According to media reports from last week’s marathon council session, Toronto politicians slapped Giorgio Mammoliti with toughest possible penalty for breaching the City’s Code of Conduct — a three-month salary suspension (worth $26,000) over the matter of the $500-a-ticket fundraiser held last spring to help the shirtless wonder defray his legal bills.

As the National Post’s headline stated, “Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has pay docked for three months over $80,000 in gifts from lobbyists.” The vote was 37-2.

But given that integrity commissioner Janet Leiper couldn’t legally compel Mammoliti to refund all those unctuous contributions from his self-interested supporters, it seems to me he actually came out ahead, to the tune of $54,000 — provided he’s not so stupid as to set fire to that sizeable windfall by pursuing a lawsuit challenging her recommendation and council’s decision.

Message: crime pays!

Okay, okay. Let’s not use the word “crime.” Let’s say: unethical, integrity-free behaviour pays! — just as it did in the bad old days of the MFP scandal, when a handful of lobbyists and city officials linked to a corrupt computer leasing deal succeeded in pocketing all sorts of green. (The police never laid charges.)

During the very same meeting, the penultimate one of this insane term, council spent hours tying itself up in rhetorical knots over Leiper’s recommendation that Mayor Rob Ford apologize in writing [PDF] for robo-calling Paul Ainslie’s constituents after the Scarborough councilor voted to support a Scarborough LRT instead of a subway.

The debate was a kind of reprise. As it happens, the final session of David Miller’s second term in office, held in late August, 2010, featured a heated debate about an alleged code of conduct violation by then Ward 2 councillor Ford, who, it transpired, had hit up numerous lobbyists and companies doing business with the city for donations to his football foundation.

Four years ago, Leiper urged council to vote to ask Ford to return the donations (he refused, and the rest is history). Last week, she merely asked council to instruct him to play nicely with the other children in the playground. After much genuflecting about whether such gestures matter in the political arena, Ford shuffled onto the floor of council, had a short whispered exchange with the city solicitor, and muttered an apology that struck me as both content and contrition-free. Still, Ainslie accepted it, and we moved on.

The juxtaposition of these two cases is yet another reminder that the City of Toronto’s integrity commissioner system, as laid out by the City of Toronto Act (COTA), is both far more and much less than it should be.

Less, because there’s no way Mammoliti should have gotten off as easily as he did with that fundraiser. And more, because the commissioner’s de facto role as a referee overseeing council’s political etiquette increasingly strikes me as redundant.

When the province passed COTA in 2006, several of its key provisions flowed directly from the MFP scandal and the ensuing inquiry by Justice Denise Bellamy. It established four accountability officers (integrity commissioner, lobbyist registrar, auditor-general, ombud) and provided each with legislative powers intended to prevent the sort of corruption – lobbyists collecting political donations, bureaucrats going on corporate junkets, etc. — that festered inside City Hall after amalgamation.

The Code of Conduct emerged as the vehicle for encouraging, if not ensuring, reputable, conscientious behaviour. At a more granular level, the Code’s provisions can be separated into two broad categories – one set of rules governing political conduct (e.g., failing to adhere to council policies); and another, more specific, set of provisions that regulate the way politicians interact with lobbyists, suppliers and others seeking to do business with the city. This latter set of provisions focuses on things like gifts, improper use of influence, and interactions with lobbyists.

For years, we’ve watched as the integrity commissioner’s office has been used as a vehicle for trying to police the way the Fords transact politics. In theory, the commissioner’s legislated authority should serve as a way of delineating what’s acceptable and what should be subjected to public shaming. In practice, however, the system has failed a crucial stress test, and that, to my mind, raises questions about whether council should even be in the business of regulating how its members play the game of politics.

Does it matter that a man who is nearly incapable of telling the truth mumbles an apology to another councillor? Has that gesture restored the world’s equilibrium? Is our democracy healthier this week than it was last? Will Ford now turn his back on the practice of using privately-funded robocalls against targeted opponents? No, no, no and, I strongly suspect, no.

On the other hand, we should all be deeply troubled that COTA doesn’t allow council to go much further in prosecuting politicians who abuse their positions in order to benefit themselves, their friends, or their cronies. Just consider two cases reported by The Globe and Mail showing how the Fords tried to push city officials to deliver financial benefits (tax incentives in the case of Apollo, and an outsourcing deal in the case of R.R. Donnelley) to companies with which Deco Labels has business relationships.

It’s important to note here that when Leiper recommended that Ford repay the football foundation donations as a penalty for breaching the Code, she got her wrists slapped by a provincial court judge who ruled, during the 2012 conflict of interest case against Ford, that she’d gone beyond her statutory limits when she made that recommendation (something no one, including the city solicitor, noticed at the time). The law, the court said, was clear: the maximum penalty council can impose on one of its members for violating the Code is three months of salary.

The problem, as this recent Mammoliti case shows, is that you can violate the Code and still come out ahead. It’s true that most politicians aren’t as shameless as he is, so I’m not expecting that Mammoliti’s tactics will become the norm. Still, the bottom line — $54,000 in the black — suggests the disincentive is inadequate.

Even more important is what this relatively modest fine implicitly says about those critical provisions in the Code that seek to prevent politicians from abusing the public’s trust and misusing their own positions of influence. After all, what’s at stake here is nothing less than the city’s credibility and council’s reputation for probity. Surely, such institutional virtues are worth more than $26,000.

by Erik Parker