Councillor’s fate in limbo as judge reserves ruling
Lawyer says Karygiannis made technical ‘mistake’ when filing expenses
Whether Jim Karygiannis will get his office back has been left in limbo ahead of an upcoming council meeting after a one-day hearing on Thursday, with a Superior Court judge set to make a ruling at a later, unspecified date.
Justice William Chalmers said at the conclusion of the hearing in a University Avenue courtroom that he would try to make aruling by Nov. 26 on Karygiannis’s application to get his seat back after he was removed from office earlier this month, but that he wasn’t making any promises.
That leaves council set to declare the Ward 22 (Scarborough-Agincourt) office vacant at a meeting that starts Tuesday with Karygiannis’s reinstatement still in the balance.
The court heard Thursday from city lawyer Mark Siboni that there is a 60-day window in which council then has to decide whether to appoint a replacement or call a byelection — meaning they don’t have to take the next steps immediately next week. If ordered by the court, Siboni said, city clerk Ulli Watkiss would be able to follow through with the reinstatement instead.
Karygiannis’s lawyer, Sean Dewart, argued Thursday that the former councillor had simply made a small, technical “mistake” when he filed paperwork in October that showed he had overspent a campaign expense limit by nearly $26,000 during the 2018 election.
That triggered his automatic removal from office as set out under the Municipal Elections Act — provincial legislation that governs all local elections.
It was not for Justice Chalmers to decide issues raised about specific expenses and how they were categorized, Dewart argued. That he said, was a process best left to an ongoing audit.
The overspending centres on a $27,000 dinner Karygiannis claimed as a campaign expense that took place two months after the election. That dinner was first classified in his initial campaign financial statement as a fundraiser, not subject to campaign limits. But in a supplementary filing, it was listed as an appreciation expense, subject to strict limits.
The dinner formed part of a request Toronto resident and fair elections advocate Adam Chaleff made to the city’s compliance audit committee for a review of Karygiannis’s expenses, noting that his financial documents don’t link any funds raised to that event.
Karygiannis has said in written legal submissions that several people approached him following voting day saying they wished to contribute. Karygiannis hasn’t named these people or provided any other specifics about the dinner to the court.
“Whatever criticisms can be laid at my client’s feet, deceit isn’t one of them,” Dewart said. “There can be no credible suggestion of any attempt to bury anything.”
But lawyer Stephen Aylward, representing Chaleff, who is an intervener in the case, said the former councillor failed to prove it was in fact a technical error, saying the dinner was “just the tip of the iceberg” and citing other instances of what they say are other potential expense violations.
Aylward said that there could only be two options — that Karygiannis made a technical error or that he did overspend the limit.
Aylward said the “simplest” argument is that Karygiannis changed his paperwork to respond to the compliance audit, which is still set to go ahead. Karygiannis has appealed that process.