This story was supposed to be about Rob Ford being caught flatfooted. And picking a fight with the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) board that he couldn’t win. Well, this morning Ford won.
After City Auditor Jeffrey Griffiths report revealing some free-spending ways on behalf of some TCH employees – company getaways to the spa and such – TCHC chair David Mitchell and the rest of the city appointees on the board resigned at an emergency meeting this morning.
Mitchell dropped the bomb in a prepared statement at the end of the meeting, saying it had become “untenable” for the board to continue given the controversy stirred in the media over the misspending allegations.
Mitchell blamed the mayor for the furor in the news, saying Ford refused to meet with the board to discuss Griffiths’ findings, or what steps TCHC had been taking before Griffiths came along to clean up its purchasing policies.
Indeed. The mayor prefers to do his talking through the media.
Much of that “talking” in the media in recent days as it relates to TCHC, has been focused on controls, or lack thereof, on employee expenses at the country’s largest landlord.
Griffiths identified some $100,000 in questionable expenditures in his report, including $1,000 in chocolates from Holt Renfrew, a testy tidbit which has captured the imagination of many scribes among the press corp.
Less attention has been paid in the news to the TCHC’s purchase policies, which was supposed to be the whole point of Griffiths’ review when it was first ordered by City Council back in 2007. There, Griffiths took issue with the sole-sourcing of some large contracts. And the lack of approval from the board on others handed out by TCHC.
There are some strong words in Griffiths report on TCHC contracting practices, but are they that out of whack compared to what may be found in a review of any large government arms-length organization? That’s a more complicated question.
Griffiths, to be sure, had some strong words for the TCH board in his report, but he also made clear in the document that “TCHC (purchasing) policies and procedures for the most part are adequate and complete.” The problem is those policies weren’t being followed by some. And now the narrative has become how to privatize social housing.
Welcome to Ford Nation, or the new knee-jerk political climate, I guess.
Is that really his answer? The mayor talked during the election about a voucher system under which social housing recipients can be housed in privately-owned apartments.
But experience in the U.S. where the voucher system has been suggests the only landlords willing to accept social housing tenants are slum landlords.
TCHC board member Dan King suggested during his questioning of Griffiths that some of the TCHC’s sole-sourcing of contracts was tied to receiving “substantial” infrastructure funds from the federal government.
Frances Nunziata, a recent Ford appointee to the board, could barely suppress a smirk on that one. She asked Griffiths if a forensic audit might uncover more dirt. Griffiths said he could find no evidence of wrongdoing or anything in his review that would warrant a forensic review.
And there’s the rub. Without getting into a total deconstruction of Griffiths’ report here, it has been little noted that the abuses identified by the City Auditor occurred before Nakamura took over the organization.
More to the point, TCHC’s problems go back further than that, to amalgamation. But that’s another story. Lost in the tantalizing details, too, of $1,004 spent on gift cards to recognize staff achievements, is the tenants themselves.
About three dozen showed up at meeting. They, many lifelong residents of social housing, lauded Nakamura’s efforts to bring tenants into the decision-making process at TCHC. One recalled her showing up at 2 am the morning of the fire at 200 Wellesley to make sure affected residents were being taken care of.
Other residents, even those with complaints, implored the board to fight the bully from the burbs who would throw them under the bus by privatizing the entire works. But little did they know, that the die had been cast. Mitchell and the board had met in-camera an hour or so before the meeting and decided to tender their resignations en masse.
