The Land of the Rich and Infamous

By Chris Nuttall-Smith
The Land of
the Rich and
Infamous
Everything about Vaughan—its
executive estates, its hectares of malls,
its politicians’ aspirations—is big and
brash. It’s one of the fastest-growing
parts of the GTA, and its expansion
has been orchestrated by a handful
of politically connected developers
who know how to get what they
want. When the new mayor vowed
to break up the party, her enemies
decided to take her down. The
unravelling of Linda Jackson and
the fight for the suburbs
68 Toronto Life | torontolife.com | october 2009
Green acres: the median household income in
Vaughan is $25,000 higher than in Toronto
The office of the mayor of Vaughan
comes with certain perquisites. The pay
packet—nearly as rich, at $160,804, as the
mayor of Toronto’s—is nice, of course,
particularly when you consider that
Vaughan has only one-tenth as many
residents. The mayor also gets a car, a
gas card, a toll pass for the 407 highway,
three secretaries, and a gold and velvet
chain of office, which is a flashy but perhaps overstated symbol of the office’s
authority these days. Until recently, the
job came with a no-questions-asked
expenses policy.
photograph by melanie gordon
Vaughan’s current mayor, Linda Jackson, hasn’t been able to
enjoy these perks. She’s 50 years old, with dyed blondish hair and
skin that’s often the colour of inexpensive bronzer. She is not a
healthy-looking woman. The bags under her eyes are dark and
puffy, and it’s fair to say that she carries around a few extra
pounds. Jackson spent much of last December bouncing in and
out of the hospital with an omental infarction, a gut condition
that feels like acute appendicitis. After Christmas, she spent 16
days in hospital because, as she explained it not long afterward,
her everything was too high, and then when she got into the car
to go home, she started throwing up. “It was a great way to lose
weight,” she joked.
That winter was a low point for Jackson for other reasons. An
auditor found that the mayor had been using her city expense
account like a shopaholic at a sample sale, racking up thousands
of dollars in questionable charges, as well as personal expenses
that she took months to repay. After the report came out, Jackson
was quoted in the Vaughan Citizen proclaiming that she didn’t
charge the city for booze during her many corporate-account
dinners. Whereupon a former friend of hers came forward with
receipts that showed she had in fact spent hundreds of dollars of
city money on wine. Jackson later claimed she had been misquoted.
Then Jackson’s husband, Mario Campese, who was also her campaign manager, was arrested outside a nightclub near Jane Street
and Highway 7 and charged with causing a drunken disturbance,
after a scuffle that stemmed from an argument about the club’s
dress code. The charges were dropped after he performed 30 hours
of community service.
october 2009 | torontolife.com | Toronto Life 69
“David Miller used a broom to clean up
Toronto,” Jackson said. “I need a front-end
loader and a 40-yard bin”
While all of this was happening, Jackson and her lawyers were
challenging the legality of council’s decision to appoint a prosecutor to investigate her under the Municipal Elections Act. They
were also fending off a conflict of interest lawsuit filed by two of
her former supporters. The mayor’s personal legal bills—which
the city refused to cover—soon climbed to nearly $250,000.
The week after Campese’s arrest, Vaughan’s eight municipal
councillors held what they billed an “emergency news conference”
at city hall. The councillors loathed Linda Jackson. For the previous two years, they had been waging a systematic campaign to
undermine, isolate and ultimately dethrone her, and their effort
was well on its way to succeeding. Now, at long last, there was
blood in the water. “She has shamed the people of Vaughan,” Councillor Alan Shef­man announced. “We have waited with an abundance of patience for two years for her to provide leadership to no
avail.” The councillors demanded her resignation.
This is not supposed to happen to an anti-corruption crusader.
Linda Jackson was elected on a platform of new ethics and transparency at city hall. She was going to clean up Vaughan. Somehow,
she had become one of its biggest problems.
The city of Vaughan stretches northward from Steeles Avenue,
at the upper reaches of Toronto, toward the rolling farmland and
forests of King City. Vaughan wasn’t big enough to be considered a city until 1991. It was a township composed
of small communities—Woodbridge, Maple,
Kleinburg, Thornhill—that were surrounded
by farms, forests and lush river valleys.
That rural history, though it has all but
vanished, is celebrated today: a few
years ago, Vaughan councillor Mario
Ferri commissioned artists to paint
portraits of heritage sites around the
community; they included an old
house standing stoically in a snowy
field, and a sugar bush scene in
the fall. The councillor’s commissions were funded in part
by the developer Peter
Cipriano, of Gold Park
Homes, a com-
pany that has paved over much of rural Vaughan.
Vaughan is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the
country. Where Toronto’s population climbed by less than one
per cent between 2001 and 2006, Vaughan’s grew by more than
31 per cent. The city has more than 250,000 residents today, and
the largest concentration of Italian immigrants in Canada. More
than 40 per cent of the population claims Italian heritage. Six
out of eight of the city’s councillors are Italian; they often campaign in Italian and bow to local Italian-language media. Jackson often points out, with a touch of defensiveness, that her husband is Italian.
The city has always prided itself on the lifestyle it affords its
citizens. At $84,312, the median annual household income in
Vaughan makes Torontonians, with a median of $59,571, look like
paupers. Vaughan’s residents are devoutly suburban. They live
in their own homes—there’s almost no rental housing in the city,
and there are few residential towers. Until this recent recession,
the annual value of residential construction routinely approached
$1 billion. Though the province forces municipalities like Vaughan
to build more high-density developments, the city’s leaders don’t
always seem receptive. Jackson, in a fiery speech before council
earlier this year, bemoaned a series of recent applications for
high-rise residential developments, and said she wasn’t going to
take the pressure from the Ontario government anymore. “People
move to this community for a certain way of life,” she said.
“We are going to battle more and more applications as
we move forward, and I think that it’s high time that
we tell Dalton McGuinty that enough is enough.” It
was one of the only times in recent memory when
Jackson’s council seemed to fully support something she had said.
The more expensive subdivisions in Vaughan
are home to what real estate agents and developers call executive estates: super-sized McChateaux with faux Corinthian columns, acres of
polished marble and garage space for four or
five cars. The more common model is row upon
row of tract housing, banal as a bar code, with
a parking pad or garage in the front and a pubis
of grass and a pressure-treated fence out
back. Vaughan is also a city of strip malls
VS.
Linda Jackson, Mayor
She won the 2006 Vaughan election
by promising to rid the city of
corruption. She has since been
charged with exceeding her
campaign’s spending limits
photograph by peter power/getstock
The Vaughan City Council
(a.k.a. Linda Jackson’s enemies)
Joyce Frustaglio
Has served on council for
18 years. Expensed $30,000
in personalized pens
and magnetic business cards
that name her “acting mayor”
Mario Ferri
Chair of the city’s strategic
planning committee.
Raised the majority of his
$143,270 in campaign funding
from developers
Gino Rosati
Elected to council in
1991 after a career in
banking and real estate.
Serves on the Highway 427
extension committee
Alan Shefman
Founder of a human rights
consulting firm. First elected
to council in 2004, and led a
2008 press conference where
he and his fellow
councillors called for Mayor
Jackson’s resignation
Peter Meffe
Has served on council for
21 years. Chairs the region’s
main electricity distributor,
PowerStream
Tony Carella
Served as a special
assistant to MPP (and
development family heir)
Greg Sorbara before re-entering politics
Bernie DiVona
Served as finance chief until
April 2009. Resigned
after an audit found he
had used $3,000 of his
campaign funds to repair
the roof of his house
Sandra Yeung Racco
First elected to council in
2003 after a decade running
the campaigns of her
husband, Mario Racco, a
former Vaughan councillor
moated with endless acres of surface parking; many of the banks
feature drive-through ATMs. What Vaughan doesn’t have is
convenient public transit. In much of the municipality, it would
be considered highly eccentric, if not outright anti-establishment,
to go out for a carton of milk by any means of transportation other
than an SUV. Traffic is the single most important issue to
Vaughan’s residents, judging by all the attention it gets in city
council and at public meetings, and many residents are completely opposed to any solution other than building more roads.
At a recent community meeting, one member of a homeowners’
association captured the zeitgeist perfectly when he shouted
down an advocate of public transit. “Stop dreaming in Technicolor!” he bellowed. “I know that they want us to travel by bus
or by bicycle or by jackass, but the reality is that we still have
four wheels out there!” Nearly 90 per cent of Vaughan’s labour
force drives to work. When Linda Jackson sent her city-leased
car to the shop for repairs recently, she replaced it with a rental
Hummer H3.
The cheek-by-jowl subdivisions were built, in the main, by a
handful of businessmen: Fred DeGasperis, head of the ConDrain
Group, one of the biggest land development and infrastructure
firms on the continent; brothers Michael, Carlo and Silvio DeGasperis of TACC Construction (their father, John, founded the
photographs courtesy of city of vaughan
company and is Fred DeGasperis’s cousin); Vic De Zen, who was
until 2005 the head of Royal Group Technologies, one of North
America’s biggest plastic building products companies; and Sam
Sorbara, founder of the Sorbara Group (and father of Ontario
MPP and former Liberal finance minister Greg). Construction
magnate Carlo Baldassarra, who owns Greenpark Homes, Canada’s largest home-building company, once boasted that Greenpark builds a home every 41 minutes. His head office is based
not far from the Vaughan Mills mall, as is Rudy Bratty’s Remington Group, Inc. (Bratty, number 58 on Canadian Business’s Rich
List, is worth $900 million; Fred DeGasperis is 45th, with $1.14
billion.) SmartCentres, the big-box developer that builds most of
the new Walmarts and Home Depots in Canada, is also headquartered in the city.
Dozens of other developers and builders are either based in
Vaughan or built their fortunes there, in no small part because
Vaughan’s politicians have always worked as much for the development industry as they have for the city’s residents, if not more.
In some cases, councillors are the developers. Anthony Reale,
who was a Vaughan councillor from 1985 to 1988, worked as a
construction contractor at the same time, and he sometimes
mixed one line of work with the other. At one point in his term,
Reale voted to rezone a piece of land while he was the main conoctober 2009 | torontolife.com | Toronto Life 71
tractor on the project. (He later said he forgot to declare the conflict.) In another case, Reale’s company won a $1-million job on a
shopping plaza just a month after he voted to approve the development. (Reale, who now works as a real estate agent, was the federal
Conservative candidate in Thornhill in 2006.) Frank Cipollone,
a real estate agent, was also a councillor in Vaughan in the 1980s.
In 1987, Cipollone voted to rezone a 30-hectare property in the
municipality; just a day earlier, he had signed a contract that would
pay him part of $140,000 in commission for the sale of the land.
(A district court judge found him guilty of a technical breach of
the province’s conflict of interest law, ruling that Cipollone made
an honest mistake.) A few years later, the city council voted unani­
mously to make Cipollone the chair of its development and planning committee.
These days, none of Vaughan’s politicians appear to be directly
involved in development business, though many, including the
mayor, have strong family or social ties to development industry
heavyweights. Even Jackson, who sees corruption and wrong­doing
in nearly every direction she looks, is reluctant to wag a finger at
the city’s development industry.
One afternoon last spring, Jackson described to me the threats
that some of her political supporters have faced. “Residents who
speak out about particular members of council, their families are
being threatened with loss of business: ‘You tell your wife to be
quiet, otherwise we’ll be sure your business slows down,’ ” Jackson said.
“Who’s telling them that?” I asked her.
“People go around and meet with them. Developers. Other
people.”
She paused, got a concerned look on her face. “But I wouldn’t
use the word ‘developers.’ Community people go to them and say
to them, ‘You’d better stop.’ ”
Lorna Jackson, was the city’s beloved
mayor from 1982 until her death in 2002; Lorna Jackson more or
Linda Jackson’s mother,
less created modern Vaughan. She built its civil service, grew its
population nearly tenfold and successfully promoted the munici­
pality’s official slogan: “The City Above Toronto.” Vaughan’s
$107 million new city hall will bear Lorna Jackson’s name when
it’s completed next year.
Michael Di Biase, a long-time councillor, took over as mayor
when Lorna Jackson died. By the fall of 2006, he’d had four scandalplagued years. In two decades in politics, he derived nearly all of
his campaign funding from land development and construction
interests, and would use his campaign surplus—in 2003, he collected $149,000 more than he was legally allowed to spend on
campaigning—to hold lavish victory parties for his grateful supporters. For his son’s bachelor party in 2005, Di Biase sold hundreds of tickets, at $75 a head, to his deep-pocketed pals in the
development industry. He was alleged to have intervened on behalf
of some of those same companies when the approval of a project
was in need of a little extra push—a charge he denies.
Di Biase used the mayor’s chair to wage war against his predecessor’s civil service, firing or forcing out 10 top municipal
managers, most of them well respected, and replacing them with
his own picks. The city’s severance costs and legal bills ran into
the millions; one wrongful dismissal suit, which was settled in
2004, accused Di Biase of bullying, emotional battery and covert
anti-Semitism, adding that he had created a “poisonous environment that is fraught with cronyism, favouritism and special
treatment.” (Di Biase says the allegations are untrue.) But the
most significant consequence of his slash-and-burn campaign
was that it left many of Vaughan’s top bureaucrats demoralized
and afraid: they feared any conflict with Di Biase or his buddies
could cost them their jobs.
Breaking the rules, however, often wasn’t a firing offence. Bernie
DiVona, a councillor and one of the mayor’s closest allies, was
investigated for taking $65,000 from the city’s utility company.
He claimed he withdrew and returned the money to test the
integrity of the utility’s financial systems. After the police decided
THE DEVELOPER KINGS
The builders of Vaughan’s suburbs are also some of the city’s richest residents
Fred DeGasperis of
the ConDrain Group.
He built his family’s
concrete and drain
business into the
largest construction
company in the country. Estimated worth:
$1.14 billion
John DeGasperis of
TACC Con­struction.
His company has
built much of the
infrastructure in
Southern Ontario—
everything from
streetlights and
natural gas lines
to roads
72 Toronto Life | to r o n to li fe .co m | october 2009
Vic De Zen, former
CEO of Royal Group
Tech­nologies, a PVC
manufacturer
responsible for much
of North America’s
vinyl siding.
Estimated worth:
$880 million
Carlo Baldassarra of
Greenpark Homes,
the largest home
builder in the country. The majority of
the company’s projects are suburbs in
the GTA
Rudy Bratty of the
Remington Group, a
residential and commercial developer
currently building a
new downtown for
Markham. Estimated
worth: $900 million
photographs: fred degasperis by george pimentel; john degasperis courtesy of tacc construction ltd.;
de zen from national post; baldassarra from corriere canadese/tandem; bratty from getstock
Growth industry: Vaughan expects to attract 160,000 people in the next 20 years
there was insufficient evidence to charge DiVona, Di Biase and
the council agreed that the city should pay his legal bills and put
the unpleasant incident behind them. DiVona, still a councillor
today, was the city’s budget chief until this spring; he is also a
director of the Michael Di Biase Charitable Foundation.
In another scandal in Di Biase’s term, it was alleged the city
ignored its own tendering rules to award a $39-million construction contract to Maystar General Contracting, a politically connected construction firm; the city’s director of purchasing said in
court documents that he had been pressured to accept the company’s bid even though it didn’t meet the required criteria. This,
many residents believed, was how Vaughan had always worked.
(The commissioner alleged to be doing the pressuring denied the
claim; the project was later retendered, and Maystar once again
won the job.)
Linda Jackson was elected as a Vaughan councillor in 2002, in
a by-election just two months after her mother’s death. She’d been
working as a security manager at Canada’s Wonderland, but
politics, she felt, had always been her calling.
Jackson became Di Biase’s angriest critic, railing against the
firings and forced resignations of senior staff. When the long-time
city manager Scott Somerville was forced out of his job (Somerville
had approved severance pay to Lorna Jackson’s estate without
seeking council approval), Jackson was indignant. “He has been
hung out to dry and made to look like a crook,” she said. “This is
absolutely disgraceful.”
The upstart councillor announced her candidacy for mayor early
in 2006, and though there were other contenders for the post, she
was widely seen as the only one with a chance of unseating Di Biase.
The mayor was a fundraiser extraordinaire; in that 2006 campaign, he would report $344,136 in donations compared to Jackson’s reported $167,858. (The spending limit was $120,419.) But
Jackson didn’t need to buy publicity the way lesser-known, more
soft-spoken types do. She had a way of generating it on her own.
Jackson’s campaign promises—and, on the surface, at least, her
comportment—stood in such contrast to the old way of doing official business that reporters couldn’t get enough of her. She promised to hire an integrity commissioner who would audit every city
department, for example, and she said that she would ensure the
74 Toronto Life | torontolife.com | october 2009
city did far more of its business out in the open, rather than behind
the usual closed doors. Jackson hammered Di Biase for all the
firings and resignations during his tenure, for his supposed pressuring of planning staff on behalf of developers, for the aura of
corruption that plagued the city.
Jackson promised to “bring respectability back to city hall.”
“You know how David Miller said he needed a broom to clean
up Toronto?” she pledged at one point during her mayoral campaign. “I need a front-end loader and a 40-yard bin.”
Di Biase, however, caught some breaks. During the campaign,
somebody left a sheaf of Linda Jackson’s e-mails—by all appearances, they had been stolen from her city e-mail account—on
Di Biase’s front porch. While Jackson was livid at the leak, neither
the mayor nor his fellow councillors seemed all that troubled by
the e-mails’ provenance. The correspondence showed Jackson,
eager to fuel her campaign with more examples of corruption,
swapping tips and information with a York Regional Police officer
about ongoing litigation against the city. Di Biase accused the
officer of improper disclosure. At a special meeting called by Di
Biase at the height of the campaign, he and his council demanded
that York Regional Police investigate the officer, which it did,
eventually reassigning him.
In the end, Jackson won the election by 90 votes. Di Biase, refusing to admit defeat, spent the next five months trying to overturn
the loss. In the week after the election, Di Biase used his mayoral
powers—his term wasn’t quite over yet—to call a special council
meeting, and his loyal councillors moved to grant a recount to the
man they had endorsed for mayor. When the recount affirmed
Jackson’s win, Di Biase went to court, where he won yet another
recount. It gave Jackson an extra four votes.
On the final day of Di Biase’s term, the city fired yet another
long-time employee—an office coordinator in the planning department. In her place, the city installed Sandra Di Ponio, the departing mayor’s faithful executive assistant.
The bad blood between Jackson and the rest of council—as well
as some of the city’s senior management—grew during the testy
days of the recounts. Jackson’s antagonists made it clear from the
outset of her term that they’d do things their way. Joyce Frustaglio,
the city’s senior councillor, said after Jackson’s win, “If she comes
photographs: this page by melanie gordon; page 76 by charla jones/getstock
Councillors gladly take gifts from the city’s developers: hockey tickets, high-end dinners,
panettones, bottles of wine
to us and embraces us and wants us to be a part of her team, then
we will be a part of her team. But if she doesn’t embrace us…we’re
eight members of council, and we’ll run council.”
And so they did. From the start of Jackson’s term, council dragged
its feet and blocked her attempts to audit and investigate alleged
corruption in the city. The city manager, who was one of Di Biase’s
hires, scheduled a key vote to award the contract for Vaughan’s
new city hall without consulting Jackson—even the provincial
minister of municipal affairs and housing, John Gerretsen, complained that it was unusual to leave the mayor out of the decision.
And the council fired the city’s long-time clerk and elections overseer, who was seen as a Jackson loyalist after trying to brush off
Di Biase’s claims for a recount.
It became clear before long that Jackson’s campaign promises
were dead. There would be no investigation into corruption in
the city. Her failure on this front enraged some of her core supporters, who then turned on her with a vengeance. One of those
supporters went to the council’s audit committee with questions
about Jackson’s office spending. The resulting report found that
Jackson had been reimbursed for nearly $14,000 in expenses on
her city credit card for which she hadn’t provided detailed
receipts. Jackson had used her city credit card for personal purchases, and took months, and almost a year in some cases, to
repay them. She hadn’t bothered to repay the city for a flight for
her husband to accompany her on a business trip. The audit discovered that the mayor’s office had also directed lucrative printing services to the husband of one of her assistants. What the
audit did not find, however, was any fault with Jackson—she
hadn’t violated any existing policies, it said.
A second audit, this one examining her election campaign spending, was more damning. Elections compliance audits are serious
business: convictions under the Municipal Elections Act can strip
officeholders of their title and bar them from running again. Among
the report’s findings: Jackson’s campaign accepted unreported
contributions of food and drink from a banquet hall owned in part
by a business partner of the prominent developer Frank Falvo;
in five separate instances, Jackson’s campaign accepted more than
the $750 donation limit from companies (including three from
Falvo-owned enterprises); Jackson’s campaign also used unreported cash—slush money, essentially—to pay for $3,810 in advertisements in the Toronto Star. All told, the audit found that Jackson
spent at least $12,000 over the campaign limit. The auditors wrote
that their report wasn’t complete, either, as Mario Campese had
stopped co-operating with the auditors halfway through their
interview, refusing to answer any more questions.
Jackson’s bid to quash the audit eventually failed. In March, as
the scandals surrounding Jackson reached a full boil, the city’s
special prosecutor charged the mayor with 68 elections violations,
and Campese with five.
or more venomous, about
Linda Jackson than Joyce Frustaglio. Frustaglio, who by virtue
of her share of the popular vote is second in line for the mayoralty,
often introduces herself as “acting mayor”; she does this even
on days when the real mayor is working in her office next door.
Frustaglio has been a city councillor for 18 years and is one of the
council’s greatest defenders of the development industry. She
No councillor has been more vocal,
The vanquished: Michael Di Biase lost his seat to Jackson by 94 votes
When Jackson sent her city-leased car to the shop for repairs, she replaced it with a rental Hummer H3
would be a shoo-in for The Real Housewives of Woodbridge, if
Bravo ever cottoned on to the sheer excess and dramatic richness
of the place. She has flair: she tints her shoulder-length bob
a metallic red and once wore a leopard-print vest to city council.
When Jackson was hospitalized last February, Frustaglio worried in the local newspaper that the mayor’s absences would hamper the organization of the city’s annual Mayor’s Gala, a fundraiser
for a new Vaughan hospital. “It’s certainly a duty that she could
have very well passed on to me or to someone else,” Frustaglio
sniped. When I point out that the city’s voters did elect Jackson
mayor, after all, Frustaglio retorts, “You know what? Barely.
Barely. They elected her by barely 90 votes. That doesn’t tell me
that you have a huge mandate. Don’t tell me that’s a huge mandate
from the public, because that is not, OK?”
Her anger, she says, stems from Jackson’s allegations of widespread city corruption. “A mayor should run this municipality as
if he or she were the mother or the father of the family, and lead
by example, and lead with love and a sense of protectiveness,”
Frustaglio says. “That’s the way I feel about my municipality.
I want to protect it. I don’t want people to malign it. And if you
don’t care that people are maligning it, and if you’re contributing
to that kind of malign that’s happening out there, then shame on
you. I don’t think that you deserve to be the leader.”
Is there any corruption or graft in the city of Vaughan?
“God no!” she answers, almost shouting. “I would put my hands
on fire. I do not believe that that is happening anywhere,” she
says. “I can only speak for myself. I haven’t seen it, I don’t feel it,
I don’t think it.”
Frustaglio’s own ethical record is less than stellar. In the past
five years, she has spent nearly $30,000 in city money to buy
plastic pens with her name on them, and magnetic business cards
that bear her picture and the title “acting mayor.” She bought
them from a printing company that belongs to Bert DiVincenzo,
her brother and campaign co-chair. “In retrospect, the optics
don’t appear right,” Frustaglio said when the revelations reached
the press. Frustaglio’s son, Steve, has done hundreds of thousands
of dollars of construction contracting business for city departments in recent years. “I had nothing to do with giving him the
business,” Frustaglio says. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know.”
She ought to have—she signed city cheques to her son’s companies,
worth nearly $35,000, in 2008. When copies were leaked to the
media, she claimed she didn’t notice the connection to her son.
The only issue Frustaglio and her fellow councillors had with the
revelation was that somebody sent copies of the cheques to the
press. And so her friends on city council ordered a $45,000 investigation to try to uncover the source of the leak. (The report has
not yet been made public.)
Frustaglio resists investigations into her own dealings and is
dismissive of the handful of Jackson allies—private citizens, all
of them—who have pursued them. “For the longest time, you know
78 Toronto Life | torontolife.com | october 2009
we had a—it was almost like an honour system,” Frustaglio complains. “I don’t ever remember having a community where some
members of the community were always badgering you about
certain things. That never existed before.”
“I suppose one would say that it is a democracy, and freedom of
speech reigns supreme in this wonderful country of ours, and how
do you stop them?” Frustaglio sighs. “How do you stop them?”
Though they’d never admit it, Frustaglio and Linda Jackson
have a lot in common. Both are comfortable with casual cronyism. Both are outspoken boosters of developers and the development industry. Both believe that they should be the city’s mayor.
And with apologies to the many upstanding and progressive
small-town politicians out there, Jackson and Frustaglio are
small-town politicians to their cores. Vaughan, meanwhile,
stopped being a small town a long time ago. It’s home to some of
the most valuable undeveloped land left in North America. The
past few years have brought the biggest, most sustained and most
lucrative building boom in its history. That the city’s voters left
the likes of Linda Jackson and Joyce Frustaglio in charge is almost
too incredible to be true.
every month, vaughan’s elected leaders approve rezoning and
development and subdivision applications that are worth tens of
millions of dollars to the same people and corporations that
brought all of them to power. And yet when anybody complains
about this, the mayor and council fight back, shrug it off, or argue
that $750, which is the legal maximum a person or corporation
can donate to municipal election campaigns in Ontario, can’t buy
a vote. (Standard Jacksonian variation: I don’t know about the
rest of council, but $750 can’t buy my vote.)
The problem with that defence is that the councillors’ putative
employers—Vaughan’s citizens, that is—have little choice but to
take them at their word. The council’s discussions of development
matters are almost always held behind closed doors. When the
votes happen, the council rarely records which way individual
politicians go. Citizens’ groups, environmental associations and
academics have been complaining about this for years. Anyone
who tries to figure out what’s happening behind those closed
doors, meanwhile, faces the city’s contempt—some disgruntled
Vaughan residents who file freedom of information requests with
the city have been informed they’re over their limit. Two in particular are currently fighting a $395,000 lawsuit from the city that
is squarely aimed at forcing them to shut up and go away. Frustaglio, for one, doesn’t think anybody should be too interested in
how individual politicians vote on development questions. “I personally don’t think that it’s a big issue. Because if there was an
issue, if I thought there was an issue with a plan and I wanted my
vote recorded, I would ask for a recorded vote,” she says. “That’s
how it works.” And she’s right about the process: all it takes to
force a recorded vote is a single councillor’s verbal request. Given
that no one ever makes that request, it appears Frustaglio’s colleagues share her lack of concern.
They save the recorded votes for really important things, such
as the fight this spring over who should get the first quote in official
city press releases: the mayor or a councillor. The motion to make
it councillors passed, perhaps unsurprisingly, with the record
showing that the councillors voted for, and Jackson against.
The other problem with the $750 defence is that the smart developers in effect give far, far more than that. In 2006, Frustaglio
took the maximum allowable campaign donations from Ada,
Michael, Nancy and Romeo DeGasperis, double the allowable
amount from Silvio DeGasperis, and $500 from Angela DeGasperis. Councillor Bernie DiVona took five separate $750 donations
from companies associated with Maystar General Contracting
(because the companies are not linked for income tax purposes,
however, the donations were all legal), which soon became one of
the finalists for the contract to build Vaughan’s new city hall.
(DiVona and the rest of council, Jackson excepted, voted the month
after that election to award Maystar the deal.)
Linda Jackson received seven separate $750 donations from
development and construction companies run by members of the
Gottardo family, plus five from members of Falvo-owned enterprises. She returned five of the Gottardo donations and four of the
Falvo donations, once the drive for an audit of her campaign
finances was underway.
More than 96 per cent of councillor Peter Meffe’s campaign
financing came from corporate contributors, most of those tied to
development or construction. Mario Ferri managed to raise an
impressive $143,270 (councillors have a spending limit of $117,920),
most of which came from development interests. All those $750
donations add up. The average winning council candidate in the
2006 election raised $53,000 in development money; the average
loser raised only a fraction of that.
They take gifts, too, and gladly: hockey tickets, high-end dinners, panettones, bottles of booze. Few of them see that as an issue.
“Fred DeGasperis sends six bottles of wine from Vineland, and I
think that’s a nice gesture,” Linda Jackson says. “I don’t think
that’s unacceptable, because he’s not just sending it to me; he’s
sending it to everyone. In this community, to me, I don’t think it’s
a bad gesture. Because the thing is that if you say, oh you can’t
accept it, a lot of times it’ll go underground and people will accept
things anyways.”
But at least the graft isn’t as bad these days as it used to be,
Jackson says.
“I know years ago, my mother, we used to almost have to get
out there and direct traffic for the Christmas deliveries,” Jackson
says. “It’s really cut back.”
“To the office, you mean? Or to the house?” I ask her.
“House,” Jackson answers. “Most of the stuff goes to the house.”
will not be easy. The charges
against her, though they won’t necessarily reach their conclusion
before November 2010, could force her to resign or bar her from
seeking re-election. Jackson’s council, meanwhile, has set its own
list of priorities for the rest of their term, which include “democratic participation”; “accountability and transparency” (these
people are nothing if not ambitious); “health care,” which is the
city’s long-standing push to bring a hospital to the community;
and “official plan review.” That last item will carve up much of
the city’s remaining undeveloped land as Vaughan projects
The rest of Linda Jackson’s term
160,000 new residents will move into the city in the next 20-odd
years; one of the key questions the review will answer is how much
of the city’s agricultural and forest land—“the white belt,” as it’s
called—will be cleared for development before 2030. That question
has been the subject of intense behind-the-scenes lobbying for
several years now. When I asked John Zipay, the city’s commissioner of planning and building, whether the review will set off
a rush for land in Vaughan’s northern farm belt, he looked at me
like I must be an absolute idiot. “Are you kidding me?” Zipay
answered. “People in the development industry are way ahead of
everybody else. They buy land well before any of these studies.
There are people who bought land 15, 20, 35 years ago, anticipating where the development is going to go.”
The official plan review hasn’t yet interested residents outside
the development industry; in spite of an admirable outreach effort,
the city had to scale back a series of planned public consultations
late last year because almost nobody ever showed up.
The jostling to replace Jackson as mayor, meanwhile, is already
in full swing. Julian Fantino, the OPP Commissioner and object
of adoration of many Ontario grassroots conservatives, is often
mentioned as a potential challenger, and he has not ruled out a
run. Frank Miele, a long-time senior manager at the city (he was
forced out in 2007, in large part, he says, because he was one of
the only top bureaucrats who co-operated with Jackson), has also
considered running. And Joyce Frustaglio is being coy about her
aspirations, though her hunger for the mayor’s chair couldn’t get
much more naked.
They’re all lining up because they know that Michael Di Biase,
who spent the first half of Jackson’s term hinting that he might be
back for another shot at her, will have a harder time of it if he
decides to run. The audit of his 2006 campaign found a raft of
problems, including steeply discounted rent on his campaign
office and spending over his campaign limit. The report also found
that somebody gave the former mayor $155,283 to fund his recount
fight after his election loss; Di Biase has so far refused to name his
benefactor—he and his lawyers say it’s nobody’s business but his.
If $750 can’t buy a Vaughan city politician’s vote, how about
$155,283 in secret cash?
Linda Jackson says her second term, if she gets one, should be
much better than the first. This is a spectacular leap of hope, of
course; notwithstanding her chances of being re-elected, a successful bid will also hinge on Jackson’s ability to, a) avoid being
kicked out of office before the election, b) avoid being barred from
running, and c) avoid being trounced by a slightly less palatable
contender. But the way Jackson sees it, the mayor has only eight
little problems in her way.
“The frustrating thing with me, with the issue of cleaning up
Vaughan, is that I don’t have the support of council to get in and
really do the work, do the investigations I want. Nor do I feel that
I have the support of the senior administration, because most of
them were hired by the former mayor,” Jackson says.
“What can you do?” I ask her.
“Not a lot. I wait for 2010.”
And what happens then?
“Hopefully I’ll be re-elected by the people,” Jackson says. “And
hopefully there will be some changes on council. The populace,
the public, are really fed up.”
“All it is going to take is one person to stand up and tell the
truth,” the mayor vows, “and then this whole place is going to fall
like a deck of cards.” E