Mayor Ford’s removal arose from bad law, even judge agrees | canada.com
Excerpt from the Judge's ruling:
So, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been given the boot from office because an opportunistic citizen hired a smart and politically savvy lawyer who found a club of an arcane statute with which to tie the hands of a judge who was willing to play ball.
That’s the short and dirty version of the bombshell that has dropped.
There was “absolutely no issue of corruption or pecuniary gain” on Ford’s part, Ontario Superior Court Judge Charles Hackland wrote in a decision released Monday.
In other words, this isn’t analogous to the cases involving other Canadian mayors where the allegations are about corruption or the countenancing of corruption — Joe Fontana, of London, Ont., who is facing fraud charges, and refuses to step down; Laval’s Gilles Vaillancourt, who quit earlier this month after a witness at Quebec’s corruption inquiry testified the mayor took kickbacks on all construction contracts; Montreal’s Gerald Tremblay, who resigned Nov. 6 amid accusations he had turned a blind eye to the corruption that was purportedly all around him.
To quote Judge Hackland again: Mayor Ford’s case, by comparison, “involved a modest amount of money which he endeavoured to raise for a legitimate charity [his football foundation], which is administered at arm’s length through the Community Foundation of Toronto.”
Furthermore, as the judge also noted, when Ford insisted on speaking to the original motion at city council — the integrity commissioner Janet Leiper had suggested council ask him to repay the $3,150 given to the foundation by donors he’d approached using city letterhead — he was trying to clear the air “in circumstances where many informed commentators would contend that the principles of procedural fairness…should have allowed him to speak (although not to vote).”
The Mayor did, notoriously, vote for a motion that rescinded the order to repay.
As the judge said, his speaking and voting “was far from the most serious breach,” but removal is mandatory unless the breach was inadvertent or by reason of an error in judgment.
Ford’s own testimony at trial made it clear it wasn’t inadvertent (he said he came to that meeting with the intention of speaking, on principle if you like) or an error in judgment (or that if it was, it was his fault for either not knowing or ignoring the rules). Besides, the judge said, Ford showed “a stubborn sense of entitlement [concerning his football foundation] and a dismissive and confrontational attitude” to the integrity boss and council’s code of conduct.
The mandatory removal required — under Section 10.1 of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act — makes the statute an ***, as the judge himself acknowledged.
The underlined explains it all
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