Mayor Rob Ford did not violate the city’s code of conduct when he had his junior aides help him coach the Don Bosco high school football team during business hours, the city’s integrity commissioner has ruled.

The commissioner, Janet Leiper, found that Ford’s young special assistants worked long and stressful days, often into the night, and joined Ford at Etobicoke practices between 3:30 p.m. and 5 p.m. to “volunteer in an activity that they thought was valuable and enjoyable.”

“I find that the involvement of the mayor’s staff in his volunteer endeavours was a respite from long hours on the job, and did not amount to an improper use of city resources by the mayor,” Leiper wrote in the unreleased decision, which was obtained by the Star.

The mayor’s office considered games “off the clock,” Leiper wrote. During practices, she found, the aides continued to do government business — so regularly that another Don Bosco coach “teased” one aide about the fact that he was formally considered a coach.

“Given the ongoing nature of the job,” Leiper wrote, it is “arguable” that Ford didn’t even need to reimburse the city for the use of the government car his aides sometimes used to go to games and practices during the 2012 season.

Mark Towhey, then Ford’s chief of staff, told Leiper the aides helped Ford deal with constituent issues brought to him by people at football events, including the high school players themselves, and otherwise assisted him “in the accomplishment of his duties.”

“Because of the long and irregular hours of political staff generally everywhere, volunteering is difficult to segregate from official duties and in practice, becomes somewhat ‘interstitial’ with regular duties,” Towhey wrote. “There is no doubt, however, that mayor’s office political staff who also volunteer are working at least 40 hours per week on official duties.”

Leiper made the decision in November, but she did not submit it to council or to the public because she did not find that Ford had broken any rules.

She is allowed to release no-breach rulings in “exceptional circumstances.” When she keeps them secret, she said via email on Thursday, she “would have determined that the circumstances were not sufficiently ‘exceptional’ to justify public reporting.”

The person who filed the complaint, writer and activist Jude MacDonald, declined to comment.

MacDonald had alleged that Ford was in breach of a section of the code of conduct that says “no member of council should use, or permit the use, of city land, facilities, equipment, supplies, services, staff or other resources . . . for activities other than the business of the Corporation.”

The late-2012 storm over the aides was the second of several football-related controversies during Ford’s mayoral term. He was criticized even by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which generally approved of his politics.

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The 2012 season was Ford’s last. He was fired as a coach by the Catholic school board in May 2013.

He now faces new criticism over the contents of board documents obtained by the Star on Wednesday. According to accounts from Ugo Rossi, Don Bosco’s then-principal, and John Royiwsky, a teacher and coach, Ford forced players to roll in “goose scat,” once threatened to beat up Royiwsky, came to a key practice inebriated and incoherent, and held an improper summer practice at which a player broke his collarbone, among other things.