Tory aims to rejoin Rogers board
Former Toronto mayor has a long history with the telecom giant and the family behind it
Former Toronto mayor John Tory is poised to be re-elected to the board for Rogers Communications Inc. after he resigned his city hall post amid a scandal last year.
Tory, 69, has been nominated for election at the board’s next annual meeting in April, according to an information circular posted on the company’s website.
He is one of three new nominees for the board following several vacancies that include Rogers family members Melinda Rogers-Hixon and Martha Rogers. The Rogers’ sisters resignations followed a private settlement with their brother Edward Rogers after a protracted, public conflict over the company’s leadership.
The Torys and Rogers have a long history of friendship and business partnerships.
Tory’s late father John A. Tory ran the family’s Torys LLP law firm, where Ted Rogers worked as an articling student before launching his telecom giant.
The younger Tory would go on to work at Rogers’ shop, including several executive positions at the company, running the cable division for eight years. He was later appointed to the board in 2010 after he failed to secure his party’s election as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives. He stepped down from the Rogers board in 2014, as promised, when he was elected as mayor for the first time.
But Tory refused to resign from the advisory committee of the Roger’s family trust, a controlling body for the family of the late Ted Rogers to exact their influence over their father’s company.
“I gave my word to Ted Rogers that I would act in this capacity so long as I was able, and out of a sense of moral obligation to my late friend, I do not intend to resign from these positions,” he said in a statement then.
He did not disclose, and the Star only confirmed for the first time in 2021, that he was paid $100,000 annually for that position.
Rogers directors received $110,000 in annual compensation in 2023, according to that year’s circular, and received $120,000 worth of stock.
The number of Rogers shares attributed to Tory in the latest circular have grown substantially since last publicly reported in 2014 — then valued at $5.5 million.
Today, the increased number of shares reported in the 2024 circular, at current stock value, are worth closer to $15 million.
Tory’s ongoing tenure on the Rogers trust brought continued questions at city hall, where he declared possible conflicts during council or committee debates dozens of times, forcing him to be absent for those discussions.
He found himself on the receiving end of an integrity commissioner complaint in 2022 after he took part in a vote about closing streets to car traffic in favour of pedestrians during the pandemic — a move opposed by the Rogers-owned Toronto Blue Jays over access to games at the stadium also owned by Rogers.
Integrity commissioner Jonathan Batty found in December 2022 that Tory had not broken any municipal conflict rules.
In February 2023, after the Star first reported on an affair with a 31-year-old junior staffer, Tory resigned from office saying he had made a “serious error of judgment.” He said in a statement that the woman left the office and secured job elsewhere, which the Star learned was at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, partly owned by Rogers.
An integrity commissioner report on the relationship later found Tory had violated the city’s code of conduct, including improper use of influence when he voted on council items regarding a bid to host the 2026 World Cup games when the woman he was in a relationship with was working on that file at MLSE.