Adam Vaughan and Mike Layton violated Toronto’s code of conduct for councillors when they harshly criticized an April casino report from the city’s top bureaucrat, the integrity commissioner says.

Vaughan and Layton have apologized to city manager Joe Pennachetti, integrity commissioner Janet Leiper wrote in reports released Wednesday. She is not recommending any further sanction.

Pennachetti had estimated that the city would get an annual “hosting fee” payment of $111 million to $148 million per year, tens of millions more than others anticipated, in exchange for hosting for a casino downtown. He also said the casino should be far smaller than the province wanted.

Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) said Pennachetti’s figures were “fictitious.” Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) said they were “fantasy numbers” and “ridiculous.”

“The casino is cut in half and the hosting fee is higher. There is nothing real in this report,” Vaughan told CBC.

Leiper said Vaughan was entitled to express his views. But she wrote that “the repeated use of the phrase ‘nothing real’ when applied to the report is an unfair portrayal of the report. So was the use of the word ‘fantasy.’

“These words and phrases imply incompetence, gross negligence or worse on the part of the author,” she wrote. “They deride an entire report that included public consultations, projections based on certain assumptions and statements that reveal those assumptions. I find that in describing the city manager’s report in these terms, the councillor showed disrespect for the professional capacity of staff.”

Leiper came to a similar conclusion about Layton’s remarks.

The code of conduct says councillors cannot “maliciously or falsely injure the professional or ethical reputation, or the prospects or practice of staff, and all members shall show respect for the professional capacities of staff.”

Vaughan and Layton are left-leaning. The complaints that prompted Leiper’s review were filed by a right-leaning advocacy group, the Toronto Taxpayers Coalition.

The casino proposal was defeated at council in May. The province’s eventual hosting fee offer was indeed far less than Pennachetti estimated — $54 million.

“It wasn’t about the authors of the report, it was about the numbers in the report,” Vaughan said Wednesday. “That’s what we intended to criticize, and we stand by our criticism. But we made it in a way that called into question the professional standing of the authors, and quite clearly that was not our intent, so we apologized.”

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