With his OPP chief pick, Ford flexes his muscle and that’s a shame
If it looks like the fix was in, it probably was, and that, alas, is just how it looks in the Ron Taverner/ Doug Ford story.
Taverner is the 72-year-old Toronto Police Superintendent who in two days is slated to be sworn in as the commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, one of the biggest jobs in Canadian policing.
Since his appointment was announced late last month, it has been awash in controversy.
First, there was the revelation that two days after the job was posted, it was revised to broaden the prerequisite qualifications, a change that just happened to make Taverner eligible.
Neither, it turned out, had Ford recused himself from the cabinet meeting where Taverner was appointed because, the premier said, an independent committee had recommended him.
But then the independence of that committee was called into question when it was revealed that Taverner’s former boss, deputy community safety minister and former Toronto Police senior officer Mario Di Tommaso, himself a recent appointment of the new government, was one of the three members.
Di Tommaso was once Taverner’s direct supervisor.
Then the Toronto Star reported that last year, a former employee of the Ford family company and now a key political aide to the premier, sold her house privately to Taverner.
Those are a whole lot of connections.
Finally, this week, interim OPP Commissioner Brad Blair wrote a lengthy letter to Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dubé, asking him to review and determine if there was political interference in the hiring process. He said Dubé turned him down.
Blair was himself a candidate for the job, which allowed Ford later to dismiss Blair’s concerns as “sour grapes.”
But in fact Blair’s concerns were rather more broad. He was concerned about the independence of the OPP, and in his letter he detailed a sobering illustration of what he meant.
He was aware, he said, that Premier Ford had requested a specific security detail staffed by specific officers with whom he felt comfortable. He asked for a faceto-face with then-Commissioner Vince Hawkes (who has retired), and told him if he wouldn’t address the issue, perhaps a new commissioner would.
Furthermore, Blair said, the premier’s chief of staff, Dean French, asked the OPP to buy a large, camper-style van and to keep the costs of the modifications the premier wanted “off the books.”
The unspoken inference was, would a commissioner indebted to a premier feel free, as Hawkes, who was unencumbered by any such handicap, seems to have done and basically tell that premier to stuff his special requests?
One of the latest developments was another report in the Star Friday, this of sources saying that Ford had been looking for a job for Taverner for months, that he “wanted to do something for Taverner.”
Those sources were unidentified, for obvious reasons, and I don’t know who they are, but I know from a source of mine that this is absolutely true.
Now, the notion that Taverner would render the heretofore pristine OPP “Ontario’s Political Police” is in some senses a stretch.
For one thing, that’s been a slur about the force for decades. It doesn’t mean it’s true, and it’s never been true of the rank-and-file.
But certainly, the OPP has failed to distinguish itself on occasions before, notably in its curious handling of the native occupation at Caledonia, where the then-head of the OPP Police Association publicly accused the brass of imposing “two-tier” policing (one rule for native offenders, another, harsher one for non-native offenders) upon the men and women on the ground.
The Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty was in place, and though it was impossible to prove that then-commissioners Gwen Boniface and Julian Fantino were dancing to the government’s tune of appeasement to and fear of the Aboriginal powder keg, that’s for all the world how it looked.
For God’s sakes, for a time, the native protesters were issuing “passports” to those non-natives who lived near the occupied land, and residents had to show them before being allowed to leave or return to their homes — all this with at minimum dozens and sometimes hundreds of cops within easy reach, all of them ordered to sit on their hands.
So Taverner would not be the first political appointment to the office. And Doug Ford isn’t the first premier to flex his muscle. But together, they have done it at least as brazenly as anyone before them, and that’s a real badge of shame.