ruling

Twitter reacts to Rob Ford ruling

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

Twitter responds to Rob Ford ruling

Rob Ford has won his appeal, which means he’ll be Mayor of Toronto for at least two more years. Here’s how Twitter followed the case this morning:

Storified by Maclean’s Magazine· Fri, Jan 25 2013 09:27:48

Rob Ford wins court appeal, will remain as Toronto mayor

By Emily Senger - Friday, January 25, 2013 at 10:33 AM - 0 Comments

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford leaves his lawyer's office in on Friday, Jan. 25, 2013. (Chris Young/CP)

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has won a court appeal, which means he will remain mayor.

The appeal to Divisional Court stems from a November decision, in which Justice Charles Hackland found that the mayor had contravened the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act when he spoke at a council meeting in February 2012 and then voted on an item that had to do with the use of city resources to solicit donations to his private football charity. The penalty for Ford’s actions, Hackland ruled, was that the mayor would be removed from office.

Ford appealed that decision and was also granted a stay, which allowed him to remain in office until after the appeal. During the appeal hearing, Ford’s lawyer argued that the mayor was an honest man who had made a mistake.

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