Rob Ford’s council attendance heading in the wrong direction

Answering mayor’s challenge, Star finds a turn-out score getting worse over time

Minutes after he launched his campaign for re-election, Mayor Rob Ford urged reporters to calculate his attendance record.

“I’ll put my attendance record against anyone else’s here,” he said Thursday at city hall.

“Hopefully you guys will do your homework and get the attendance out — who has the best voting record down at council, who’s been down here the most.” Happy to be of service, sir. Ford has been touting his attendance since he read a Star article in November 2012 that showed his record was far better than that of lateterm David Miller. Ford had missed 14.8 per cent of votes; Miller missed nearly three times as many, 41.8 per cent, over the last two years of his term.

Ford will be pleased to know he is still beating Miller today. But his attendance has gotten worse over time — both in absolute terms and relative to the rest of the current council — and his record now compares unfavourably to those of two-thirds of his colleagues.

Ford was 24th-best on the 45member council in November 2012, just about right in the middle. He was 30th as of November 2013, well below average. (He would be 31st if we counted recent council appointee Peter Leon.)

As of November 2013, Ford had missed 17.3 per cent of the 5,600 council votes since the beginning of his term.

The median was Josh Colle’s 14.2 per cent.

In Ford’s first year in office, from December 2010 to December 2011, he missed only 7.7 per cent of votes. In 2012, he missed 23.5 per cent of votes. In 2013, he missed 20.3 per cent of votes through November.

Doug Holyday, the veteran right- wing councillor who left his post as deputy mayor this summer to become an MPP, was council’s longreigning attendance champion; he proudly refused to leave the council chamber during meetings, even to eat his tuna sandwiches. Before his departure for Queen’s Park in August, Holyday had missed a mere 42 votes out of 5,063 this term — less than 1 per cent.

The new champ is the left-wing Gord Perks, perhaps Holyday’s ideological opposite. Perks (Ward 14, Parkdale—High Park) missed only 2.4 per cent of the votes this term, second only to Speaker Frances Nunziata (2.2 per cent), whose job is to preside over meetings and whom we thus disqualify from the title.

“Just about every vote we have matters to somebody,” Perks said Friday.

“If I don’t vote, the 55,000 people who elected me don’t get their voice heard. I’m elected to do a job, which is to represent a community. That’s an enormous privilege, and I don’t understand why you wouldn’t exercise that privilege.”

Next best were Mary-Margaret McMahon (4.3 per cent), Adam Vaughan (4.5 per cent), Sarah Doucette (5 per cent), Mike Layton (5.1 per cent), and centrist Josh Matlow (6.5 per cent). All but Vaughan are rookie councillors.

The two councillors who missed the most votes were Ron Moeser (44.5 per cent) and Giorgio Mammoliti (41.1 per cent), both of whom had health problems. Aside from them, the councillors with the worst records were John Filion (27.7 per cent), Denzil Minnan-Wong (26.8 per cent), Mark Grimes (26 per cent), James Pasternak (25.3 per cent), and Michael Thompson (24.6 per cent). All but Pasternak are veteran councillors.

Minnan-Wong (Ward 34, Don Valley East), who is thinking of running for mayor, missed a spring council meeting for a long-scheduled family vacation during which they got to meet the Pope. He had cancelled a family trip the year before because of the then-expected city labour dis- ruption, he said, and “wasn’t going to cancel it again.” Our attendance calculations count every vote, including unanimous votes on trivial procedural matters. Minnan-Wong said he sometimes misses minor items when he is “called away” to deal with matters related to his role as chair of the public works committee. Filion (Ward 23, Willowdale), who represents the most populous city ward, said the “three-year average is misleading.” He noted that his attendance improved in 2013, when he missed 24 per cent of votes; he had missed 33 per cent as of November 2012. And he said his office’s own number-crunching shows that twothirds of his 2013 missed votes were on items where council was unanimous. More than half, he said, came on days where a meeting dragged into an unscheduled extra day. “So I would have had constituency meetings and things like that that I was ducking in and out of,” he said. “Ideally, you should be there for all the quick-release items,” he said, “but they tend to happen at the fringes of the meetings, and sometimes you’ve got to duck out to a community meeting, or sometimes you’re late getting back from a lunch meeting or something like that, especially when they occur on days where you weren’t expecting to have had to be there.” Ford was criticized by Holyday and others in 2012 for skipping more than two hours of a meeting to coach a football game. But it is Ford’s absenteeism on non-council days that has generated the most questions about his work habits. In 2011 and 2012, Ford took three hours off on most fall afternoons to coach football practice. His daily whereabouts for much of the term were unknown, and former aides told police he had cancelled appointments and had gone “MIA” while intoxicated. His internal itinerary for much of 2012 and early 2013 was filled with large chunks of unspecified time listed as “private.”