Underdog (23 page)

The hypocrisy seemed pretty clear to me. But when I said on CP24's
Stephen LeDrew Live
that Ms. Wynne gave lesbians a bad name, the Twitterverse lit up. Sure it was a provocative statement. But I truly felt, as a fellow lesbian – and especially as someone who'd lived closeted for twenty years – that we needed to show some empathy towards Mr. Ford. Besides, unlike Ms. Wynne's corrupt government, Mr. Ford had not thrown precious tax dollars down the drain on scandals or handouts to his supporters. Quite the contrary. His personal problems didn't directly impact on taxpayers. In fact, I often joked that if he managed to accomplish everything he did while dealing with these personal issues, imagine what he could have done without them.

Nevertheless, that day and in the days that followed, yet another new name for me was added to the Lib-left repertoire on social media – that of self-loathing lesbian who was/is a disgrace to the LGBT community. This made absolutely no sense. I'd lived in the closet for twenty years and finally had the guts to come out and write a column about who I really was. I had no problem calling Denise my wife, unlike Ms. Wynne, who while legally married to Jane Rounthwaite for years, still publicly calls her a partner – a move I suspect is simply an exercise to pander to her more religious voters. So, really, who is the self-loathing lesbian? Or perhaps the self-serving lesbian? That lie continued as I dared to counter the constant accusations that Mr. Ford was a homophobe. When he found out I was getting married to Denise, he wished us well, and whenever he saw her publicly he embraced her with a real fondness. That's not what I'd call homophobic behaviour. True, he stubbornly refused to participate in the Pride Parade, and that made it easy for his critics to target him. If I'd been in his shoes, I would have made it my business to turn up to at least one parade. But understanding nuance was never Rob Ford's forte. Nor was keeping his feet out of his mouth. I did not, however, ever believe he was a homophobe.

But so it goes. I've heard it all on social media, in the comment boards under my columns (which were discontinued in the fall of 2015 because the attacks got so personal toward controversial writers like me), from the left-wing fringe media and from bloggers. Many deliver their often bordering on obscene insults anonymously, which is a statement in itself. There is most assuredly a boldness that comes with anonymity. I've been called a Canadian version of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck; a hack with no integrity (that one
is a favourite among my critics); and even a member of the Tea Party, although that makes absolutely no sense considering I'm an out lesbian. The most predictable and frequent insults from my detractors on social media, of course, contend I'm a “has-been” or “hack” or “hag” who works for that “tabloid paper,” the latter words dripping with the supposed elitism that comes with proudly admitting one does not read the
Toronto Sun
or follow one of its controversial columnists, as tired as that sentiment has become. It's been so funny to watch my detractors squirm when I pointed out that they were the first to rush onto the comment boards and now to Twitter to try to discredit what I've written and to endeavour to gang up on me when I write a controversial column or post a similar Twitter remark. The immediacy of Twitter and Facebook and people's increased reliance on the Internet to not only disseminate news but to exchange feedback in the past half-dozen years has certainly boosted the ease of cyber-bullying, and of doing so anonymously. I don't want to sound like a dinosaur, but I remember a time in my journalism career when people actually picked up the phone and delivered their criticism in a fairly civil exchange. Sure, some were heated at the outset, but at least I was afforded the opportunity to properly defend myself. Social media and the conducting of interchanges by e-mail can so easily misconstrue meaning and often escalate hostility because of the lack of a direct interface.

POLITICIANS ARE A VASTLY DIFFERENT ANIMAL.
Unlike my social media and e-mail detractors, they prefer to tell me what they think of me in a public forum. Not always to my face, mind you, but
when they think I can't respond. I have been singled out by thin-skinned politicians in the middle of meetings – for doing my job – so many times I've lost count. When I wrote about the high salaries paid to Toronto school bureaucrats in 1995, trustee Fiona Nelson, a long-time NDPer, whispered angrily at a meeting the day the story appeared that it was all “lies, lies, lies.” That, of course, made it into my follow-up story. In 2013 and 2014, former Ontario premier and Pan Am Games chair David Peterson accused me of a variation on the same theme. When I wrote about the scandalous items being expensed by the senior executive team (all earning $300,000 or more) – anything from lavish team dinners overseas to $1.89 cups of Starbucks tea – Mr. Peterson suggested angrily that he knew “what journalists like to do.” He never completed that thought, which also made it into my story, but I suspect he meant I like to make things up. He actually used those words when I contacted him for a story on a TO2015 insider who blew the whistle on the dysfunctional Pan Am organization, saying I was not only “making things up” but needed to find better sources who told me the truth. I had a good laugh at the latter comment, considering he'd hitched his wagon to the most corrupt Liberal government in recent memory and Mr. Peterson's sister-in-law, Deb Matthews, was I believed the most incompetent health minister I'd ever encountered (except for, perhaps, George Smitherman). I suspect the Pan Am Games will end up being as big a Liberal spending scandal as Ornge or eHealth, if the truth of what is spent ever actually gets out and is not buried in the bowels of various provincial ministries.

I was constantly being accused of something by councillors while covering Toronto City Hall for fifteen years.
Long-time midtown councillor Anne Johnston once claimed I earned too much money – during a debate on raising councillor salaries, which I vehemently opposed – because she felt I wore nice suits. Howard Moscoe named a “Levy levy” in my honour in 2001, when I dared attack council's cult of spending on free food and other perks. Mr. Moscoe, never one to miss a free buffet, free trips, or free tickets, and who would never dream of trimming his own personal fat, felt quite comfortable letting me know if I'd put on some weight. Norm Kelly, a perennial porker known to use campaign donations to treat himself to dinners with his wife, Charlotte, at his favourite fancy steak house, did the same. I often wondered if either of these two over-the-hill troughers would dare make the same comment to a man, whether a fellow councillor or a journalist.

I was even blamed in my early days at City Hall for the death of a limo driver because he was so distraught after my stories had embarrassed councillors into cancelling the costly and unnecessary limo service, which Toronto's auditor general had pointed out was costing taxpayers eighty dollars per ride. The accusations were completely over-the-top, considering none of these limo drivers ever lost their jobs. They just got reassigned to other city departments. But the most memorable phone message I ever got was from former Toronto councillor Sandra Bussin, who represented the Beaches area of the city. One night, after my colleague Zen Ruryk and I had exposed how the councillors had used their fifty-three-thousand-dollar expense accounts – and Ms. Bussin had been found to charge a bunny suit to her expenses – she called me in a panic. She said that, because of our stories, she'd been guilted into buying a late dinner (following a meeting) at a cheap Chinese restaurant in what
she portrayed as a bad neighbourhood. When she'd pulled up in her late model BMW, a man had come up to her car and pounded on the window, scaring her – and this was all my fault. Her premise was that because I'd called her out on her expenses, she was afraid to spend too much on a meal she would be charging to her office budget.

One of the most laughable comments came in the spring of 2014, from the former chair of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), Gerri Lynn O'Connor. Ms. O'Connor, the long-time mayor of Uxbridge, was clearly not accustomed to the pushback that came when I revealed that the conservation authority she'd been overseeing (for what seemed like forever) had been operating like an unaccountable fiefdom. When I disclosed in a series of articles in April 2014 that the perennially cash-strapped publicly funded TRCA owned 118 homes being rented to favoured friends and TRCA employees at below market rents and that its CEO was double-dipping (he retired with a full pension and then was hired back on contract), Ms. O'Connor's reaction bordered on frantic. She and her board weren't used to being put under the spotlight. The day after the stories appeared, she called to reprimand me like I was a first-year reporter with a small-town weekly, informing me I was “ruining people's lives.” That really meant I was ruining their comfortable little social club at TRCA. Then she hung up on me. (She subsequently apologized after I phoned her back, told her she was being unprofessional, and explained that I was a seasoned journalist who was simply doing my job.) But that wasn't the end of the matter. In an e-mail response to a constituent who'd read my stories (which the constituent forwarded to me), Ms. O'Connor claimed she only read the
Globe and Mail
and,
because of that, had no knowledge of what exactly I'd written about the TRCA. Just who was she kidding? Still, I laughed when I saw her e-mail response, not just because her intent was a cheap putdown of the
Toronto Sun
but because it once again amazed me how unprofessional and utterly classless politicians could be.

I'VE BEEN THREATENED
by union bosses, too. In the spring of 2009, a few minutes before I was due to go on air with him, the late Brian Cochrane, head of CUPE 416, advised me that he knew where I lived – likely to try to intimidate me for advocating that garbage collection done by his union brothers and sisters be contracted out. Without skipping a beat, I asked him if that meant my garbage would be picked up quicker. Right after the interview, when I told Denise what happened, she said I should have gone on air and repeated what he'd said. I've been followed by the Toronto cops, who were trying to catch me in a DUI offence for daring to criticize their salary increase or former chief Bill Blair's refusal to trim his budget. This time, heeding Denise's advice, I went on the radio and called them out. It has never happened since.

When I write about entitled unions having extravagant contracts, wages, and benefits that outstrip any comparable jobs in the private sector, I'm pegged as a “grotesque enemy of working people.” It apparently doesn't matter that I, too, am a working person who belongs to a union. My union, however, is part of a company that must compete in an embattled private sector industry. We are not a monopoly, and those of us still working for what is now Post Media all have the war wounds to prove what happens when a segment of the economy is
in trouble. My point has always been that taxpayers working in the private sector can't continue to prop up out-of-this world union contracts. At the provincial level, surreal levels of union wages and benefits that outstrip inflation have created massive deficits and removed all hope of balancing the books, I would predict, in this decade. We've seen examples in Detroit, California, and Greece of what happens when unions and their contracts take precedence over a city or country's ability to afford the cost of such contracts. Public sector workers, for the most part insulated from job losses and enjoying the luxury of generous benefits, are able to work a shorter week and are retiring more than a year earlier than their private sector counterparts. And who props up these expensive contracts? Private sector workers, of course. But for daring to point out those simple facts, I'm branded a union-hater.

The prize for how far a union will go to protect its own interests and tell untruths about me resoundingly goes to the Toronto Professional Fire Fighters' Association (TPFFA). Over the years, I've pointed out many times what a terrific job the TPFFA does to indoctrinate easily intimidated councillors and the public – all to maintain their bloated contracts and benefits. I've got to hand it to them: they are masters at playing what I call the “fear and loathing” card, implying repeatedly that if they are forced to trim their ranks
in the slightest,
the entire city of Toronto will go up in flames. It just burns them that I understand how they manipulate public sentiment. From as far back as Toronto's amalgamation days in 1998, when six cities were melded into one and a long list of city departments were told to streamline their operations, Toronto's fire services escaped unscathed. Even though all six fire services were combined into one, they didn't cut
one staffer or one penny of their budget. Without a second thought, in 2001 they took sixty-four firefighters off the front lines to provide glorified chauffeurs for the district chiefs at a cost of four million dollars, all the while crying that they needed fifty-five more firefighters to man trucks that were out of service. Common sense never matters when these kinds of moves are made. After the firefighters threw a temper tantrum for getting less than the boys in blue, David Miller generously gave them the same retention bonuses awarded to the police in 2000 to stem the tide of departures to police forces outside Toronto. There was just one small hitch: the firefighters did not have a retention problem. So why did they get their way? The answer is simple. They lobbied – meaning they in fact threatened – councillors. No increases for the firefighters, no support from their union in the next election.

In October 2007, when I had the nerve to break the story of a 9.66 per cent wage hike for firefighters voted on virtually in secret on June 20 of that year, their union tried to silence me by taking me to the Ontario Press Council. The deal was one of those council agenda items we call “hidden in plain sight” – on the agenda with the vaguest description possible and buried among mounds of paperwork. It was also voted on at 8 p.m., when those in favour of it knew the media would no longer be monitoring council. It was in the best interests of David Miller and his leftist supporters to keep the vote hush-hush if they were to have any hope of getting their new land transfer and personal vehicle taxes through council later that year. I only found out about it because I thought it was curious that rows and rows of firefighters – always dressed in some sort of T-shirt that made a statement – attended the October council meeting at which
the taxes were debated and approved. I soon realized their presence and support were quid pro quo for their lucrative contract deal. The firefighters really had a problem with the headline on the column that broke the story: “City Hall's Secret Hose Job.” But I took the heat for daring even to suggest that it was City Hall's best-kept secret, and the Ontario Press Council, in yet another decision that proved they were far more political than relevant, forced the
Toronto Sun
to run a correction claiming it was not in fact a secret deal.