Rob Ford has won his conflict of interest case. For good.

The Supreme Court of Canada announced Thursday morning that it has rejected a request to hear a final appeal of Ford’s January victory. As usual, the court did not offer an explanation.

The decision, made by a three-judge panel, ends a 15-month saga that nearly cost Ford his job last year. The case weakened him at council, took attention away from his agenda, and cost him tens of thousands of dollars.

The case “created months of instability, turmoil, and confusion at city hall,” Ford said in a city hall speech.

“I’m so happy this is finally over. I’ve been vindicated, and we can move on. This case has taken a significant toll on my family, both financially and emotionally,” Ford said.

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The court was always unlikely to grant the appeal. It accepts only about 12 per cent of the applications it receives in a given year, and it rejects cases it does not think involve legal questions of significant public importance.

The lawyer who pursued the conflict of interest suit, Clayton Ruby, had told the court in a written filing that the case involves “legal questions that are fundamentally important to all municipalities and all Canadians.” Ford’s lawyer, Alan Lenczner, had disagreed.

In his speech, Ford said the residents behind the case “do not respect democracy” and were driven by a “political agenda.”

“They tried to abuse a loophole in outdated laws, laws which even the premier admits need to be changed. They couldn’t beat me at the polls, so they tried everything they could to stop me from moving forward with my agenda,” Ford said.

Under provincial law, it is up to citizens to pursue politicians in court over alleged conflicts of interest. Ruby worked on behalf of resident Paul Magder — and Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, a left-leaning activist, Ford opponent and former library board vice-chair who recruited Magder.

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Ruby declined to comment. “I am not saying anything,” he said in an email.

The appeal was dismissed “with costs,” which means the resident who filed the challenge against Ford will have to pay part of the fees Ford incurred because of the Supreme Court appeal. Under a previous Divisional Court decision, however, Ford will have to cover his own costs from the rest of the case — more than $100,000. Ford called that decision “outrageous.”

The case could have added significant uncertainty in the 2014 mayoral election. Under the court’s normal timetables, a decision would probably have come during the campaign, possibly very shortly before voting day.

Ford has triumphed in three separate legal cases during his troubled mayoralty, though one, a defamation suit, is still under appeal. He remains embroiled in a scandal over a video that appears to show him smoking crack cocaine; he denies that he uses crack and that a video exists.

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Ruby argued that Ford broke the province’s strict Municipal Conflict of Interest Act when he spoke and voted at city council in February 2012 on the issue of whether he should have to pay back $3,150 to lobbyists and a company from which he had improperly accepted donations to his football foundation.

Ford lost the case at the Superior Court in November. Justice Charles Hackland ordered him to vacate his office, ruling that his actions “were characterized by ignorance of the law and a lack of diligence in securing professional advice, amounting to willful blindness.”

But Ford hung on. He was quickly granted a stay that allowed him to remain mayor until the Divisional Court settled his appeal, and he won the appeal in January: a three-judge panel ruled that Ford’s contested vote was null and void because council never had the legal right to order him to pay back the $3,150 in the first place.

The same panel did require Ford to cover his own costs, saying that Magder was “reasonable” to pursue the challenge and noting that Ford succeeded on only one of his four appeal arguments. The panel also wrote that the case raised “novel legal issues with respect to matters of public importance.”

Chaleff-Freudenthaler, silent on the conflict case, was the vocal public face of a challenge that forced an audit of Ford’s election finances. The audit uncovered dozens of “apparent contraventions” of elections law, but an expert committee voted 2-1 in February against launching a prosecution.