Underdog (13 page)

As a journalist, I was able to tell the story of St. Catharines senior and retired educator Marian Walsh, who had three health crises in early 2013 and found herself thrown out of the hospital without proper home care – although she'd been “promised the moon” by her local CCAC. Remember those? They are the centres staffed with many of Ms. Matthews's friends that have middle managers positively tripping over each other shuffling paperwork and creating unnecessary red tape while the senior brass are making six-figure salaries. Ms. Walsh ended up getting through the challenging time by hiring her own help and virtually exhausting her private insurance benefits, including thousands of dollars of her savings. She also relied on neighbours to pitch in. As I pointed out in my column about Ms. Walsh, home care involving two
nursing visits plus 7.5 personal support worker hours per week would cost the government a mere $4,400, but because of the growing demand and the Liberals' mismanagement of the budget, the average home care client in Ontario was being forced to wait a ridiculous nineteen days to see a personal support worker.

During my brief but very fruitful six months at Queen's Park, I also tackled the very sad situation at Kinark Family and Child Services, one of the largest agencies in Ontario providing desperately needed intensive behavioural intervention (IBI) therapy for severely autistic kids. Kinark actually serves as the money dispensary only, handing out funding for the IBI therapy provided by another agency. In September 2013, I wrote about three families in York Region who'd been informed – with no rationale or warning provided – that the funding was to be cut off for their sons, even though all of them had improved tremendously with the IBI therapy. Kinark's officials would never admit it, but the funding cut was to make way for other families on the waiting list. Meanwhile, as I dug more into Kinark and its controversial history, I inadvertently discovered that Jane Rounthwaite, Premier Kathleen Wynne's wife, had cashed in with more than one million dollars in contracts from Kinark, even filling in as Kinark's interim director of program services in 2010 and 2011. This was at the same time that the agency was picking and choosing the families who'd be lucky enough to receive funding for autism services. In late March of 2016 the province cut off funding for IBI therapy entirely for kids five years and older, proving once again they care little about the vulnerable.

It had become clear to my editors that while at Queen's Park I was far more interested in digging into stories of political and bureaucratic mismanagement and the mistreatment of taxpayers by the Liberal government than the news story of the day. I loved watching politicians squirm when I asked them the hard questions. But I was bored by the political theatre. I felt I could do much more for my readers by putting a human face on that mismanagement and mistreatment. My ongoing desire to scratch below the surface and my scoop on the obscene spending by the brass at the Pan Am Games in September 2013 – an investigative series that led to the firing of three senior executives including the CEO Ian Troop – got me reassigned full-time to investigative reporting. That subsequently brought paramedic Patrick Allen and Olympian “Mighty Mouse” Elaine Tanner out of the woodwork. Mr. Allen approached me a few days before he was fired in May 2014 for trying to keep costs down, believe it or not. He was also an unfortunate casualty of two bosses jockeying for power within the TO2015 organization. He risked his severance to blow the whistle on what had become a terribly mismanaged and dysfunctional organization. It was touch and go for at least two weeks whether he'd get his severance, but he finally did. I suspect the Pan Am officials decided to pay him what he was owed rather than have me make a hero of him in another story. Ms. Tanner, affectionately named “Mighty Mouse” because of her tiny stature, was at the tender age of seventeen the first Canadian woman to win an Olympic medal in swimming. In 1968, in Mexico City, she took home three medals from a single Olympic Games to add to the ten times she was called to the medals podium in the Pan Am and Commonwealth Games the year before.
But when she retired from competition at age eighteen, the Canadian sports world tossed her aside like a used-up piece of garbage. Mighty Mouse and I spoke after my Pan Am exposé appeared and we had an instant connection – two underdogs who'd come out on top after experiencing many obstacles in our lives. She was brave enough to relay her tale of being cast aside by the sports world and, after suffering from anorexia and depression, finding herself homeless on the streets of Vancouver in the 1980s. She also spoke about her disappointment with the system, which she feels has lost sight of the fact that the Olympics, or Pan Am Games, or Commonwealth Games are to celebrate athleticism and not a way to “feed a lot of elite people” who are “at the trough.” I have no doubt her story was read by a good number of people in the competitive sports business the day it ran, and I was very proud of her for speaking up. She's started her own website called
TeamUnderdog.​ca
to raise awareness of a variety of underdog stories in the areas of mental health, homelessness, water safety, animal safety, and even the story of a journalist who was threatened with legal action for writing an exposé on John Furlong, the former CEO of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, pertaining to abuse allegations against him while he was a teacher in 1970. (The defamation suit and all legal action pertaining to Mr. Furlong was dismissed in the fall of 2015).

BY THE TIME
I was putting the finishing touches on this chapter – about two years after I'd first taken on the investigative beat at the
Toronto Sun –
I'd managed to touch on municipal, provincial, and school board issues of mismanagement.
The more I wrote, the more my Twitter and Facebook messenger feed, as well as my e-mail inbox, filled to the brim with tips and possible stories. I saw a need and was happy to fill it. I'm nothing special, but let's face it, there are not many avenues out there, whether in government services or in the media, that legitimate whistle-blowers and the discontented can access to have their voices heard. We pat ourselves on the back plenty as Canadians for being there for those in need, but all too often those who pride themselves with caring and helping the most – government bureaucrats, the Lib-left, etc. – are in it to help only themselves and their various sanctimonious agendas. “We care,” they say. Yes, they do care – about themselves only. Calling them out is the best job I could ever have, slings and arrows be damned!

It was during the Toronto budget debate in 2002 that I first got a sense of how much councillors, Mayor Mel Lastman, and even city staff treated Rob Ford's repeated attempts to trim the fat at City Hall as a big joke. The then thirty-two-year-old newbie councillor had felt, and quite rightly, that if taxpayers were going to be handed a 4.32 per cent property tax hike that year, councillors and bureaucrats should lead by example and tighten their own belts, even if just a little. By then, I'd been at City Hall for four years and had watched how self-indulgent the politicians could be. I had also observed how Toronto's amalgamation from six cities into one megacity – instead of being a downsizing exercise as originally envisaged by Premier Mike Harris – had turned into an excuse to harmonize union wages, city services, and even councillors' own perks up to the rich levels enjoyed by the pampered downtowners and professional grant-getters in the old City of Toronto.

The savings Mr. Ford proposed that day were more symbolic than anything, and he knew it. They wouldn't have made a tremendous difference to City Hall's bottom line and they certainly wouldn't have left councillors feeling the pinch in the slightest. He wanted to cut the $100,000 worth of free food and drink served at council and committee meetings, and to trim per-councillor slush funds (office budgets that they use for self-promotional flyers, travel, and meals out, over and above the staff budgets and the free offices, equipment, and the like) from $53,100 to $35,000 per year. He also asked councillors and city staff to water their own plants so he could get rid of the $78,000 City Hall plant watering budget. Was the man mad?

It wasn't enough for councillors to vote down his ideas. They intended to humiliate him on that March day. Even the bureaucrats joined in the fray because councillors sent the message that it was acceptable to mock this man, his ideas, his intelligence, his weight, you name it. Beefy NDPer Howard Moscoe, best known during his thirty long years in office for only moving quickly when he spotted a free buffet, for his relentless efforts to increase his already generous pay, and for the mess he made of the TTC during his time as chairman, heaved himself out of his council seat with a derisive snort, and – bellowing to the crowd as he always did – asked if Ford expected the city's top boss, Shirley Hoy, to also clean the windows and the urinals. Councillors roared at his lame joke. But the die was cast.

It went on for years and years. Whenever Mr. Ford tried to inject some sanity into council decisions – whether they were related to the draconian tree bylaws of the David Miller regime, or some out-of-control leftist pet project, or council's
obsession with speed-bumping the city to death – he often found himself the lone wolf and one of the few voices of reason. Whenever he got emotional about council's dependence on overspending and their complete disregard for balancing the books – saying things in the heat of the moment that were not couched in the phony political rhetoric used by his council colleagues – he was mocked and ostracized. Council's bullies treated him as nothing more than the punching bag they could use to divert attention from their ridiculous spending decisions, from their arrogant dismissal of taxpayer wants, and from their childish debates. While I would often cringe in those days at the clumsy way Mr. Ford expressed himself – he called Giorgio Mammoliti a “Gino Boy” and Gloria Lindsay Luby a “waste of skin,” and claimed that “Orientals” work like dogs – I admired him for standing up to the bullies on council and sticking to his principles.

As I noted in the
Toronto Sun
in March 2002 – not realizing how prescient I was – one day Ford would have the last laugh. Some twelve years and many Rob Ford escapades later, I was certainly not laughing at what happened to our controversial former mayor – his crack cocaine smoking, his alcoholism, his crude outbursts, or how he himself derailed a fiscally sane and sound agenda. I despaired every time I thought of the Lib-left elitists taking delicious delight in the ruination of the fiscally conservative agenda and the return to good times at the taxpayer trough – though I'm not so sure this is the end of what we can call the backlash against the political arrogance and mismanagement, judging from the number of hard-core supporters Mr. Ford continued to have throughout all of his troubles and the massive outpouring from supporters at his funeral. Still, I am forever amused when a
member of Toronto's chattering classes – including some of my colleagues in the media – continues to accuse me, even following his death, of enabling Mr Ford's addictions because I had the audacity (in their minds) to support him when he deserved supporting, and to call out his fellow councillors and the compliant media for stooping to a level of crudity, vindictiveness, and cruelty I've never ever seen in my eighteen years of covering politicians. If students behaved like this in grade school, they'd be reprimanded, disciplined, and sent home. The attitude was, either you were anti-Ford or you were pro-Ford. There was no in between or shades of grey, as is necessary in any democracy. The debate was extremely polarized, and I was often berated for daring to show the slightest bit of empathy given that he might have had a mental illness or for understanding why he was in denial about his alcoholism.

Of course, I had as little to do with enabling Mr. Ford's rise to power as I did with creating the circumstances that empowered his bid for mayor. It was arrogant Liberal and NDP politicians in Canada's largest city – such as Kyle Rae, Paula Fletcher, Sandra Bussin, Howard Moscoe, and Adam Vaughan – who spent with impunity, and seemed to care little about their constituents, and who actually created the environment in which a Rob Ford would not only resonate with the public but would become the rational choice for mayor. They were the enablers – the ones who empowered Mr. Ford, who, for all his warts, his penchant for inappropriate and sometimes bordering on racist discourse, and his personal issues, had his heart in the right place when it came to respecting taxpayers.

If anyone enabled Rob Ford to become mayor of Toronto in 2010, it was David Miller, with his arrogant disdain of
anyone who dared question his self-righteous environmental agenda, and the unalienable fact that he tripled the city's debt and raised four new taxes over his seven years as mayor. If there was one final act that sealed the deal for Torontonians in paving the way for Ford Nation, it was the mayor's cowardly surrender to the unions' demands after forcing the city to endure a thirty-nine-day garbage strike in 2009.

Councillor Kyle Rae did his bit when he threw himself a twelve-thousand-dollar taxpayer-funded farewell party to himself at the Rosewater Supper Club. The entitlement was so entrenched and accepted at City Hall that the integrity commissioner – the same woman who helped bring Rob Ford down – refused to investigate Mr. Rae's abuse of taxpayer money or the fact that a long list of political guests, including George Smitherman, who was running for mayor at the time, turned up to lap up the free booze and hors d'oeuvres. Rob Ford would never have been caught dead at such a party. My editor at the time, Rob Granatstein, had such a friendly relationship with the councillor that I made a conscious decision not to turn up at the party to break the initial story, figuring Mr. Rae would feel well within his rights to throw a very public temper tantrum at me, as he had in other instances.

Paula Fletcher, a classic leftist bully, got Toronto tongues wagging for days when she publicly dressed down a citizen, John Smith, in 2010, for turning up at City Hall to provide feedback on the $9.2-billion operating budget. No doubt irate that he dared criticize the spending excesses of the Miller regime, she screamed at Mr. Smith to “come on down” and deliver his criticisms to her face, as if she were some schoolyard bully. Her rant was replayed and discussed on radio talk shows for days. It wasn't enough that Toronto residents had been taxed
to death under the NDP regime of David Miller. Torontonians let it be known that they were simply fed up with the rude and overbearing Ms. Fletcher and some of her socialist compatriots – and this was yet another nail in the coffin of the leftist stranglehold on City Hall. There's no doubt in my mind that Adam Vaughan, novelist Margaret Atwood, Premier Kathleen Wynne, a long list of Red Tories, assorted other elitists, and the
Toronto Star
helped roll out a red carpet for Mr. Ford's victory in 2010 when they engaged in vicious fear mongering, intimidation, and attacks on his character for weeks and months before the election to prop up their chosen candidate, George Smitherman – the same deputy premier to Dalton McGuinty who had his paw prints all over the eHealth, Ornge, Samsung, and Green Energy Act spending fiascos. When integrity commissioner and David Miller hire Janet Leiper came up with the first of her numerous one-sided reports chiding Mr. Ford, then still a councillor, for his many alleged crimes against the socialist state, I watched with amazement how councillors took turns lining him up in front of a verbal firing squad. I kept thinking they just couldn't get it through their thick heads that by disparaging Mr. Ford, they were driving voters to support him. As the days drew closer to the October 2010 election, it didn't dawn on the self-perceived A-listers that their tricks weren't working – that Torontonians were plain tired of the corruption, the arrogance, the overspending on pet agendas, and the phony crocodile tears for the downtrodden. But more than anything, they were fed up with being treated as second-class citizens. The
Toronto Star
and its long list of past-their-prime columnists, thinking they ran the city, never did recover from Mr. Ford's win, and they set out to destroy him from the moment he took office. They finally succeeded when he
succumbed to his aggressive cancer in March 2016, barely 46. Actually they tried for months before, but didn't get very far by spitting in the faces of a large constituency of voters who just happened not to read their newspaper or live in the Annex.

Fact is, no one was more surprised than me when council's “enfant terrible” decided in late March 2010 to run for mayor. It wasn't just that I thought him unpolished, far from diplomatic, and extremely limited in his fiscal and intellectual scope. But as the lone wolf on council who refused to even try to play nice with others, I wondered how he'd ever be able to coalesce such a dysfunctional council. While I knew he had balls and determination and his heart was in the right place, I figured him far more suited to the role of opposition critic, holding his colleagues' feet to the fire, than actually tackling the complex job of running a city. My hopes in the early days of the mayoralty race were pinned on Rocco Rossi, who I knew not only had the guts and integrity to make the tough changes needed to clean up City Hall, but had the right intellectual stuff to follow through on a vision that went well beyond saving a few hundred thousand dollars here and there by cutting free food for councillors and their office budgets. Mr. Rossi had the polish to bring together a highly dysfunctional council of competing interests without pandering to them. I saw him present a well-thought-out fiscal action plan and outside-the-box thinking on the gridlock problem, and to this day, I suspect he would have tackled the ongoing issues with construction in Toronto that never seems to be delivered on time or on budget. But it was not to be with Mr. Rossi. Regrettably, his message of change never did resonate with voters, who – so fed up with the constant onslaught of new taxes and fees imposed under the David Miller regime and the slick talk that had come
from City Hall – really wanted a quick fix, a campaign platform delivered in sixty-second sound bites by a “regular guy.”

I understood why Mr. Ford's message of stopping the “gravy train” quickly caught on with those disenfranchised by City Hall. I had watched the anger grow during the ten years prior to the 2010 election. People were already feeling disconnected from an amalgamated city government that had grown too big – too unwieldy, bloated, and beholden to the unions that worked there. The thirty-nine-day garbage strike in the summer of 2009 managed to bring that anger to a boil. When I decided to take a five-week leave from my job at the paper just after that strike and run for MPP in St. Paul's under newly selected PC leader Tim Hudak, I encountered the anger at the door while campaigning. In fact, I heard far more outrage about Mr. Miller's mishandling of the garbage strike than, unfortunately, then premier Dalton McGuinty.

At a time when most of the David Miller acolytes had lost touch with what they were there for and started believing their own rhetoric about how important they were, Mr. Ford presented as the antithesis of the arrogant politician – an Everyman who returned phone calls, gave out his home number to constituents, and connected with residents in their own neighbourhoods. To many disenfranchised voters, Ford practised what he preached by not spending his taxpayer-funded office budget or jetting around the world. He told dirty jokes, was overweight and loud, liked football, and actually preferred hanging out at a suburban barbecue rather than the Giller Prize event. I still remember Denise telling me that when she had her issue with Councillor Michael Walker, who helped her neighbours to take away her widened driveway in 2006, Mr. Ford was one of the few councillors who took
the time to actually sit down and talk to her about it. That was his appeal in a nutshell.

As the months went on and Mr. Rossi's campaign did not gain much ground, I realized that Mr. Ford represented the best chance of shaking up the entitlement at City Hall and getting the city's fiscal fortunes back on track. My editors at the
Toronto Sun
agreed. I knew he had the determination to make the hard decisions; I just hoped that he would surround himself with strong councillors to make up for his many weaknesses, whether it was his inability to understand the hard numbers in the budget or to build bridges with all members of council. I suspected that life would never be dull with Rob Ford as mayor, but I certainly underestimated the sideshow that would emerge. I knew Mr. Ford would always be rough around the edges and boorish, and would say things that would send the elitists on council into histrionics. But to be honest, I didn't think much of their dramatics, considering that far too many of them had their moments too over the ten years I'd watched their every move. Adam Vaughan? His nastiness drove Mel Lastman to threaten to kill him. Shelley Carroll? The former bank teller drove the city's finances into freefall while pretending to know what she was talking about or making it up as she went along. If she didn't like what someone was saying at a committee – whether citizen or councillor – she'd pace around the room, heckle and mock, talk loudly, and break into her horsey laugh to try to distract and intimidate them. Ditto for Pam McConnell and Paula Fletcher. Gord Perks? He became well known for grilling residents who didn't share his view of the world, as if he considered himself a defence lawyer questioning a hostile witness in court. If Rob Ford's colleagues on council had anything in
common, it was their complete lack of class and decorum and their constant mean-spirited bullying of anybody who dared criticize them or their agenda. True, he could get somewhat emotional, but if Mr. Ford had drinking or drug problems during those years as a councillor, he hid them well. Mike Del Grande and I both watched him for ten years and never saw any sign of alcohol or drug abuse.