Doug Ford to Star: Drop dead

Councillor Doug Ford said again Thursday that Mayor Rob Ford will not send official communications to the Star until the newspaper issues a front-page apology for a 2010 article the mayor says was false.

John Honderich, chair of Torstar Corp., which owns the Toronto Star, wrote in a Thursday column that the Star would file a complaint with council’s integrity commissioner over the mayor’s exclusion of its reporters from the email list he uses to notify the media of his appearances and public statements.

Honderich wrote that the complaint would not try to compel Ford to speak to Star reporters. Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother, nonetheless portrayed it as an attempt to do so.

“No one can force anyone to talk to anyone,” he said in a brief interview during a council meeting.

“You can quote me: if you apologize on the front page, it’s done. You can go to the Supreme Court and try to get Rob to talk to the Star — he won’t talk to you. He just won’t. Until you do it. It’s simple: put that one-liner (apology) in there, it’s over,” he said.

Ford’s spokesperson, Adrienne Batra, declined to respond to the Star’s request for comment, as is her policy. Standing with Doug Ford, however, she agreed when he said the Star must say “we regret the error” before the mayor relents.

People close to Ford, including some of his council allies, have advised him to normalize relations with the Star, telling him he is hurting himself by maintaining an antagonistic posture toward the city’s largest newspaper.

“When there’s this kind of brittle dispute, it taints both sides of the issue,” said right-leaning Councillor James Pasternak.

“We’re losing sight of what we’re all here for — we’re here to run a great city and make it greater, and we have to support a free and open press. I strongly urge everybody involved to get together and try to come to some sort of soft landing.”

Ford, however, says he is not willing to back down. So do Star editors, who stand by the article, which said Ford had been asked to stop coaching a high school football team after an alleged confrontation with a player. Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday said he would make another attempt to talk Ford into a compromise.

“I will mention to the mayor, and the mayor’s staff, that I think it’s better we resolve this between the two parties as opposed to getting the thing overblown into an integrity matter,” he said.

Honderich wrote: “Mayor Ford has no obligation to speak to or be interviewed by the Star. That is entirely his choice. However, when it comes to public press releases and public notifications from his office as mayor of all the people, that is another matter.”

Origin
Source: Toronto Star