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The judge’s decision in Rob Ford’s conflict of interest case will be released Monday morning. Spacing’s senior editor John Lorinc will be tweeting about the fate of mayor of Toronto starting around 9am until the ruling becomes public at 10am. A column examining the verdict will be follow by early afternoon.
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4 comments
Perhaps Spacing’s contributors should go on record with their predictions / hopes for the verdict, for posterity.
And here is a helpful hyperlink.
I think we probably had the worst outcome possible. He is removed from office and allowed to run again. Now let us face it, he got a pretty solid voter base, maybe somewhere around 30-35%, and he will quite possibly gain some votes because the feeling among some voters that he was just prosecuted for some charity work. Should there be an election soon, all these people will be very motivated to come out and vote. On the other hand, his opponents has a short time to define themselves, and could split votes against him. Heavy-weights might shy away from entering the fight because of the short timeframe and the odds which do not look that good. So IMO he is actually pretty likely to win again in a vote in near future. What will such a result do to this town? Will that even help him 2 years from now?
I am not surprised by the verdict. The system has a way of protecting itself. Without a doubt Ford was in conflict, but so what. If he had not used the letter head there would be no issue. Everyone whom he solicited was aware that he was the Mayor. The fact that so much time has been wasted on this while real conflict’s get ignored or around the letter of the law is appalling. How about the way candidates raise donations. Developers frequently get calls from EA’s that will ask how many tables they would like to buy at a fundraiser dinner. Of course a list of names of the ‘individuals’ attending will be requested so as to appear as independent contributions. Or issues like councilor’s getting campaign donations from family members of persons seeking sole source contracts, against the recommendation of staff. Those are the types on conflicts we should be worried about.