Underdog, page 22
The prize for how far a union will go to protect its own interests and tell untruths about me resoundingly goes to the Toronto Professional Fire Fighters’ Association (TPFFA). Over the years, I’ve pointed out many times what a terrific job the TPFFA does to indoctrinate easily intimidated councillors and the public – all to maintain their bloated contracts and benefits. I’ve got to hand it to them: they are masters at playing what I call the “fear and loathing” card, implying repeatedly that if they are forced to trim their ranks in the slightest, the entire city of Toronto will go up in flames. It just burns them that I understand how they manipulate public sentiment. From as far back as Toronto’s amalgamation days in 1998, when six cities were melded into one and a long list of city departments were told to streamline their operations, Toronto’s fire services escaped unscathed. Even though all six fire services were combined into one, they didn’t cut one staffer or one penny of their budget. Without a second thought, in 2001 they took sixty-four firefighters off the front lines to provide glorified chauffeurs for the district chiefs at a cost of four million dollars, all the while crying that they needed fifty-five more firefighters to man trucks that were out of service. Common sense never matters when these kinds of moves are made. After the firefighters threw a temper tantrum for getting less than the boys in blue, David Miller generously gave them the same retention bonuses awarded to the police in 2000 to stem the tide of departures to police forces outside Toronto. There was just one small hitch: the firefighters did not have a retention problem. So why did they get their way? The answer is simple. They lobbied – meaning they in fact threatened – councillors. No increases for the firefighters, no support from their union in the next election.
In October 2007, when I had the nerve to break the story of a 9.66 per cent wage hike for firefighters voted on virtually in secret on June 20 of that year, their union tried to silence me by taking me to the Ontario Press Council. The deal was one of those council agenda items we call “hidden in plain sight” – on the agenda with the vaguest description possible and buried among mounds of paperwork. It was also voted on at 8 p.m., when those in favour of it knew the media would no longer be monitoring council. It was in the best interests of David Miller and his leftist supporters to keep the vote hush-hush if they were to have any hope of getting their new land transfer and personal vehicle taxes through council later that year. I only found out about it because I thought it was curious that rows and rows of firefighters – always dressed in some sort of T-shirt that made a statement – attended the October council meeting at which the taxes were debated and approved. I soon realized their presence and support were quid pro quo for their lucrative contract deal. The firefighters really had a problem with the headline on the column that broke the story: “City Hall’s Secret Hose Job.” But I took the heat for daring even to suggest that it was City Hall’s best-kept secret, and the Ontario Press Council, in yet another decision that proved they were far more political than relevant, forced the Toronto Sun to run a correction claiming it was not in fact a secret deal.
The firefighters dined out for months and months on that success, claiming the one person in the media who hated firefighters had been silenced. Not that I hated them. They even cooked up a story saying that the reason I was so hard on them (and had an alleged soft spot for paramedics) was because my partner (Denise) was a paramedic. Not that she is. That myth circulated for a couple of years. It didn’t dawn on them at the time that my criticism was all based in fact. The number of fires they fought per year was down to less than 10 per cent and the medical calls they’d taken on to reinvent themselves were up to almost 60 per cent of their responses. The tiered-response approach – meaning that police, ambulance, and fire all showed up to many 911 calls – was and is no longer affordable. In many cities in the U.S., the fire and ambulance services are combined. Yet here in Toronto we were still building separate stations for each service (sometimes on the same corner) and enriching the firefighter contracts, often to the exclusion of the paramedics. It made, and continues to make, no sense to me.
I wasn’t silenced, however – to the firefighters’ chagrin. In the summer of 2011, after Rob Ford came to power and the fire department was busy trying to counter a consultants’ report that recommended the paramedics and fire be amalgamated, I wrote a column that had them fired up for days. As I ventured by the Yorkville fire hall around ten o’clock on a Saturday evening, I noticed a couple of beefy firefighters posing for a picture with a bunch of beauties in skin-tight, glittery dresses – during what turned out to be a bachelorette party. I wrote about that, daring to suggest that perhaps they’re not so under-resourced after all if they have time to pose for pretty pictures. The nasty e-mails flooded in for days. After all, how dare I criticize those fire gods! I was accused of being jealous, of being a home-wrecker (by a wife whose husband had posed for the picture), of hating firefighters and having no empathy for the terribly difficult work they do, of being married to a paramedic (that was said over and over again), and many other offences too obscene to repeat. When a firefighter dug up a photo of me posing in a fire truck at a street party during my 2009 election campaign – one of those pictures I didn’t remember taking and have since regretted – I was accused of being opportunistic for days and days. Evidently, it didn’t strike them as ironic that they seemed to have a lot of time on their hands to find my picture and to send me attack e-mails, thus reinforcing what I’d been trying to say.
In addition to continuing to insist that Denise is a paramedic (I repeat, she isn’t), the firefighters are convinced that I hate them and they have perpetuated that lie for years. It doesn’t matter that I have no reason to hate them and have said so repeatedly. I simply loathe the way the fire gods manipulate public sentiment to get what they want in the way of unaffordable pay increases when common sense (and the facts) should dictate that they be forced to cut back like every other city department has (except for the police, the other sacred cow). I hate the way politicians so easily cower in the face of their demands, more concerned about support and votes than balancing the books. I’m also not too fond of the way they’ve tried to gag and intimidate me for merely stating what is fact, and how they expect reporters only to write puff pieces about the latest five-alarm fire they battled (heroically, of course) on a cold night. I recognize that firefighting can be a dangerous job. But they get paid handsomely for it and only work seven days a month (on twenty-four-hour shifts). There is forever a long list of people who want to do the job if they don’t.
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NOT ONLY DO I WORK for “that tabloid” that seems to constantly fire up the masses – and not only have I loved every minute of my twenty-six years digging up the dirt – but evidently my loyalty is purchased at a bargain-basement price. My Lib-left detractors were still dining out years later, on a one-sided story penned by my then Toronto Star colleague Robyn Doolittle when she first came to the paper’s City Hall bureau in 2010. She wrote that Rob Ford, then a councillor, donated one thousand dollars to my campaign for MPP a year earlier. To this day, I believe she deliberately did not get a comment from me so she could leave the implication out there that the donation bought my loyalty. After all the favours I saw being exchanged, the kickbacks quietly handed to certain downtown councillors by developers, and the public money spent by councillors on junkets to far-flung lands, I regularly joked after the story appeared that I sure went cheaply. But let’s look at the reality of what occurred and how absolutely ludicrous the contentions were. During the thirty-five days of my by-election campaign, I was completely consumed with cramming as much canvassing and as many media interviews and speaking engagements into my fourteen-hour days as humanly possible. I had no idea who had contributed to my campaign until long after it was over, when I sat down to write my thank-you notes. And when the mayoralty campaign got into full swing a few months later, I made it quite clear that I supported Rocco Rossi for mayor. That continued well into the campaign until it became obvious that Mr. Rossi’s message wasn’t resonating and the only hope of cleaning up the waste at City Hall was to support Rob Ford’s fiscal agenda. But my detractors have never let the real facts get in the way of their consistent efforts to discredit me.
What my critics should realize by now – whether it be those politicians whose feet I hold to the fire or those who read my writing – is that I don’t run with the pack. I have a commonsensical view of the world and am not seduced by fuzzy-wuzzy words of hope or change, or as one of my good friends calls it, “social speak.” I’m talking about platitudes that make lazy, pampered voters feel warm and happy but actually mean nothing and don’t address the real issues of debt, corruption, or the absolutely immoral way many politicians and their union friends operate these days. I see politicians and bureaucrats for who they are. I am not interested in being friends with them, or the firefighters, or the union heads, or the cops, or the bloggers. I am not there to mouth whatever they feed to me. I am interested in championing the interests of those betrayed or treated unfairly by the system. I have a passion for social justice and am obsessive about tax money being used wisely. I keep on hoping my crusading might just embarrass the odd public service or politician into doing what’s right. I am doing my job, hopefully the way it should be done. I am a reporter, not a repeater. If that makes me a “complainer about everyone and everything,” as a Liberal attack piece contended during my 2009 campaign for MPP, perhaps that’s because the truth really does hurt.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Neighbourhood Bully
If ever there was a tale of political correctness gone mad, of bureaucrats and politicians succumbing to the intimidation and bullying of a very vocal and hateful minority, it was the campaign to fight Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) from marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade. Six years and many difficult uphill battles later, the Israel haters finally called it a day in the spring of 2015, after being virtually sidelined in the World Pride Parade in Toronto in 2014. Left almost to the end of the line in the five-hour parade, QuAIA’s motley group of no more than a dozen anti-Israel protesters found that many of the spectators were already leaving for home by the time they started to wend their way along the parade route. They’d run out of steam and had become ridiculous and irrelevant, viciously attacking the only gay-friendly liberal democracy in the Middle East. It was just deserts for a group that had absolutely no business being in the parade in the first place. Fuelled by John Greyson and other gay filmmakers – who used this cause largely as an attempt to promote themselves and their government-subsidized commercially unsuccessful “niche” films – the presence of this group managed to polarize the gay community and put an unpleasant taint for years on what is supposed to be a celebration of gay rights and freedoms in Toronto.
In many ways, the presence of this radical, fringe group in the parade, and the inability of Pride’s leaders to deal with it, caused Pride Toronto to lose its way. With QuAIA participating, the parade organizers couldn’t consider the event mainstream or strictly educational, even though a long list of advertisers cozied up to them, knowing full well that the gay community had money to spend. But nor could it be deemed political as long as there was a conspicuous absence of any group marching against countries where gays are either thrown in jail, brutally murdered, or against the many instances of intolerance south of the border.
Only Israel was singled out for the entire six years, which led all of us fighting this cause to conclude that this was simply an exercise in Israel-bashing. It’s not that Israel hasn’t forever been the underdog. Tiny Israel, a mere twenty-two thousand square kilometres from north to south and east to west, with an estimated 2014 population of eight million people, is a miracle born from the desert, sandwiched between countries that can all be considered vicious enemies. Never mind talk of peace or a two-state solution. The Jewish homeland will never survive in a truly peaceful state as long as most of the Arab countries that surround it really want to see it annihilated, bombed into the sea. The entire landscape has changed in recent years, with a number of extremist factions – ISIS, the Iranian nuclear program, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a corrupt PLO – within a hair’s breadth of Israel’s borders.
When Denise and I arrived in Israel in late August 2014, two days after a truce had been declared in the fifty-day conflict with Hamas in Gaza – during which even the Tel Aviv airport was targeted and some southern towns encountered a constant barrage of up to one hundred Hamas rockets per day – we were surprised by the resilience of the Israeli people. Tel Aviv’s beaches, cafés, shops, and buses were teeming with people, and the Israelis we spoke with told us resoundingly that they just wanted to live in peace. Still, they felt very much alone and battle-weary. While they believed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper had their backs, no one could say one nice thing about President Barack Obama, who, like the mainstream media, couldn’t seem to grasp the concept that Israel had every right to protect itself from the rockets – which were all launched at civilian areas – with its state-of-the-art Iron Dome technology. And as we would soon learn from a very outspoken Arab journalist living in Jerusalem, the mainstream and international media embedded in Gaza – CNN, the BBC, and even Canada’s own TV broadcasters – were all under the gun of Hamas and were being told to report the party line or risk being thrown out. “They did Israel a great injustice,” said the journalist, a stringer with the Jerusalem Post and a variety of North American and European news outlets.
The one-sided media coverage of any and all conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbours is a given. The persistent ganging up on Israel by the United Nations and a variety of European countries is nothing new. But the disturbing thing is the rise in anti-Semitism masquerading as concern for the Palestinians and the completely false claims that Israel is an apartheid state similar to what once existed in South Africa. Neo-Nazis are less to be feared by Jews these days than the fringe left, who’ve become useful idiots for the Arab contingent. They first made their presence known on university campuses across Canada ten or so years ago with Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), and I’ve watched that movement grow, enabled and fuelled by weak-kneed university presidents and senior university officials who use the “freedom of speech and discourse” card as the reason not to clamp down on this veiled attack on the Jewish state and the Jews.
That very same excuse became the mantra of the weak-willed bureaucrats at City Hall, who were easily intimidated by QuAIA and their supporters. These same bureaucrats, while forever horrified by the idea that tolerance and inclusivity might not be extended to other visible minorities, especially Muslims, seemed to feel that somehow it was perfectly fine to delegitimize Israel and the Jews. Is it any wonder that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – a far more egregious campaign started in 2005 by pro-Palestinian groups to attack and isolate Israel – has gathered steam globally? Once the door was opened with Israeli Apartheid Week, and universities turned a blind eye to the ramifications of this week’s events, the Israel haters were emboldened. One sad part of this is the pressure that has been successfully applied by BDS activists to musicians and other artists and to university lecturers, urging them not to fulfill concerts or other engagements in Israel. If artists don’t back down, they continue to be intimidated and ridiculed. In a Toronto Life article in 2014, Mr. Greyson announced quite proudly, after nearly losing his life in an Egyptian jail the year before, that he intended to have a QuAIA float in Toronto’s Pride Parade that would mock actress Scarlett Johansson for daring to stand up to the pressure exerted on her to quit her role as ambassador for the West Bank company SodaStream, which, ironically, employed 950 Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. (Mr. Greyson never followed through with that float, but his arrogance and his ignorance were still shocking.) The Palestinians working at SodaStream made the same wages and got the same benefits as Israelis – and took home nearly five times the income any Palestinian could earn in Ramallah. SodaStream officials would not admit that pressure from the BDS movement was a factor, but they decided to consolidate operations at a new plant in the south of Israel and phased out the West Bank factory at the end of 2015, putting five hundred Palestinians out of work.
As much as many of those associated with the Israeli apartheid and BDS movements will repeatedly deny they are anti-Semites, there is usually no other way to describe them. That goes as well for the Jews who, for some reason – whether out of a need to belong, or guilt, or the fact that they really loathe being Jewish – have become part of these movements. I’ve come to call them “useful idiots” or “Judiots” for the left and for Islamic terrorists everywhere.
It was in spring 2009 – as we were busily putting together our wedding celebrations – that Denise and I first heard about QuAIA marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade. At that point, we had already travelled together as a couple to Israel twice and found ourselves sharing a passionate commitment to and protectiveness toward our Jewish homeland. Denise has family living just outside Tel Aviv, and her parents are well known in Toronto for championing and donating extensively to a wide variety of Israeli causes. We knew little about QuAIA in the summer of 2009, but we agreed to march in the parade with a Jewish and pro-Israel LGBT group called Kulanu (Hebrew for “all of us”) that was very passionately run by Justine Apple. For Ms. Apple, who was used to helming mostly social activities and events tied to the Jewish holidays, this step into a heated political arena was perhaps a baptism by fire. But she handled all of it adeptly. Although both Denise and I had never before considered marching in the parade, we wanted to be part of a strong pro-Israel presence to offset the lies we felt were being perpetuated by the fringe group of anti-Israel protesters. It was at that parade that Toronto lawyer Martin Gladstone documented on video the activities of QuAIA and the placards they carried not only stigmatizing Israel but displaying distinct neo-Nazi overtones. Little did I know that day what a journey Martin, his partner Frank Caruso, Denise, and I would take in endeavouring to stand up for Israel, and what a bond would be created between the four of us.
