And Adam Vaughan wants to be Toronto's Mayor?

There’s something fascinating about the freewheeling world of your average municipal politician. Much like the school board Trustee system, unless there is a scandal or a salacious make-out session on a City-owned couch that hits the front page, our City Councillors are largely left to their own devices. That’s not the case for Toronto’s Mayors, of course, whether the name be Lastman, Miller or Ford. They often get as much ink as Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, and City Hall seems to have a larger press gallery than Queen’s Park. But the dedicated Councillor who works hard, responds to the needs of their constituents, attends to the neighbourhood meetings – they’re the ones who get re-elected, almost automatically.

Which brings us to Toronto Councillor Adam Vaughan. He’s a self-styled “independent”, but someone who always seems to vote with the NDP (at least according to Councillor Doug Ford) and goes to great lengths to cast public aspersions at Conservatives; something that “independents” generally don’t have the zeal for. If you’re wondering why his name comes up a lot of late, it’s simple: Mr. Vaughan has told the media that he’s thinking about running in the Mayoral by-election next year. Which makes his track record so relevant to those living outside Ward 20.

I’ve been exposed to him during the past five years through his attempts to choke, close, cut-off and otherwise undermine the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Despite its $1.9 billion economic impact and the 5,700 jobs associated with the operation, Mr. Vaughan wants to shut it down. As a tool to get his name in the newspaper, I suppose you can comprehend why Mr. Vaughan constantly sides with the small minority of Torontonians who’d still like to close the BBTCA. As they say, he’s welcome to his opinion.

But what astounds me, even after five years of watching his childish antics, is the lengths he’ll go to in an effort to achieve his agenda. Many of you may think it goes with the territory, but I’m still amazed when an elected official thinks he/she can get away with publicly saying things that just aren’t true. It started out with fibs at first, for Mr. Vaughan. And then he graduated to outright falsehoods. Which morphed into him saying things that he surely knew not to be true – at least that was my sense – but Mr. Vaughan couldn’t resist making the claim just the same. All on the assumption, I guess, that no one was keeping track.

As a former TV journalist, perhaps he thinks all of his wild statements just get erased once they’ve been uttered, like so much tape in a production studio at the end of a long show.

He guessed wrong.

It all began in 2008 when Mr. Vaughan said some things about the BBTCA and TPA that turned out to be false. So I wrote him a letter, gently outlining the facts; I didn’t hear back. A year later, he told some more tall tales. So I wrote him again, laying out the facts. Facts that clearly undercut his wild claims about the airport, the City’s island ferry service, and a variety of other things he was railing on about in 2009. Again, he didn’t write back (although one time he did post a comment in response to a blog); he seems to think his short stint working in a bar pre-politics gave him sufficient training to manage an $8 billion civic budget.

It happened again from time to time, certainly every six months or so, although there was a period of time when he essentially gave up with his campaign of untruths in December 2010 — perhaps using the time to lick his wounds in the wake of Rob Ford’s mayoral victory.

But now that he’s looking to raise his profile again, he’s back to beating his favourite piñata. It all flared up again recently when he was complaining about the BBTCA’s impact on the November 9, 2012 airing of The John Oakley Show on AM640. He said some things that weren’t true, so I wrote him on November 13th to outline the fact from his fiction; compete with the show’s transcript and the documents showing were he’d gone off the truth rails. Host John Oakley, and fellow panelist Doug Ford, also had a copy of the Nov. 13th letter, and put the facts to him a week later on the Nov. 16th airing of the same radio show.

What did he do? To cover his tracks, Mr. Vaughan just generated a bunch of new “facts” to explain away his falsehoods from the prior week’s show. Ice wouldn’t melt in his veins. When confronted with his own faux-facts, he found new ones in an attempt to make it all go away. And I’m not talking about “specious” facts, either, or stuff that could be left to interpretation. He simply made up more stuff that wasn’t true in the hopes that he’d coverup the fact that he’d been caught telling tall tales the prior week.

As John Oakley said himself, you have the right to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Here is a snapshot of what Vaughan was up to:

• an effort to explain away his opposition to the operation, Vaughan claimed the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport was dropped (in 1939) into what was historically a residential community. He told Councillor Ford on Nov. 9th to look it up in the “history books”. So I did. Vaughan was wrong: the area around the BBTCA was a mixed-use industrial community from 1900-1950; it was filled with smoke stacks, factories, marine terminals, even a slaughterhouse and a steam plant; as evidence, I sent him a bunch of photographs from 1912, 1918, 1922, 1928, 1930, the late 1930s, and even one from 1949 in a letter yesterday.

• Vaughan denied on-air that he had ever told the Toronto Star that the BBTCA pedestrian tunnel was “a bunch of money to help one particular airline, not the airline industry. It’s a bunch of money to move a few very privileged people, not taxpayers.” According to The Toronto Star’s Rob Ferguson, he did, on August 24, 2009.

• On AM640, Vaughan claimed that the TPA wanted to build a sidewalk “through” Little Norway Park. According to the written Court Decision of Madam Justice D.A. Wilson dated December 23. 2008, a copy of which I sent to him yesterday (yet again), he didn’t tell the truth. Madam Justice Wilson said the TPA wanted to build a sidewalk “alongside” the park in question; which Vaughan claims is my “interpretation” of her decision, despite the fact that it is a direct excerpt from her Dec. 23/08 ruling. To paint the TPA in a bad light, and to make it seem that Vaughan is riding in on a White Horse to save the community from the big bad wolf, he makes up this yarn about us wanting to build a sidewalk through the middle of a city park. And, thanks to Sir Adam, the TPA was stopped. Except none of that’s true, as is clear from the written decision of an Ontario Superior Court judge’s written decision.

• Vaughan also told AM640 listeners that the recently-installed traffic restriction signs at Bathurst and Queen’s Quay don’t contribute to traffic congestion. According to the Toronto Police Service representative involved in the City’s traffic management meetings, they specifically do, and not just at the Queens Quay intersection, but all the way through Bathurst and Lakeshore Boulevard to the north. Vaughan knew this to be their position prior to his appearance on the Nov. 16, 2012 John Oakley Show, but that didn’t stop him from claiming he knew better, and that his new turn restrictions had done nothing of the sort. No matter what the police might say.

• On November 9th, Vaughan told AM640 listeners that the TPA was evicting Ornge’s medevac service so as to make room for more commercial flights at BBTCA. Nothing of the sort happened, which I made clear in my letter of November 13th. So Vaughan changed his tune for the Nov. 16th AM640 show. This time he told AM640 listeners that the TPA was “economically evicting” the Ornge Medevac service and forcing them to move to the Hamilton International Airport by increasing Ornge’s landing fees. Vaughan’s facts were off there, too. Ornge advised the TPA of its intention to leave the BBTCA in an e-mail to dated May 18, 2010, well prior to September 2010, which was the date when the TPA Board began to consider raising landing fees for non-commercial fixed and rotary wing aircraft. The BBTCA landing fees, which hadn’t been raised in the prior 8 years, are now in keeping with Hamilton’s owned published rates. A fact which undercuts the “economic eviction” element of Vaughan’s argument. Ornge eventually decided to stay, but Vaughan continues to pretend they’re being booted out because of Air Canada’s arrival at the BBTCA in early 2011.

The guy will stop at nothing, clearly. And he probably isn’t used to having someone listen to him which quite so much care. But, with 5,700 jobs at stake at the BBTCA, you can’t have the local Councillor foam at the mouth without reminding him of the facts when he gets tripped up in his own spin. Our mutual stakeholders deserve better.

To make matters worse, he told the BQNA Neighbourhood Association Town Hall meeting on November 19, 2012 that the TPA has launched a
“media campaign to discredit his complaints against the TPA using double talk to skirt the truth”. This is the height of irony, as my Nov. 13, 2012 letter was written after he first took to the AM640 airwaves on Nov. 9th, where he used specious facts and clear falsehoods to revitalize his longstanding campaign against the airport.

He’s careful to never put anything on paper, perhaps for fear of being caught in a lie. But radio transcripts are pretty effective. And he’s certainly never demonstrated where we’ve “skirted the truth”. But perhaps all of this talk about running for Mayor will finally force him to pony up. Before someone stands up at an all-candidates meeting a shouts “liar”, as Mayor Rob Ford did yesterday at City Council (according to several Toronto newspapers).

Voters can put up with a lot of nonsense; they care about big issues, not the grist (see prior post “A million Howard Beales” Oct 22-10). But they don’t like someone who can’t tell the truth, and the fact the a candidate is against this or that doesn’t give them a “free pass” on ignoring the truth; it speaks to character. And everyone thinking about running for the Toronto Mayoral chair should be clear on that point.

MRM
(disclosure – this post, like all blogs, is an Opinion Piece. And, of course, reflects a personal view and opinion and is not meant to represent the views of the TPA, its Board/Staff or the federal government.)