LORINC: The death knell for Toronto’s Integrity Commissioner?

When council this week turns its frayed attention to integrity commissioner Janet Leiper’s follow-up report about Rob Ford’s practice of asking lobbyists to donate to his family’s football foundation, it will be doing nothing less than casting a vote of confidence in the city’s most important accountability mechanism.

Make no mistake: if council refuses to act on her recommendations (i.e., merely receives the report), it will be completely gutting the credibility of the office of Toronto’s integrity commissioner (IC). After all, if the city’s top accountability officer, armed with a legislative mandate and clear council policies, can’t confront a sitting mayor, what’s the point?

Indeed, Leiper may as well tender her resignation, while the rest of us mull over how one of the key recommendations of Justice Denise Bellamy’s inquiry into the MFP computer leasing scandal came to such an ignominious end.

The aforementioned report is a follow-up to a 2010 commissioner’s investigation which concluded that Ford, then a councillor, violated council’s code of conduct by “improperly” using his office and influence to raise money for the football charity.

During the final session of David Miller’s term in office, and in the midst of an election campaign, council adopted Leiper’s recommendations. She has spent the year since trying to persuade Ford to comply with the decision, as is his “obligation,” in her words. The recommendation before council this week gives him a month to prove that he’s reimbursed the donors, as per her original council-approved finding.

The caricature version of the integrity commissioner’s actions, promoted by some Ford supporters, is that the 2010 council decision was a nakedly partisan gesture, as were earlier attempts by Leiper and her predecessor David Mullan to rein in Ford’s intemperate behaviour and his unwillingness to adhere to council rules.

A closer reading of the IC’s record since 2006 suggests the story is far more complicated. Few now remember that Mullan, council’s first integrity commissioner, actually supported Ford’s practice of involving himself in other councillors’ ward business and helping their constituents deal with city-related problems. The issue first arose back in 2004, amidst a spat between Ford and Howard Moscoe, who had succeeded in getting speed bumps built in Ward 2, a.k.a. Fordville.

Ford demanded that Mullan investigate, and his subsequent report, released in September, 2005, not only approved of the practice, but dressed it up, noting that such incursions both improved transparency and reduced the temptation for councillors to treat their wards like personal fiefdoms. It’s not an overstatement to say that Mullan’s ruling helped lay the groundwork for Ford’s mayoral victory.

As is well known, the integrity commissioners also took aim at Ford’s antics – refusing to properly report office expenses, admonishing his public drunkenness at Leafs game, and violating council confidentiality rules because he couldn’t be bothered reading staff reports.

But during the Miller years, the integrity commissioner also rapped the knuckles of left-leaning stalwarts like Howard Moscoe, who was rightly taken to task for inappropriately using a City of Toronto email address to drum up business for his sign company in the run-up to the 2007 municipal elections.

Nor did the integrity commissioner always go after Ford with hammer and tong. After he was accused in 2005 for sending around his City of Toronto business card to prospective Deco customers, Mullan wrote, “It is an improper use of city property for a councillor to include his or her city business card in promotional material relating to his or her outside business interests.” However, he didn’t recommend a reprimand. Ford, in turn, pledged to cease and desist.

Ford’s increasingly defiant approach to the integrity commissioner seems to date to a 2009 complaint brought by Councillor Adam Vaughan. During a radio broadcast, Ford accused Vaughan of conflict of interest over the latter’s alleged role in getting a campaign donor appointed to a city committee.

As Lorne Sossin, the then interim integrity commissioner, noted in his report about the episode, Ford made a prompt on-air retraction and apology. “I have further concluded that no sanction is necessary in these circumstances.”

But at the time, Ford was an unpopular nuisance who enjoyed making embarrassing revelations about his colleagues’ office expenses. Perhaps as a result, council ignored Sossin’s recommendation and passed a resolution basically rubbing Ford’s face in what he’d done, ordering him to make a public apology and retraction to Vaughan and council, and also to submit a signed version of the same.

Ford, for sure, is one of the most verbally reckless and bellicose politicians I’ve ever encountered; his brother is cut from the same cloth. But I’d argue that council, in that instance, showed itself to be a little too eager to stand on Ford’s neck.

If you read six years worth of council motions in response to integrity commission reports, that one sticks out like a sore thumb. Indeed, I’d bet heavily that Ford has nursed a festering grievance over that particular episode ever since.

Which leads me to the issue of the independence of the integrity commissioner. While the IC reports to council, and council is the ultimate arbiter of code of conduct disputes, I’d argue the only way this accountability office can truly fulfill its statutory duty (City of Toronto Act, s. 158) is for council to accept the IC’s recommendations 100% of the time. Otherwise, the whole thing risks becoming a gong show, with the rulings dependent on whichever political faction prevails.

In other words, the IC must be totally free of the taint of politics, as is the case with the city’s auditor general.

Independence is what Bellamy had in mind when she laid out the policy architecture for this position after the city’s worst-ever corruption scandal.

“The City,” says recommendation 46 in her lengthy report, “should give the integrity commissioner the power to recommend to Council an appropriate range of sanctions for ethical misdeeds by councillors. Sanctions should include public reprimands, public apologies, expulsion from one or more committee meetings, removal from committee posts or committee chair positions, expulsion from one or more Council meetings, or, at the high end of the spectrum, a fine or declaration of a vacancy in the councillor’s seat.” (The actual penalties are considerably less onerous.)

By contrast to the Vaughan accusation, Ford’s lobbyist-donor problem is far more significant than his chronic case of gutter-mouth. Lest we forgot the lessons of MFP, this story is all about the ever-present risk of influence peddling in politics.

So at City Hall this week, the 45 members of council face a stark choice: they can vote to destroy the IC’s moral authority with yet another politically partisan decision, or they can allow Leiper to do the job they themselves hired her to do.

 

photo by Marc Lostracco