Municipal corruption in Ontario has, predictably, exploded as City Hall descends into the Wild West

Nearly 20 years ago, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun newspaper journalist and creator of the award-winning TV series The Wire, appeared before the U.S. Senate to provide testimony on the value of saving America’s dying local newspapers.

He warned that as local newspapers doing critical accountability journalism were replaced by online platforms chasing clickbait and advertising revenue, municipal councils would quickly react. 

“The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption,” Simon said in 2009. “It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.”

In Ontario today, as independent outlets like The Pointer continue a long tradition of investigative journalism at the local level, others that used to fulfill the role have withdrawn from municipal coverage, prioritizing where to allocate shrinking revenues. 

Other than the occasional article mainstream outlets parachute in for, there is very little day-to-day chronicling of what is taking place in the hushed corridors and closed rooms at City Hall. 

At the provincial level, Ontario’s Ombudsman, who is supposed to provide oversight as the principal watchdog of local government in the province, has instead backed off, leaving municipal councils to govern themselves.

The Doug Ford PC government, meanwhile, has refused to call out mayors behaving badly. Many work closely with Ford and have ties to his PC Party. They have, in turn, supported the Premier politically for the last eight years.

Since his election in 2018, which coincided with a sharp decline in media investment into municipal coverage, the sector has devolved into the Wild West. 

In Brampton, a city The Pointer covers closely, Patrick Brown can plant stories with media outlets that either don’t know the facts, or willingly support his underhanded, undemocratic leadership, which continues to deeply damage the city. 

The Ombudsman has blithely sent recommendations to council, suggesting elected members under Brown’s thumb re-open a series of external investigations into widespread evidence of corruption under the mayor, after he cancelled them himself. Brown, who has been chased by scandal from one political role to the next, has, obviously, ignored the Ombudsman’s calls to re-start probes that centre on a mayor whose political career has lifted up the black cloud that follows him.

The Pointer only knows all about Brown because it’s too easy to chronicle his constant lies and scandalous behaviour when you watch him day-to-day. 

In other parts of Ontario, similarly-styled politicians operating quietly under the mainstream media’s shrinking radar, deploy the same type of disturbing strategies that are turning town halls into cesspools. 

In Stratford, two former politicians were dumbfounded when an effort to raise concerns about a local redevelopment plan led to trespass notices against each of them, barring them from entering any municipal property after they attempted to address a project residents were suspicious of during a public council meeting.

The reason?

The current mayor does not want anyone to provide the facts about the development plan to residents.

Former MP Mike Sullivan has sued the current mayor of Stratford, Martin Ritsma, for banning him just because he brought forward information about the development the mayor did not like. 

The lawyer representing Sullivan when he was banned from entering any municipal property in 2024, spoke out at the time. "I've never seen anything like this where people who are simply criticizing city council and members of staff have been banned outright for the most innocuous expressions of discontent with council," lawyer David Donnelly said. "This is why we pay taxes and why people fought and died for our rights in Canada. You simply cannot bar people from council because you don't like what they are saying."

Sullivan spoke to The Pointer recently about the state of municipal government in Ontario today, and his disbelief over the impunity Stratford officials, including the mayor, feel entitled to.

“The province doesn’t really care what goes on in a municipality,” the former MP said. “The province really doesn’t care. They see what’s going on but they don’t do anything about it. There really is no consequence for municipal politicians who behave badly, ever. This provincial government turns a blind eye to things that should make everybody quake. This is what makes places lose their democracy, like the U.S." 

Bill 9, introduced by the PC government this year, to supposedly address the alarming situation in municipal government, has been widely panned by critics who work in the sector. Beyond a uniform “code of conduct” municipal council members are supposed to follow, and some vague monitoring of local integrity commissioners who are supposed to enforce code of conduct rules, powerful mayors and their council allies remain, effectively, self-governed.

Barb Shaughnessy, a former Caledon councillor, now living in Stratford, was also banned from municipal property after she tried to address concerns with the redevelopment plan.

“My fear is, from a democratic point of view, that if this doesn’t stop, this will filter off into all municipalities. The moment you no longer allow the voice of the people, you have lost democracy.” 

Shaughnessy said she has watched local democracy slowly erode in Ontario.

“I think people think democracy all of a sudden just goes, but it has been creeping, and it has been creeping for a long time.

“It is all about silencing the people.”

In Rideau Lakes, what has been labelled the most dysfunctional council in Ontario, saw seven integrity commissioner reports land on a single agenda in the fall of last year. The meeting devolved into chaos and a physical altercation almost erupted in Council Chambers. 

In Oshawa in 2014, things did devolve into violence, when residents called out their own councillors for vastly overpaying to purchase a new works depot, then firing the auditor general who tried to expose the disturbing use of taxpayer money. When residents tried to confront councillors during a public meeting, they were tackled by undercover police officers who had been secretly called to the gallery. 

Little has changed in more than a decade. 

Advocates hoped Bill 9 would finally clean up the badly broken municipal government sector, which has been the cause of widespread dysfunction among councils across the province.

Instead of introducing a requirement that local integrity commissioners be lawyers, to help avoid some of the blatant bias in decisions that have favoured mayors and councillors who hire and fire the IC, the idea was ignored. 

The PCs also ignored a recommendation that the removal of a local elected official for egregious misconduct be taken out of the hands of the council members themselves. 

So we are left with a system that allows untrained investigators, paid by council, to investigate their wrongdoing, and any final decision is left to their colleagues, allowing political interference in what should be an objective accountability process aimed at protecting taxpayers, not politicians.

Woodstock Councillor Bernia Martin hoped Bill 9 would make a difference. 

“When I was elected in 2022, I believed deeply in the promise of municipal government,” she wrote on Substack in May. “I believed local politics was where collaboration mattered most, where communities came together to solve problems, and where elected officials were held to a standard worthy of public trust.

“What I quickly learned was that accountability in municipal politics has long been one of Ontario’s weakest links.”

She wrote that “councillors, advocates, municipal leaders, journalists, and residents across Ontario spent years sounding the alarm about dysfunction in local government. Stories emerged from municipalities large and small about bullying, retaliation, harassment, toxic workplaces, and behaviour that would never be tolerated in most professional environments.”

Regarding the desperate need for proper provincial legislation, she questioned, “Is this really a serious issue across Ontario, you might ask? Yes, there are numerous situations across this province where municipal councillors have actively opted to stay home or participate virtually to avoid in-person harassment, bullying, and hostile environments in council chambers.

“That is dangerous for democracy.”

Some of the more unbelievable examples were read out in front of provincial legislators when Bill 9 was being contemplated during hearings held across the province earlier this year. 

Lawyer Guy Giorno spoke at one of the provincial hearings for Bill 9 in the summer and provided examples of dysfunction in local government that left the impression that many municipalities in this province are worse than the Wild West. They are comically inept.

He represents some 20 of them as their integrity commissioner. 

First, he laid out his bona fides.

“I’m the former chair of the Canadian Bar Association committee on the law of lobbying and ethics, former board member of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, and an adjunct professor at Carleton University, where I teach the graduate course Ethics in Political Management.”

He then launched into a jaw-dropping indictment of municipal accountability in Ontario.

“Fact: Many municipalities, without knowing it, have appointed as their integrity commissioner a lawyer who was previously suspended by the law society for misappropriating $63,000 from his client’s trust account. One GTA municipality, without knowing it, appointed someone with a criminal record. Another individual was charged with sexual assault, and the charge was dropped in exchange for a 12-month peace bond. As soon as the peace bond expired, the individual started an integrity commissioner business.”

He continued.

“A few years ago, Thunder Bay hired an integrity commissioner with a background in investigating but not legal interpretation. The commissioner conducted an inquiry and said a councillor was in a conflict of interest. The city then hired a legal expert to review the integrity commissioner’s work. The expert concluded that the commissioner got the law wrong, so the matter went back to the commissioner to do over. Thunder Bay ended up paying three times, for the commissioner to investigate, for the lawyer to explain that the commissioner got it wrong, and for the commissioner to do it again. This is not an isolated case. Many municipalities pay for integrity commissioners then end up paying for lawyers to explain the law to integrity commissioners, because they didn’t pick an integrity commissioner who understood the law in the first place.”

He then offered a couple of examples of what council dynamics and accountability over municipal officials typically look like in Ontario today.

"In North Stormont, a female councillor felt that she was excluded from decision-making by 'an old boys’ club' of the other councillors, all male. The integrity commissioner, in his wisdom, found the woman had harassed the men by using a 'gender-based stereotype' that was unwelcome. 

“The mayor of Arnprior denied that there was racism in eastern Ontario, and the integrity commissioner of Arnprior said that, no, it wasn’t a breach. A councillor disagreed with the mayor and said racism does exist and the Black community deserved an apology, and the integrity commissioner ruled that she was in the wrong. He said her pay should be suspended for 30 days.”

In Brampton, The Pointer has chronicled for eight years the disturbing lack of accountability under Patrick Brown’s leadership. 

His hiring of an integrity commissioner with no experience, who had direct connections to him, and her shocking subsequent decisions have been well documented for our readers. 

His cancellation of investigations into widespread evidence of corruption under his leadership, his hiring of officials directly implicated in municipal corruption elsewhere and his handing out of contracts to friends have all been swept under the rug, as Brown has turned City Hall into his own fiefdom. 

If he wins re-election today, along with other bad mayors across the province, taxpayers will again have to pick up the pieces of their broken communities. 

Maybe, in four years, they will try again to restore democracy in our local government. 

Or maybe, democracy will continue to slowly slip away.

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