Janet Leiper last week said she would not recommend a punishment against Ford until she considered his last-minute “letter of retraction.” After studying the letter, she decided that Ford should be formally reprimanded.
The letter includes “no words of apology, regret, remorse or contrition,” creates “an overall impression of someone who is blaming others and minimizing his own behaviour,” and “fails to meet the criteria of a ‘fair and responsible’ response,” Leiper wrote in her follow-up report.
Leiper investigated Ford’s comments about Dr. David McKeown in response to a complaint from the left-leaning chair of the health board, Councillor John Filion. Ford and his allies have dismissed integrity complaints against him as political gamesmanship.
Ford called McKeown’s $294,302 salary “an embarrassment” on his radio show in April after McKeown recommended lower speed limits to protect pedestrians and cyclists. McKeown’s health department had spent $60,000 on a study called “Road to Health: Improving Walking and Cycling in Toronto.”
In Ford’s letter, he repeated that he believed transportation issues are outside the health department’s mandate. He then conceded that the department’s mission statement “may” be interpreted to cover such things as road safety.
“With that in mind, I retract my public comments regarding Dr. McKeowan,” he wrote, misspelling McKeown’s name. He continued: “I still believe spending $60,000 to commission research that recommends an impractical solution seems extraordinarily wasteful.”
Leiper concluded, “The letter of retraction does not contain any apology. It also contains commentary that is unrelated to the mayor's conduct.” In her original report, she concluded that the walking and cycling study was firmly within the department’s jurisdiction.
The follow-up report comes after Ford responded to the original by arguing that an integrity commissioner is not necessary and that Leiper’s duties should be handed to a lawyer who would also serve as part-time ombudsman and lobbyist registrar. That would violate provincial law, which requires Toronto to have an independent integrity commissioner and ombudsman.
In another report last week, Leiper recommended a reprimand of Councillor Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother, for referring to McKeown as “this guy” and twice asking, “Why does he still have a job?”
Doug Ford has argued that the integrity commissioner should not force councillors to apologize for saying things they do not actually regret. “I feel sometimes you live in a socialist state where they force you to say something even though you don’t believe even what you’re saying,” he told AM640’s Arlene Bynon.
When Bynon asked if he didn’t mean the apology he had just offered, he said, “No, I am apologizing. If I’ve offended the medical officer of health, Doug Ford apologizes to him. In saying that, who’s going to apologize to the taxpayers when they go out and spend $60,000 on a transportation study?”
Filion said Rob Ford deserves the reprimand. The letter, he said, “used a so-called ‘retraction’ as another excuse to provide criticism.”
“The problem with this is that at some point, to the public, it all looks like a bunfight. People need to see it as a serious breakdown of the proper functioning of City Hall,” he said.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Daniel Dale
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