Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Mayor Rob Ford misses committee meeting to coach football at ‘jamboree’

Mayor Rob Ford skipped the last 5.5 hours of a 9-hour meeting of his executive committee on Monday. Not even the allies who chaired the meeting in his absence knew where he had gone.

He was coaching his high school football team, he said on Tuesday.

“We had our first football game up in Newmarket. If I’m not there, the kids don’t play,” he told reporters, flatly, after an appearance at a United Way event in Nathan Phillips Square.

The Newmarket event was not a regular game but a “four-team scrimmage” known as a “pre-season jamboree,” according to an August web posting.

In an email Tuesday morning, Ford spokesperson George Christopoulos wrote, “There were no contentious issues remaining on Exec. agenda and the mayor felt comfortable leaving the meeting in the hands of other committee members.”

Ford, however, missed a lengthy and emotional debate about Pride funding and the activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, an issue that has been contentious for three years.

He also missed a debate of the future of Casa Loma, which he mused last year about selling; items related to the police budget and general council budget; a discussion on changes to the permits policy for special events; and a speech from union leader Mark Ferguson, who accused the city of basing its case for the outsourcing of garbage collection on incorrect numbers. He was absent from about 2:40 p.m. until the meeting ended at 8:04 p.m.

“(The game) started at 4:30; very few times does it conflict with my schedule. So that’s why I had to leave two hours before,” he said Tuesday.

The 13-member committee is composed solely of Ford’s allies. It is the only committee at which residents can express their opinions directly to Ford.

Asked what he would say to people whose Tuesday speeches he missed, he said, “They can call me. I return all my phone calls. Everyone has my number.”

Ford coaches Etobicoke’s Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School Eagles. He said during the 2010 campaign that he would quit coaching if he were elected, but he changed his mind after he took office — and also launched two summer teams, both called the Rexdale Raiders.

His work habits have been criticized this year by his political opponents; Councillor Adam Vaughan has called him a “part-time mayor.” The Star has reported that his schedule appears to have shrunken significantly since his first months in office.

“He’s not being paid to coach football, and he’s not being paid to campaign. He’s being paid to be the mayor. And if you can’t show up for executive committee, which is one of the responsibilities — he’s showing extraordinary disrespect for the taxpayers who are paying his salary,” Vaughan said Tuesday.

Said Ford: “I work harder than any mayor ever has.”

Ford is a self-proclaimed football fanatic who played briefly at Carleton University, regularly attends Toronto Argonauts games, and picks CFL winners on sports radio every week. He runs the Rob Ford Football Foundation, which raises money to help high schools pay for equipment.

He has not explicitly said how much time he devotes to football as mayor. On his radio show in April, he said the summer teams practise every Tuesday and Thursday and “travel to all over Ontario every weekend." In a July speech in which he tried to recruit coaches for other high schools, he cautioned that school coaching is a major commitment.

“It’s every day from 3 to 6 o’clock for September-October, and depending on how far the team goes in the playoffs, it could go to the end of November,” he said at a fundraiser for the foundation.

Ford has said he coaches in part to serve as a mentor to disadvantaged teenagers. He doesn’t want to quit, he has said, because he doesn’t want to abandon them.

“I get criticized a lot, because from September and October every day from 3 o’clock to 5 o’clock I’m on the football field. And it drives people nuts,” he told Edward Keenan of Eye Weekly, now The Grid, as a councillor in 2006. “They’re like, ‘You’re leaving council to coach football.’ And you know what? I do. I do leave council to coach football for two hours a day and I come right back to council, I’m back down there at six o’clock. My constituents know it, they agree one hundred per cent. These kids, it’s unbelievable where they come from. But they’re playing football, they aren’t getting into trouble.”

He also said that he has a strict attendance policy for his players. “If they don’t have a 60 average, they don’t play. If they miss a class at school that day, they cannot play the following day. You have to be at practice every day, just like you do at work, and I try to set them up in that environment. If you come late to practice? Don’t bother coming. It’s discipline, and they love it and the parents love it,” he said.

He testified in court last week in a lawsuit accusing him of a conflict of interest for participating in a council vote over whether he should be forced to repay $3,150 to lobbyists and companies whose football foundation donations he improperly accepted.

Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Daniel Dale

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