Editorial - How to Get Rid of A Mayor

Jeff Green | Dec 06, 2012

Editorial by Jeff Green

From a distance it has been a lot of fun watching the trials and tribulations of the City of Toronto and its outlandish Mayor Rob Ford.

In the first instance, there was the outrage of the Toronto Star, whose editors still can't believe that the citizenry of Toronto refused to heed their unrelenting warnings by electing Ford in the first place. After that, courtesy of some of my old friends, who, judging from their Facebook posts, have become obsessed with every nuance of Mr. Ford's personality and political program, I have come to see the whole Rob Ford thing as a kind of small-town mayor issue set in a large city.

The reaction to Ford is personal; it's as if everyone knows him, as they would a very annoying neighbour who gets drunk on Saturday nights and walks up and down the sidewalk singing Danny Boy off-key.

The decision by a Superior Court judge to remove Mr. Ford from office is particularly interesting from a small municipality point of view. Although Toronto's budget is thousands of times larger than our local municipalities, and there are probably more people working for the City of Toronto than live in Frontenac or L&A Counties, conflict of interest rules for mayors and members of council everywhere are exactly the same, and it doesn’t matter how much money, or little, is involved.

What Rob Ford did would raise the same objections here as it did in Toronto.

Although Mr. Ford and his supporters blame his downfall on a left-wing conspiracy, and while the decision by a Toronto resident to bring the conflict of interest charge to court may have been politically motivated, the truth is that Mr. Ford's actions gave the judge no choice but to rule as he did.

The issue in front of the judge was not whether it was fair to make Rob Ford pay back the $3,000 he raised for his football team's charitable foundation by sending request letters out on city letterhead. The issue in front of the judge was much more simple than that.

A motion was made at council to excuse Rob Ford from paying $3,000. Mr. Ford spoke to the motion, and he voted on the motion. Municipal politicians in Ontario must excuse themselves from any decision that has a direct effect on their own financial interest. It could not be clearer than that. All Ford had to do was say, "I have a conflict of interest in this case", pull his chair back from the table, and stay quiet until the vote was taken.

Whatever else Rob Ford has done or not done as mayor of Toronto, he has breached the conflict of interest act and has thus been removed from office.

He will appeal, and another judge may try to bring some nuance to the situation, some lesser penalty, but the judge in the first instance certainly acted properly.

Ford broke the most basic rule of municipal politics, and he can't blame any of his political opponents for the consequences he faces as the result.

What happened to him should give some local politicians pause. From time to time, we have made note of apparent, even indirect, conflicts by members of some of the local councils, as the press in Toronto did in the Rob Ford case. The difference was that someone took it a step further and brought the case to court, and that is what has, presumably, cost Ford his job.

It is rather unlikely that someone would take the trouble of taking a municipal councilor or mayor to court over a conflict, but the possibility exists.

The irony is that it is actually very difficult to remove someone from office in an Ontario municipality, as the Council from the City of London is finding out.

Their mayor, Joe Fontana, is facing criminal charges for fraud, but the council can only ask, they cannot force him to step aside until the charges are dealt with.

A council does not have the power to remove the person who has been elected to head it - be they elected by the public, as a Mayor or Reeve is, or even elected by the council itself, as a Warden is.

The Council of the City of London, might well try to make Joe Fontana’s life miserable by thwarting his efforts and blocking his policies, but until he has his day in court there is nothing stopping him from thumbing his nose at his council and hanging onto the chain of office for dear life.