NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE—Toronto isn’t the only place in Ontario getting kicked around by Premier Doug Ford.

While Ford is noisily dismembering Toronto’s city council, using tactics that degrade and disrespect Canada’s Constitution, his Progressive Conservative government has also more quietly cancelled elections for regional chair in York, Peel and Niagara.

It’s always murky for a senior government to deny Ontarians the right to vote for regional representatives, so the cancellation of all three elections raises questions. But cancelling the vote for regional chair in Niagara may be the most murky of Ford’s moves outside Toronto.

The cancellation leaves unanswered a number of questions about the way Niagara Region is administered and the way its elected regional council functions.

They really boil down to this: Is Niagara Region Ontario’s rotten borough?

Niagara Region has been wallowing in the mire quite a bit, it seems.

Last December the regional council illegally seized the notes and computer of a St. Catharines Standard reporter, Bill Sawchuk, whose transgression appears to have been covering a council meeting — doing his job.

One regional councillor, Andy Petrowski, got in trouble for sending out inflammatory Trump-like tweets about other local officials, homosexuality and Muslims, as well as an email from his government account with a pornographic image of a woman with her legs spread open.

Pewtrowski, who is not running again, said he was sorry about the email, which he says he didn’t send. But he has refused to apologize for what objectively, anyone would consider some fairly nasty tweets about Islam — he says these are “truth and the word of God.”

There’s also a bit of mess at the region’s Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, which cost taxpayers a bundle in lawyers’ fees. The authority, along with its former chief administrator, Carmen D’Angelo, sued a local activist, Ed Smith, for defamation‚ and they lost.

The failed lawsuit left taxpayers on the hook for at least $100,000.

Niagara’s regional chair, Alan Caslin, then played a role in hiring D’Angelo as Niagara Region’s chief administrative officer to a cushy $230,000-a-year job. The CAO of a region executes the policies that the elected officials approve.

D’Angelo may be a fine administrator, but it also turns out that he had help with the job interview.

Grant LaFleche, a reporter at the local paper, the St. Catharines Standard, did some digging and found that Caslin’s office appears to have tipped the hiring process, providing D’Angelo with his job interview questions — along with suggested answers.

Have you ever applied for a job you really wanted? Who among us wouldn’t want to be given the exact interview questions and answers?

“Lucky” D’Angelo won the $230,000 taxpayer-funded job.

It would have been reasonable for Niagara’s voters to ask Caslin, who was running for regional chair, what happened and how his office was involved.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Except that, whoops! Thanks to Ford, he doesn’t have to answer now.

Just after the local story broke about the interview “help,” Ford cancelled the regional election as part of the ill-fated bill that proposed to slash Toronto’s council.

The court decision that forced Ford to go back to the drawing board on Toronto did not affect the cancelling of votes in Niagara (or Vaughan or Peel).

Caslin is now free to run for a local seat on Niagara’s regional council, instead of region-wide. He can then try to get reappointed by his peers in the clubby regional council.

Meanwhile, it turns out that, without anyone overseeing or approving, Caslin also quietly extended D’Angelo’s contract, with a golden parachute.

The contract Caslin approved gives D’Angelo a full year’s salary — $230,000 — even if his contract expires and council decides not to renew it.

Niagara’s other councillors say they did not find out about this cushy contract extension until right around the time Ford decided that Caslin would not have to run region-wide.

In announcing that he would use the Constitution of Canada to pursue his personal vendetta against Toronto and its council, Ford made a point of saying he believes he has this right because, “I was elected.”

What about electing the Chair of Niagara’s Regional Council? When Niagara voters go to the polls on Oct. 22, they can forget about that.

Correction — Sept. 17, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the city of Vaughan had regional chair elections. In fact, York Region had regional chair elections before it was cancelled by the Progressive Conservative government.

David Israelson, a former journalist with the Star, lives in Niagara-on-the-Lake. He is a candidate for a seat on the District School Board of Niagara.

Read more about: