After Rob Ford’s legal victory, Toronto’s humiliated left has a front-row seat to watch the mayor’s influence grow
COMMENT
What will they do, the massed forces of the Toronto Spring, the great swirling media-leftist agglomeration that had convinced itself that they had the city’s right-wing mayor, Rob Ford, on the ropes? They’ve been counting votes, announcing candidacies, speculating and musing about recapturing city hall from the evil clutches of a mayor who actually wanted to curb the growth of city spending and reverse decades of slide and deterioration.
The story was so big in the minds of the Toronto media that they had spun the possibility of overthrowing Rob Ford into a national event. Was it a symbol of a national reawakening of the left? Unfortunately, all the plans and fantasies—the late Jack Layton’s wife, Olivia Chow, was being trotted out as the left’s likely standard bearer — had been pinned on the outcome of a court case.
In a staggering blow on Friday to the great entrenched left-wing power base in Canada’s largest city — a base that has never accepted loss of control over their sprawling government enterprise — an Ontario Divisional Court threw their hopes out of court. The unanimous three-judge appeal decision concluded that the very foundation of the case was based on a series of manoeuvres by Mr. Ford’s enemies on city council — manoeuvres that were essentially illegal.
Anti-Ford activists on council, with a sympathetic Integrity Commissioner as accomplice, had essentially attempted to force Mr. Ford to repay $3,150 that had been contributed by others to a high school football team at the mayor’s request. Council had no legal authority under the city’s Code of Conduct to punish Mr. Ford in this way, said the court. The attempt was “objectionable” because “council did not have the jurisdiction to impose such a penalty.” It was “ultra vires” — beyond council’s power — and therefore “a nullity.”
Good word, that. Nullity is where the left is at right now.
The rest of the case falls apart as a result. Some are claiming Mr. Ford won on a “technicality,” including Clayton Ruby, the high-profile activist Toronto lawyer who brought the charges into court. Mr. Ruby says he will appeal Friday’s decision to the Supreme Court, but at least one expert in administrative law says such an appeal has little hope.
“The Divisional Court’s judgment is almost certainly the end of the legal saga,” says Paul Daly, adjunct professor of administrative law at the University of Montreal, in a commentary in today’s National Post. “The Supreme Court of Canada has a very limited power to entertain any appeal.”
So now Toronto’s mayor and the city can begin to get back to business. The mayor himself seemed somewhat contrite. He claimed to have found the process a “very, very humbling experience.” That lasted a few seconds before he moved on to say: “We are running this city better than any administration ever has” and that he planned to push ahead with his agenda “for the next six years.” That implies he will be running for another term in 2014.
Doesn’t sound too humiliated to me. And six years is a long time in politics, even longer if you’re on the political left and you have just spent the better part of a year on ill-fated and ultimately embarrassing trumped-up failed legal cases engineered by Mr. Ruby, a national hero of the Canadian left.
The other case run through Mr. Ruby’s legal shop attempted to pin a libel charge on Mr. Ford over comments allegedly related to a Toronto restaurant owner. There was much media and political hysteria over that case, too, but it was thrown out just before Christmas.
So now, across Toronto and at city hall, the gunslingers of the left will have to re-holster their empty political revolvers. They are said to be shocked at the outcome.
They should, in fact, be shocked at their own ignorance and deep ideological bias. The charges against Mr. Ford were weak and flabby from the start, and this loss was predictable. Many Torontonians see it that way too.
I kinda like the way I put it in a column last December: “They have no case and no just cause beyond their own ideological delirium — these fantasy rock throwers, the usual collection of leftists and waffly centrists, cringing sophisticates, downtown Liberals, Toronto Star columnists, CBC reporters, Ryerson academics and would-be mayoral candidates who would like to maintain the old quasi-corrupt ways that have long dominated Toronto city government.”
Good riddance to all of them, at least for a little while.
Mr. Ford remains the nearest Toronto — and maybe any city in Canada — has had in recent decades to what I have called a straight-shooting Saperlipopette-disturber. He’s no saint and he has his uncouth flaws, but he is also someone who tends not to play along with the ingrown culture of municipal governance that has dominated Toronto politics for decades.
Recently, with Mr. Ford calling most of the shots, the city passed a budget that was as close to good policy as is possible, especially during a period when the mayor was at the time under constant siege from the left and the media.
If there’s a Toronto Spring, Mr. Ford may be its torchbearer. Torontonians can now expect more good government — or at least better government — from city hall. The recent past under Mr. Ford includes a more disciplined budget, an abandoned plastic bag ban, privatized garbage collections, mostly quiet unions. There should be more to come, on transit reform, road repair and spending.
In the transit debate and future budgets, Mr. Ford’s influence and authority will be higher than they were before the left tried to engineer a coup via the courts rather than the ballot box.
Many have said — and continue to say — that Rob Ford may have learned a lesson from these cases. They had hoped — and still entertain the idea as a weak fallback position following the court decision — that Mr. Ford would be humiliated. It is hard to see it that way, in the wake of Mr. Ford’s two convincing court victories. It is the left that has been humiliated.
news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/25/after-rob-fords-legal-victory-torontos-humiliated-left-has-a-front-row-seat-to-watch-the-mayors-influence-grow/
