October 6, 2003
If ever there was a need to resurrect Project 80, the former police unit dedicated to probing municipal corruption, the Friends of Barbara Hall group is it.
Disbanded by the Metro council that morphed into the council of the current day, Project 80 was loathed by the politicians. They were never comfortable with an active unit, comprised of province-wide police officers, there to keep them in check.
During the heyday of Project 80, one of its members told the editor of Our Toronto, now Toronto Free Press/Canadafreepress.com that "You can drive a Mack truck through the holes in the Ontario Municipal Elections act."
That was the case in the early 1990s, and that is the case to the present day.
It would seem that the Friends of Barbara Hall group gave a leg up to Hall, who was allegedly conducting electioneering duty a full year before she was registered as a mayoral candidate.
The Yonge Street headquarters of Friends was quietly closed in early January. Toronto Free Press ran a front-page picture of the closed-down headquarters with a note advising the new location of the Hall mayoral campaign office tacked to the front window, last April.
When Hall officially kicked off her campaign for mayor in March, she proudly proclaimed: "No one has every questioned my integrity."
Even the left-loving Toronto Star editorialized: "She can’t, in good faith, make the same claim now."
In a ruling last month, Mr. Justice Brian Trafford. Of the Ontario Superior Court, found "reasonable grounds" for a belief that Hall, directly or indirectly, broke the rules on election financing.
Part of Trafford’s ruling stemmed from the approximate $5,000 Hall put into Friends to convince herself to run.
When Trafford’s ruling was revealed, Hall’s campaign was quick off the mark claiming a "complete victory".
When a business associate convinced CFP to post the Judge Trafford’s transcript in its entirety on its weekly website, some 360 people took the trouble to read it.
That in itself is a compelling argument against Hall’s claim that the matter is only the work of a no-chance election rival.
Now that a four-person team of the Ontario Provincial Police is investigating Friends, Hall’s campaign is still ducking accountability and singing the same tune.
Characterizing Tom Jakobek’s complaint as "unsubstantiated allegations from a candidate who is very low in the polls", Hall maintains, "I’m confident that my integrity, standing up against Tom Jakobek’s integrity, will be unscathed."
That’s Hall’s story and she’s sticking to it.
A no-show at the mayoral campaign’s only televised debate, Hall showed up with businessman husband Max Beck at Liberal headquarters on election night.
Buoyed that pre-election polls were right about a Liberal landslide, Hall is confident that the polls are right about her own inevitable victory on Nov. 10.
She needn’t risk flubbing the lines during televised debates when she can count on a cakewalk through the polls.
Meanwhile, a Project 80 cop was right on the mark when he declared that you could drive a Mack truck through the holes in the Ontario Municipal Elections Act.
That’s exactly what Barbara Hall is doing right now.