OPP firing looks dirty, punitive, small

Running the cops instead of the courts

The problem is not that the Ontario government fired Brad Blair, the deputy commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police.

The problem is that the firing looks dirty — political, punitive and small — because everything about the Blair story thus far has been dirty in the same way.

First, Ontario Premier Doug Ford hired his old friend, former Toronto police superintendent Ron Taverner, as the next OPP commissioner.

While a long-serving and well-regarded city cop, if also one known to be close to the Ford family, Taverner regrettably didn’t have the requisite qualifications — he hadn’t risen far enough up the ladder — as described in the ad placed by the recruiting agency the government hired to fill the spot.

The ad was pulled after two days, the qualifications lowered to allow someone of Taverner’s rank to qualify: big, dopey mistake, one that would never have been made by Liberals, who better than Conservatives know how to get what they want while seeming to play within the lines.

(Well, until Jody WilsonRaybould and Snc-lavalin and Jane Philpott they did, that is.)

Ford has denied that finding a way in for Taverner was why the qualifications were changed, saying rather it was to “broaden” the candidate pool, and that the decision was made by the recruitment firm.

That a premier or a government would choose a kindred spirit, or at least a malleable one, as the OPP boss is nothing new. Not for nothing has the OPP been called “Ontario’s Political Police” for decades.

But the mistake in the ad, and changing the qualifications so Taverner could “apply” (ha, ha, ha), rendered the search a charade and gave the appointment a nakedly brazen look.

It was no secret that Ford had been casting about last summer for a cushy landing for his pal.

There were published reports that Taverner already had been offered, and turned down, the job of boss of the government’s new cannabis store. I wasn’t the reporter who broke that story, but my sources absolutely confirm it.

Also, smack in the middle of this hot mess was Mario Di Tommaso, another former Toronto senior officer who had been Taverner’s direct supervisor and is himself a new Ford appointee — deputy community safety minister — and who was a mem- ber of the hiring committee.

It was Di Tommaso, Community Safety Minister Sylvia Jones said Monday, who made the decision that Blair’s release of “confidential private information for his own personal gain” warranted his firing, approved by the provincial public service commission.

(What personal gain? He lost the interim commissioner’s job, and now has been fired outright after almost 33 years on the job for the OPP. That’s some gain.)

Jones told reporters she didn’t initiate or approve the request to fire Blair, nor was she “asked for advice.”

Blair allegedly breached confidentiality by releasing, in an Ontario Superior Court filing on his bid to force the Ontario ombudsman to investigate Taverner’s hiring, an email from OPP Sgt. Terry Murphy, who was one of the premier’s bodyguards.

According to Murphy’s email, which was meant only to alert his superiors, Ford ranted profanely while complaining about his everchanging personal security detail (he wants to handpick his bodyguards) and asked the OPP for a van customized especially for him.

The OPP Association boss late last week had written Di Tommaso, complaining that Murphy has since been wrongly removed from the bodyguard rotation, as indeed it appears he has been. It wasn’t Murphy who made the contents of the email public, after all.

Now Blair was an unsuccessful candidate for the job that Taverner got. That renders him open to charges of sour grapes, which the premier hurled early in this saga, but his concern for at least the appearance of OPP independence is bigger than that.

By going to the court, trying to force the ombudsman to take on the case, and, earlier this year filing notice that he also intends to sue Ford for libel and slander — this for the premier’s comment that Blair had breached the Police Services Act by speaking out the way he did — the former deputy commissioner was clearly courting trouble.

Rare is the employee, anywhere, who can sue and take his employer to court and merrily continue his employment as if nothing has happened.

But none of that ought to diminish the real concerns raised by Blair — that there was overt political interference in the hiring process and that the OPP’S independence from the political arm is in jeopardy.

As Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his sycophants repeat ad nauseam that none of their bully-boy tactics on Wilson-raybould were inappropriate and that the government’s only concern is jobs, so do Ford and his pet ministers insist there was no political interference.

How it seems is like this: The former want to run the courts, the latter the cops.

This is where usually, I’d resort to the old saw that justice must not only be done, but also be seen to be done. But I’d rather sing the chorus of an old Northern Pikes’ song: “She ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.”