February 17, 2003
In a time where few any longer trust the administration of the Corporation of the City of Toronto, the city’s chief administrative officer Shirley Hoy has emerged on the murky side.
How else to explain her too little, too late missive in a daily newspaper, where she tried in vain to defend the tattered reputation of a dedicated Toronto public service?
The silence from Hoy was deafening when her chief financial officer Wanda Liczyk was out getting haircuts on the recommendation of MFP computer huckster Tie Domi.
Hoy wrote that integrity, accountability, professionalism and dedication are the norm among most of the staff. Had she identified those staff as the little person up to mid-management she would have scored higher on the salvation of her own credibility.
Hoy has explained to no one why she was so long getting off the mark in passing a conflict of interest policy for Toronto City Council.
Long before the $101 million computer leasing scandal raised its corrupt head, there was the taxi cab plate scandal with the mayor, some councillors and friends dominating the big players in the local cab industry. Even to this day, the relatives of elected officials are said to have their names attached to slivers of land down at the Portlands and on major developments now under construction. Before city hall lawyers were shredding documents suppressing the facts of the Union Station backroom deal, there was the City of Toronto’s $8 million and still growing telephone scandal, written about by Toronto Free Press but virtually ignored by the mainline media. Way back before Coun. Bas Balkissoon was blowing the whistle on MFP, TFP columnist and long-time city employee Jeff Goodall was writing about dozens of staledated cheques of up to $1 million uncashed by the city’s treasury department. Goodall was summarily fired by Liczyk after writing his first column about that little discrepancy.
Where was Ms. Hoy then?
As Toronto citizen Jeremiah Dolan pointedly asks, "Why isn’t Hoy taking some personal responsibility for the need now to spend millions of our hard-earned tax dollars on hearings and investigations?"
In attempting to defend this city’s administration with regard to accountability and corruption, Hoy has remained mum while the mainline media shines the light on bad city management, terrible decision making and strained ethical dilemmas.
That the late-to-check-in Hoy would attempt to pass off these costly discrepancies as routine for any organization the size of the city has to deal with makes her as bad as the politicians she serves.
If Hoy doesn’t choose to follow the same bailout route as peer Wanda Liczyk over the next few months, she should be the number one priority for Toronto's newly elected mayor on November 11.