Jim Karygiannis city’s new lone wolf
Making friends with colleagues has not been a No. 1 priority for former MP-turned-councillor
Six months after his leap from federal to city politics, Jim Karygiannis is emerging as council’s newest lone wolf, one who admits he won’t win the title of “Mr. Congeniality” any time soon.
Already he has been chastised by the mayor, shut down by the Speaker of council and drawn the ire of his fellow councillors.
But the 60-year-old has also become the newest wild card on council — this week helping make the difference to Mayor John Tory’s narrow victory on a crucial vote on the Gardiner Expressway.
His support doesn’t come without a price. In a bizarre move, opposing sides on council both found themselves pandering for Karygiannis’ swing vote by pledging to support his outside motion to bury the Gardiner.
Tory has made no secret of his displeasure with Karygiannis’ early antics. After campaigning to bring decorum to city hall, the mayor gave Karygiannis a tongue-lashing in March for wagging his finger and badgering deputants at a licensing committee hearing on taxi industry reform, one of the rookie councillor’s pet issues.
“This is the new city hall, not the old one,” Tory scolded.
Karygiannis, who represents Scarborough-Agincourt (Ward 39), makes no excuses. He claims to have mastered the Rob Ford brand of “grassroots” politics — one that alienated his colleagues — long before the former mayor’s outbursts became a fixture on latenight talk shows.
“If sometimes my style of politics disagrees with others, well, you know, I make no excuses for the fact that the people that I represent are the people that elect me,” Karygiannis said.
In the council chamber, Karygiannis has tussled with Speaker Frances Nunziata, who accused him of being disruptive and using bullying tactics during debate.
“He’s a fish out of water,” says Councillor Paula Fletcher. “This is not the House of Commons. People are not banging on their desks, they’re not interrupting; they’re not shouting people down.”
Behind the scenes, Jimmy K, as he’s known, has also rubbed fellow newbie councillors the wrong way.
During an orientation meeting, Councillor Jon Burnside, another rookie, was put off, he says, when Karygiannis kept pressing for details on how to expense a trip to China. “He monopolized that whole meeting with stupid questions like that,” Burnside says.
Burnside describes an elevator encounter with Karygiannis in which he complained that coffee wasn’t available in council chambers. Karygiannis said going downstairs was a waste of time. Present was Councillor Rob Ford, appearing haggard in the midst of cancer treatment, who had previously championed an end to free snacks and coffee at city hall as part of eliminating the “gravy train.”
“I just looked at him (Karygiannis) and I go, ‘You know what, you don’t have an ounce of class, do you?’ ” Burnside, a former cop, says he told Karygiannis. Burnside says Karygiannis growled, “Pardon me,” while leaning toward him.
“The general consensus is that he’s a bully,” says Burnside.
“I’m no threat to him; he’s much bigger and stronger than I am,” Karygiannis responds, shrugging off the accusation.
“Mr. Burnside has one election under his belt, but (by) the time he does nine he might feel a little different.”
Like Ford, Karygiannis has a certain populist appeal and cares not if he steps on the toes of decision-makers.
“I’m not here to earn the title of Mr. Congeniality, I’m here to represent my constituents — bottom line, full stop, end of story, exclamation mark.”
He’s “survived” 26 years in politics, often with “whopping pluralities,” he says. “If people did not like my tactics or if people didn’t like the way I carried myself, they wouldn’t have voted me back in.”
Eight consecutive times, in fact, to Ottawa as the Scarborough-Agincourt Liberal MP, before rewarding him with a landslide victory in last fall’s municipal election, giving him a fresh start in civic politics.
Karygiannis’s electoral track record speaks for itself, says Dimitri Soudas, former Conservative party director, who met Karygiannis back in 2002.
“That is the one performance measure by which you can tell whether a politician is doing his job or not,” Soudas said. “It’s important to ultimately work well with your colleagues, but the most important thing is to fight for the people that elect you.”
Fletcher agrees that a politician lives and dies at the ballot box. But she points out one key difference between federal and municipal politics: “We’re not an adversarial level of government. There’s no opposition, we’re all government.”
Karygiannis acknowledges he’s still adapting to the “municipal mindset.”
“I push the envelope, at times, in my questioning and tone of questioning. This is acceptable in the other place — because you play to the camera,” he says of the House of Commons. “Here, the camera’s on constantly and everybody grandstands and everybody gets up to speak and if you’re on the favourite side of the Speaker, you’re allowed to speak, if you’re not you’re shut down.”
Karygiannis is referring to Speaker Nunziata.
“She’s not protecting my rights and privileges as a member of council,” he says. “She has a bad habit of picking on people.”
Nunziata refuses to wade in. “I won’t comment on the specific allegations of the members. There are processes they can follow to raise those concerns,” she wrote in an email.
Karygiannis uses his direct, takeno-prisoners approach when responding, within 24 hours, to resident complaints. If that sounds ripped from the Ford playbook, Karygiannis has another take.
“I guess you could say Rob Ford copied it from me, because I got elected before he did.”
Karygiannis will drive around his suburban ward, north of the 401, between Victoria Park Ave. and Brimley Rd., looking “to see if people are doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing,” like cutting down trees, not mowing the grass or running an illegal rooming house. Sometimes he threatens to call bylaw enforcement. Other times he takes matters into his own hands.
“People vote for me even more for that simple reason.” Monica Wahba might disagree. Earlier this month, Karygiannis challenged her for the way she parked in her own driveway. The two sparred on Twitter. Wahba first posted a photo of Karygiannis, Cuban cigar in hand, attempting to “physically intimidate” her after boxing her into her driveway with his car. “People should learn to park properly,” he barked back, with a photo of her car. She doesn’t want to discuss it further; he maintains she was the aggressor.
It’s also not difficult to find fans of Jimmy K.
“He was very relatable,” Quaison Parris says of meeting Karygiannis at a fundraiser in 2005. “He spoke about growing up in Greek Town . . . and the struggles of being a new immigrant.”
Parris was at city hall for a flag raising to mark Guyana’s 49th anniversary of independence. Karygiannis sponsored the ceremony, where he was introduced as an “honorary Guyanese.”
Ten years ago, Karygiannis toured the South American country after it was ravaged by flooding. He successfully lobbied the federal government for a $2.7-million recovery package. He was Parliament Hill’s most frequent flyer.
Parris was so impressed with Karygiannis that he donated to his election campaign despite that fact he was living in Brampton. In fact, only a handful of Karygiannis’s donors live in his ward. The majority are residents of the 905 area code, many of them connected to the taxi industry which he staunchly supports in the ongoing propaganda war against ride-sharing Uber.
The father of five daughters, married to the same woman for 39 years, Karygiannis left federal politics after 2013, what he says was a “devastating” year of personal losses, including the death of his father.
“This is not the House of Commons. People are not banging on their desks, they’re not interrupting; they’re not shouting people down.” COUNCILLOR PAULA FLETCHER