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THE LOBBYISTS
PAUL GODFREY
In case you’ve been living on the other side of the moon, or in Markham, the former Metro chair, Toronto Sun publisher and current president of the Toronto Blue Jays is the real mayor of this city. Not only did he give us Mel, but he also gave us the taxpayer-funded Skydome. He’s a political fixer extraordinaire, and without him Curly would have been burning up in Florida years ago. That he turns up on this list is curious, since he’s not known as a lobbyist and says he doesn’t have any financial interest in the Union Pearson Group. But as Godfrey tells NOW, people are always calling him for advice and he’s still in touch with the pols on Queen Street. So the consortium declared him on their lobbyist list.
Says Godfrey, “People called me and asked me questions on that, and I did speak to one or two (councillors) that I came into contact with.”
PHILLIP REICHMANN
Chief executive officer of O&Y Properties, which is part of the Pearson Union Group. O&Y donated a total of $5,000 to Mel’s 1997 and 2000 mayoral runs. In addition to Reichmann, O&Y’s John Levitt and Ron Taylor are also listed as lobbyists. Former city planner and long-time O&Y consultant Ron Solskone is also working City Hall and acting as spokesperson for the consortium. These guys have got to be interested in more than just sprucing up Union Station.
LARRY TANENBAUM
President of consortium partner Kilmer Van Nostrand Co. Limited. Tanenbaum is also a staunch Mel supporter. And the mayor’s son, Dale Lastman, represents Tanenbaum’s interests on the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
DAVID SMITH
A key lobbyist here until Jean Chretien made the Toronto lawyer and long-time Liberal organizer a senator, the former Toronto city councillor over the years represented everybody from developer Marco Muzzo to aerospace giant Lockheed in the municipal corridors of power.
STEPHEN LeDREW
The Toronto lawyer and president of the federal Liberal Party of Canada has been most visible lately as the middleman in the Jean Chretien-Paul Martin dust-up. He was brought on board recently after David Smith went to the Senate. A long-time lobbyist at City Hall, LeDrew represents developers and ratepayers. He was also a law partner with Mel bagman Jeff Lyons, who is now under a cloud over campaign contributions, and David Smith in the late 1980s, when they successfully killed a proposed lobbyist registration bylaw for the old city of Toronto.
PETER VAN LOAN
He’s at the same law firm as David Smith (Fraser Milner Carsgrain), and is a past president of the Ontario Tories.
THE partners
O&Y PROPERTIES
Mel was foiled by the feds when he tried to deliver Downsview military base to the Reichmanns for their Technodome theme park a few years back. But that will likely be forgotten if the city comes through here. This could be another landmark site for the master builders of the World Financial Center in New York City and London’s Canary Wharf, which wasn’t an immediate success.
SNC LAVALIN
The Canadian engineering and construction company’s holdings include the 407 (ever-increasing) toll highway above Toronto. It has a spotty record when it comes to Third World projects. The directors include former Tory municipal affairs minister Al Leach, retired Royal Bank chief John Cleghorn and former federal Tory insider and party leadership contender Hugh Segal.
OMERS REALTY
OMERS (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System) president and CEO Dale Richmond, former Metro CEO, has been criticized by the unions representing the municipal employees in the pension plan for investing in projects that effectively privatize public services.
PCL CONSTRUCTORS
This was the firm that was supposed to build the sports venues for Toronto’s 2008 summer Olympics. Critics noted that the $480-million “conceptual construction budget” was for “shell space only.” We can only imagine what kind of cost overrun taxpayers would have been stuck with.
JONES LANG LASALLE
A multinational property management firm. Do we really want our train station globalized?
A slick clique of big-biz heavies — aka
Union Pearson Group Inc. — cut
themselves a real whopper of a backroom
deal last week to revamp Union Station. Is
it any wonder Mel’s club has got the inside
track?
