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EDITORIAL

Integrity can't be legislated

February 24, 2003

City Councillor Joe Mihevc says he favours "systems that support and encourage a high level of ethical professionalism from staff and elected officials" at City Hall and thinks it's time for an integrity commissioner. An integrity commissioner says Mihevc "could investigate alleged breaches of the code, and give council an independent assessment if someone has acted inappropriately."

Who is Joe kidding?

It was staff by another name who advised council to go for the $43 million computer lease contract.

That well-paid staff member soon skipped off to another job, and the rest as they say is history.

City politicians have been known to ignore the advice of staff, including that of their own lawyers.

Nor do city councillors seem to exert much control over staff.

For example, senior bureaucrats recently decided to trash key documents related to a controversial redevelopment scheme for Union Station, even as certain councillors were getting a lot of media attention about discrepancies of the plan.

That means while councillors like Michael Walker and David Miller were renewing calls for an independent inquiry of the Union Station deal and peppering the chamber with questions about a possible conflict of interest involving the mayor and his son, the shredders could be heard grinding away at City Hall.

Patricia Simpson, a city solicitor and the manager of the Union Station project, owned up to the shredding, confessing she had destroyed the score sheets used to evaluate bids submitted by rival consortiums to renovate and run the station.

Called on it by councillors, she conceded the destruction of the papers was "unwise," but said she did not consider them to be "official documents at the time."

Ms. Simpson, along with City Auditor Jeff Griffiths and Joan Anderton, the commissioner of corporate services, repeatedly explained the shredding of the information as "an honest mistake".

With a $15 public inquiry probing the City of Toronto's $100 million plus computer leasing scandal churning out delicious tidbits such as former CFO Wanda Liczyk's hair cuts as recommended by Dash Domi, soon forgotten is the fact that the contract went to MFP without courtesy of public tender.

Letter writer Matthias Schlaepfer is right on the money when he concludes we don't need an ethics commissioner to tell us about council's moral bankruptcy.

"Recalcitrant City Hall offers…the spectacle of councillors pursuing their own interests, engaging in backroom deals, discarding democratically adopted policies, hiding behind staff advice and awarding excessive development bonuses–all legitimized by some perfunctory public participation.

"To top it off–as the Star revealed last year–many councillors funded their campaigns predominantly with corporate donations," Schlaepfer complained in his letter.

With the horses long out of the barn, appointing an integrity commissioner for council won't cut it, Coun. Mihevc. Like commmonsense, you can't legislate integrity. As an elected official trusted with the public purse, you either have it as or you don't.