The fact of the matter is that it can't. Ford's popular support has been withering away almost from the day he took office, mostly due to his own hubris and stupidity. His own allies on council have learned that they can vote against him with impunity. They have their own careers to look out for and it's become clear to them that having the albatross of Hizzoner's delusional populism tied around their necks does nothing to further that.
Finally and most importantly, how this plays out is in the hands of a single judge now, Justice Charles Harkland.
For the uninitiated, this particular story has been going on for years. I haven't written about it because I simply never thought it would come to this. Contrary to every piece of available evidence, I thought that the Mayor would grow the self-awareness to somehow avoid the disaster that is now seemingly inevitable.
Ford has this teen football charity that he seems more passionate about than he does his political career. As a mere city councillor, he used city letterhead and resources to solicit funds for said charity from lobbyists and businesses with ties to the city. While I was shocked that this, in and of itself, isn't a crime, the city's integrity commissioner, Janet Leiper, declared it verboten and ordered Ford to return the money ($3,150) on August 20, 2010. The full council voted to support Leiper on August 25.
Ford refused, ignoring six different letters from Leiper. In the interim, he became mayor in November, 2010. On February 1, 2012, Leiper issues another report, acknowledging same. The matter is taken up by Council again on February 7. This time, Ford is absolved.
And that's where things get hairy for Hizzoner. You see, the mayor spoke and voted during the debate on his own conduct. Since that vote also involved what the law describes as a “pecuniary interest,” it also put him on the wrong side of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. A private citizen named Paul Magder filed suit on March 12 seeking to have Ford removed from office under the MCIA.
On June 28, Ford gives a hilarious 150-page deposition that makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't take any of this seriously. Justice Harkland orders the matter to trial and further orders that the mayor must testify publicly. That testimony is ongoing as I write this. It doesn't appear to be going well for him.
Mayor Ford is putting on the most impossibly ridiculous defence imaginable. His position is that there can't be a conflict because the vote at issue was of no financial benefit to the City of Toronto. To his mind, for there to be a conflict between an office holder and the city, both must be a position to financially benefit.
Folks, I've been following politics closely for decades. I have never heard anyone interpret conflict-of-interest legislation this way. Ever. Moreover, I've never heard of a politician dumb or desperate enough to even attempt to offer it in a court of law. I'd say that this is Nixonesque but Nixon's declared understanding of conspiracy laws in the David Frost interviews was at least clever and entertaining.
Nobody, seemingly not even the mayor and his lawyer, think that Ford's factual defence is going to withstand any scrutiny at all. Luckily for them, there's a secondary defence available to them under the act, specifically that Rob Ford was just too ignorant of virtually everything to understand that a conflict may exist. In this case, unlike most others, ignorance of the law actually is an excuse.
Magder's attorney, Clayton Ruby, understands this and spent most of the June 28 deposition and this morning disassembling it as an escape route for Ford. He is very specifically proving that Ford, if he is in fact ignorant of the law, was willfully so. After each of his four elections to municipal office, Ford was given a code of conduct pamphlet that explains concepts like conflict of interest, which he shockingly now doesn't recall receiving or reading.
Ford instead says that he relied on the very same bureaucrats that he's spent his career railing against to advise him of conflicts, although he this morning admitted that the responsibility for determining and announcing conflicts of his alone. Hizzoner also admits that he didn't seek advice from anyone about the potential of a conflict regarding the February 7 vote.
Ford and his allies are further arguing that this is nothing more than a political attack, which is transparently horseshit. Were former mayor David Miller or any of Ford's innumerable enemies on Council to find themselves in this situation, Ford Nation would be the very first ones with their claws out. Of that there is no doubt whatsoever. And they would be absolutely correct in doing so. These laws exist for a very important reason.
Nor is this, as Ford and his pinhead supporters argue, something for the "court of public opinion" to decide. Elections are popularity contests and the law is not. For "law and order" types to even suggest this is to highlight their own rank hypocrisy.
If Rob Ford is allowed to survive this, it will essentially be impossible to enforce conflict of interest laws in the future. Some grifter scumbag will just invent their own definition of the law and then argue that he was stupid and lazy. In that event, we may as well be honest enough to just abolish those laws in their entirety and allow ourselves to be drowned in the ensuing corruption because they'll be meaningless. And no law at all is far better to a meaningless law.
If it were up to me, the mayor's solicitation of charitable donations from lobbyists and others with business before the city alone would be sufficient to remove him from office and disqualify him for life. The incestuous relationship between politicians and lobbyists should be put on the tightest leash imaginable if we don't want our democracy to become a bigger joke than it already is. .
The most damning fact in this case is how avoidable the whole mess was. We're talking about a grand total of less than four grand here and Rob Ford is a wealthy man. Unfortunately, Rob Ford is also obstinate, arrogant and not very bright.
But make no mistake about it, this is the hill that Mayor Rob Ford himself decided to die on. He is the author of his own destruction.
Special thanks to Torontoist for the timeline of events.
0 comments:
Post a Comment