It was January 28, 2014, and nine veterans – mostly elderly and wearing their service medals – had trekked to Ottawa from across Canada to meet Fantino, hoping to persuade the minister to change his mind about closing eight VAC district offices.
But Fantino didn’t show up to the meeting. More than an hour after he was supposed to arrive, as the veterans sat waiting to meet the press, Fantino walked in. Attired in a charcoal-grey suit and looking ill-at-ease, things started off calmly enough. But when a Newfoundland veteran, Paul Davis, asked a skeptical question about services, Fantino got shirty with him.
“You know, this finger-pointing stuff doesn’t work really well with me,” he said.
“It don’t work well with us that you didn’t turn up at a meeting you were supposed to turn up to,” snapped a visibly agitated Davis.
“Don’t tell us that something came up. You bushwhacked us.”
Veterans were angry because of government cuts to their services. In the 2012 budget alone, $226-million was slated to be chopped from VAC, leading to offices being closed and hundreds of staff who handle veterans' health problems laid off.
They grew more outraged with Fantino after discovering three other facts: his ministry was spending an extra $4-million on TV ads touting services to veterans; he flew to Italy to lay a wreath at the very same time the Auditor General was releasing a report critical of his ministry; and his ministry returned $1.1-billion in unspent money to the treasury (in order to help balance this year’s federal budget, it was believed).
Bruce Moncur is one of the nine veterans who tried to meet with Fantino in January, 2014, after his local VAC office in Windsor, Ont., was scheduled to be closed.
“[Fantino’s] approach was all wrong,” says Moncur. “He thought he could bully and negotiate the way he had with police forces… and that proved to be an unmitigated disaster... He was as effective as eating soup with a fork.”
Checkered career as a cop
In 1991, when he was superintendent in charge of the force’s detective services, Fantino ordered a lengthy spying operation – which included wiretaps – targeting Susan Eng, the soon-to-be head of the city’s police oversight board (ostensibly over concerns that a lawyer friend of hers was associating with drug dealers). Eng, an Asian-Canadian lawyer, was a vocal critic of the police chief over issues such as use of force and racism. The Toronto police not only listened in on her conversations, but those of her friends and colleagues, even eavesdropping on Eng at restaurants.
When the wiretapping came to light in 2007, Fantino refused to answer reporter’s questions about it and then claimed he had not ordered such an operation.
Fantino’s next career stop was chief of police in London, Ont. Between 1993-’95, London police laid 371 criminal charges against 45 men, with Fantino and his department claiming they were busting up a child pornography ring. This sensational accusation led to the creation of Project Guardian, an Ontario-wide investigation into similar rings.
But soon journalists discovered no such child porn ring ever existed in London. Instead, what they found were gay men primarily having sex with other men, or sometimes teens, and often young hustlers. While some of this sex was filmed, the videos were never sold or distributed commercially. (Fantino once appeared at a press conference beside hundreds of tapes seized from one man – although a minority of the tapes were pornography, none involved children, and all had been approved for public sale by Ontario’s censors).
When a young journalist in London, Joseph Couture, helped produce a CBC Radio exposé about the non-existent child porn ring, he found himself being harassed by London police, who once surrounded his house with cruisers and dogs. Couture was forced to seek help from the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, who complained to Fantino in 1995. Fantino was unrepentant.
After Fantino was appointed Toronto’s police chief, the outraged gay community demanded a meeting with him to discuss what happened in London. Five members of the community attended. “He came in like gangbusters and acted as if we were the bad guys,” recalls James Dubro, a highly-regarded author and gay activist. “He almost left the room several times.” Dubro says Fantino was unapologetic about his London tenure.
Bullying at the OPP
Fantino’s insensitivity towards minorities would continue during his next major posting. In 2006, he was appointed Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
In 2004, an OPP police sergeant took a baseball bat and beat the car of his estranged wife. The OPP officers responding to the complaint did not arrest him but instead asked the wife to leave the house.
The wife complained, and eventually the matter went to the OPP’s professional standards bureau, run by Supt. Ken MacDonald. He asked one of his sergeant majors, Alison Jevons, to look into the matter. In her report, Jevons found that the domestic violence policy was followed up until the point where the husband should have been arrested. Eventually, the OPP officer who’d led the investigation into the domestic dispute was reprimanded.
This did not sit well with the OPP’s union. An investigation agreed with the union’s position that MacDonald and Jevons did not follow proper procedure. In 2006, Fantino moved to charge MacDonald and Jevons with neglect of duty and deceit for their handling of the investigation. Evidence later emerged that Fantino had a personal vendetta against MacDonald.
The two OPP officers fought back, saying they were victims of a witch hunt orchestrated by Fantino and the union.
During the disciplinary hearing against MacDonald and Jevons in 2008, evidence emerged that Fantino meddled in the investigation of the two officers. When Fantino changed his testimony on the stand, the adjudicator chastised him. Fantino retaliated by trying to have the adjudicator thrown off the case - a person he himself had appointed. When that failed, the charges against MacDonald and Jevons were abruptly dropped in 2009.
The whole process cost more than $500,000 in public money. Meanwhile, the woman whose car was damaged praised MacDonald and Jevons for doing their job, saying they should have received commendations instead of being charged.
In 2010, Fantino retired from the OPP and was quickly recruited by Stephen Harper to run in a by-election in the northern Toronto riding of Vaughan – an area with a large Italian population and a long-time Liberal stronghold.
One person who helped Fantino win was now-disgraced senator Mike Duffy. Duffy hosted a successful electronic town hall for Fantino that went out to 40,000 homes. Fantino won with fewer than 1,000 votes, although he refused to engage in any debates with his opponents or speak to the media.
This soon changed. In a CBC interview not long after he was elected, Fantino said the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been a friend of criminals.
Harper quickly put Fantino in his cabinet, making him minister of state for seniors. Following the 2011 election, Harper appointed him the associate minister of National Defense where he became point man for the controversial F-35 fighter jet.
By that time, the plan to buy 65 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighters was devolving into a mess. The Tories claimed the price tag would be $9-billion to purchase and $7-billion to maintain. Yet the contract was never put out to tender – even though Canadian law requires this must happen for major defense purchases.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated the fighter would actually cost nearly $30-billion over 30 years. The Auditor General said the Tories were lowballing the sum, too. One other estimate suggested the total cost could be as high as $126-billion.
Fantino, who was responsible for procurement, went on the offensive, ripping critics over the cost issue. At one point he claimed that the government effort to buy the fighters was a “holy” undertaking. In November 2011, he argued: “We will purchase the F-35. We’re on record. We’re part of the crusade. We’re not backing down.”
Peggy Mason, president of the Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based advocacy group on defence matters, says Fantino was a big part of one of the Conservatives' biggest financial blunders.
more
Is this man the worst MP (and minister) in Canada? | National Observer
But Fantino didn’t show up to the meeting. More than an hour after he was supposed to arrive, as the veterans sat waiting to meet the press, Fantino walked in. Attired in a charcoal-grey suit and looking ill-at-ease, things started off calmly enough. But when a Newfoundland veteran, Paul Davis, asked a skeptical question about services, Fantino got shirty with him.
“You know, this finger-pointing stuff doesn’t work really well with me,” he said.
“It don’t work well with us that you didn’t turn up at a meeting you were supposed to turn up to,” snapped a visibly agitated Davis.
“Don’t tell us that something came up. You bushwhacked us.”
Veterans were angry because of government cuts to their services. In the 2012 budget alone, $226-million was slated to be chopped from VAC, leading to offices being closed and hundreds of staff who handle veterans' health problems laid off.
They grew more outraged with Fantino after discovering three other facts: his ministry was spending an extra $4-million on TV ads touting services to veterans; he flew to Italy to lay a wreath at the very same time the Auditor General was releasing a report critical of his ministry; and his ministry returned $1.1-billion in unspent money to the treasury (in order to help balance this year’s federal budget, it was believed).
Bruce Moncur is one of the nine veterans who tried to meet with Fantino in January, 2014, after his local VAC office in Windsor, Ont., was scheduled to be closed.
“[Fantino’s] approach was all wrong,” says Moncur. “He thought he could bully and negotiate the way he had with police forces… and that proved to be an unmitigated disaster... He was as effective as eating soup with a fork.”
Checkered career as a cop
In 1991, when he was superintendent in charge of the force’s detective services, Fantino ordered a lengthy spying operation – which included wiretaps – targeting Susan Eng, the soon-to-be head of the city’s police oversight board (ostensibly over concerns that a lawyer friend of hers was associating with drug dealers). Eng, an Asian-Canadian lawyer, was a vocal critic of the police chief over issues such as use of force and racism. The Toronto police not only listened in on her conversations, but those of her friends and colleagues, even eavesdropping on Eng at restaurants.
When the wiretapping came to light in 2007, Fantino refused to answer reporter’s questions about it and then claimed he had not ordered such an operation.
Fantino’s next career stop was chief of police in London, Ont. Between 1993-’95, London police laid 371 criminal charges against 45 men, with Fantino and his department claiming they were busting up a child pornography ring. This sensational accusation led to the creation of Project Guardian, an Ontario-wide investigation into similar rings.
But soon journalists discovered no such child porn ring ever existed in London. Instead, what they found were gay men primarily having sex with other men, or sometimes teens, and often young hustlers. While some of this sex was filmed, the videos were never sold or distributed commercially. (Fantino once appeared at a press conference beside hundreds of tapes seized from one man – although a minority of the tapes were pornography, none involved children, and all had been approved for public sale by Ontario’s censors).
When a young journalist in London, Joseph Couture, helped produce a CBC Radio exposé about the non-existent child porn ring, he found himself being harassed by London police, who once surrounded his house with cruisers and dogs. Couture was forced to seek help from the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists, who complained to Fantino in 1995. Fantino was unrepentant.
After Fantino was appointed Toronto’s police chief, the outraged gay community demanded a meeting with him to discuss what happened in London. Five members of the community attended. “He came in like gangbusters and acted as if we were the bad guys,” recalls James Dubro, a highly-regarded author and gay activist. “He almost left the room several times.” Dubro says Fantino was unapologetic about his London tenure.
Bullying at the OPP
Fantino’s insensitivity towards minorities would continue during his next major posting. In 2006, he was appointed Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
In 2004, an OPP police sergeant took a baseball bat and beat the car of his estranged wife. The OPP officers responding to the complaint did not arrest him but instead asked the wife to leave the house.
The wife complained, and eventually the matter went to the OPP’s professional standards bureau, run by Supt. Ken MacDonald. He asked one of his sergeant majors, Alison Jevons, to look into the matter. In her report, Jevons found that the domestic violence policy was followed up until the point where the husband should have been arrested. Eventually, the OPP officer who’d led the investigation into the domestic dispute was reprimanded.
This did not sit well with the OPP’s union. An investigation agreed with the union’s position that MacDonald and Jevons did not follow proper procedure. In 2006, Fantino moved to charge MacDonald and Jevons with neglect of duty and deceit for their handling of the investigation. Evidence later emerged that Fantino had a personal vendetta against MacDonald.
The two OPP officers fought back, saying they were victims of a witch hunt orchestrated by Fantino and the union.
During the disciplinary hearing against MacDonald and Jevons in 2008, evidence emerged that Fantino meddled in the investigation of the two officers. When Fantino changed his testimony on the stand, the adjudicator chastised him. Fantino retaliated by trying to have the adjudicator thrown off the case - a person he himself had appointed. When that failed, the charges against MacDonald and Jevons were abruptly dropped in 2009.
The whole process cost more than $500,000 in public money. Meanwhile, the woman whose car was damaged praised MacDonald and Jevons for doing their job, saying they should have received commendations instead of being charged.
In 2010, Fantino retired from the OPP and was quickly recruited by Stephen Harper to run in a by-election in the northern Toronto riding of Vaughan – an area with a large Italian population and a long-time Liberal stronghold.
One person who helped Fantino win was now-disgraced senator Mike Duffy. Duffy hosted a successful electronic town hall for Fantino that went out to 40,000 homes. Fantino won with fewer than 1,000 votes, although he refused to engage in any debates with his opponents or speak to the media.
This soon changed. In a CBC interview not long after he was elected, Fantino said the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been a friend of criminals.
Harper quickly put Fantino in his cabinet, making him minister of state for seniors. Following the 2011 election, Harper appointed him the associate minister of National Defense where he became point man for the controversial F-35 fighter jet.
By that time, the plan to buy 65 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighters was devolving into a mess. The Tories claimed the price tag would be $9-billion to purchase and $7-billion to maintain. Yet the contract was never put out to tender – even though Canadian law requires this must happen for major defense purchases.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated the fighter would actually cost nearly $30-billion over 30 years. The Auditor General said the Tories were lowballing the sum, too. One other estimate suggested the total cost could be as high as $126-billion.
Fantino, who was responsible for procurement, went on the offensive, ripping critics over the cost issue. At one point he claimed that the government effort to buy the fighters was a “holy” undertaking. In November 2011, he argued: “We will purchase the F-35. We’re on record. We’re part of the crusade. We’re not backing down.”
Peggy Mason, president of the Rideau Institute, an Ottawa-based advocacy group on defence matters, says Fantino was a big part of one of the Conservatives' biggest financial blunders.
more
Is this man the worst MP (and minister) in Canada? | National Observer
