On the last Tuesday in August, many councillors tuned in to the CBC’s Metro Morning with a mixture of shock and disbelief. In the studio, Doug Ford was waxing rhapsodic about the notion of a mega-mall project, complete with a Ferris wheel and a monorail, on that benighted stretch of the eastern waterfront known as the Port Lands. As gasps rippled through the municipal body politic, Pam McConnell, one of two councillors whose wards cover the area, was shaken by more than Ford’s scheme to plunk down a glitzy retail Disneyland on that 1,000-acre plot of prime lakefront real estate. Earlier, Ford had labelled Waterfront Toronto, the 10-year-old tri-government agency charged with developing the waterfront, a “boondoggle.” Now McConnell wondered what was behind those comments.
On the CBC, Ford had alluded to a presentation where detailed plans for the project had been unveiled and “everyone’s jaw just dropped.” As McConnell and fellow area councillor Paula Fletcher soon discovered, that “visioning” exercise took place at an August 16 in-camera board meeting of the Toronto Port Lands Company, a city agency David Miller had stripped of its development mandate, turning it into a waterfront property manager. As they also discovered, Doug Ford had a connection to the TPLC’s president, Michael Kraljevic, a former real estate executive. They had played on the same high school football team, though Ford insists he hadn’t spoken to the man in 25 years. “Rob and I specifically ran against backroom deals,” he says. “I can assure you, no one influences Rob and me.”
A paper trail revealed that the mega-mall scheme had been in the works since shortly after Rob Ford took office. In February 2011, Kraljevic wrote to Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, questioning its environmental assessments of the Port Lands. In May, a lobbyist for an Australian mall developer, the Westfield Group, had met with Doug Ford and the mayor’s new chief of staff to discuss the possibility of a shopping centre on the site. By the time the August 16 TPLC board meeting rolled around, two high-priced architects, Eric Kuhne and Mark Sterling, were presenting elaborate drawings for a Westfield-backed mall—drawings that included an ice palace in the Hearn generating station, an industrial white elephant on which Ford’s campaign donor Mario Cortellucci and his partners held a long-term lease. Astonishingly, TPLC had paid the architects $55,000—a sole-source contract of the very kind Rob Ford had once railed against as a councillor.
Still, it wasn’t until a week later that it became obvious a bureaucratic coup was in the works. An August 22 report from the city manager recommended, out of the blue, that Kraljevic’s TPLC replace Waterfront Toronto as the lead agency in developing the Port Lands. “All of us kind of had this wake-up call,” Fletcher remembers. “It was like, ‘Whoa!’ ”
When the mayor’s executive committee promptly endorsed the report, the full import of the putsch was clear. It would pave the way to auctioning off some of the city’s most valuable undeveloped real estate—almost all of it contaminated post-industrial land awaiting soil remediation and basic services—at fire-sale rates.
Already, Doug Ford’s boondoggle comments had provoked panicked calls from one of the waterfront’s biggest developers, Texas-based Hines, demanding to know if their deal was off. But when Pam McConnell told the mayor’s brother he had shaken investors’ confidence—perhaps even threatened a multi-million-dollar development—he seemed uncomprehending. “He said, ‘Send them my way and I’ll make a deal with them,’ ” McConnell recalls. “I said, ‘Councillor, that’s the problem: we’ve already got a deal with them.’ ”
