Chief Bill Blair has served Councillor Doug Ford with notice of legal action and is demanding an apology as the mayor’s brother continues to fight back in an ongoing war of words.

Ford was served by Blair on Monday with a notice of defamation over comments he made about the chief wanting “payback.”

“Chief Blair said a week or so ago that he was prepared to take legal action and he has done that,” police spokesperson Mark Pugash told the Star.

Walking to lunch after his last Etobicoke community council meeting, Doug Ford shot back at the chief.

“It is unprecedented, isn’t it?” Ford said. “Isn’t it unbelievable the police chief would be doing this?”

After the Star reported last week that police were planning to subpoena his brother, Rob Ford, to testify as a witness at the preliminary hearing in the extortion case against the mayor’s friend Alexander “Sandro” Lisi, Doug Ford lashed out against the chief.

He accused Blair of leaking the information to the Star.

“When you have the leadership of the police department releasing a subpoena to the media before they release it to the mayor, you wonder why we need a change at the top?” Ford told reporters.

“It’s a little payback … You know exactly what I’m talking about. So it’s disappointing again that the police chief, in my opinion, would condone this behaviour from his own department.”

Last month, the police services board — including three city councillors who have in the past been loyal to Ford — voted not to accept the chief’s request for a contract extension.

Blair, whose contract expires in April, then threatened legal action against Doug Ford and accused him of “lying.”

In the days that followed, Ford briefly backed off and then reassumed his tough stance against the chief.

“Rob’s changed his life. I just hope the top-ranking person in the police would change his life and follow the rules,” Ford told the Globe and Mail.

Blair is asking that Ford make a public apology and retract his statements about him in a “manner agreed to beforehand by Chief Blair,” Pugash said.

Blair has provided no deadline by which Ford would have to apologize.

Though details of the notice were not made available, any action that falls under the province’s Libel and Slander Act gives any person six weeks after learning about the alleged defamatory comments to file a statement of claim.

Doug Ford, saying the matter is now in his lawyers’ hands, deflected reporters’ questions Tuesday by throwing out his own.

“Is this (libel action) being paid by the taxpayers?” he asked.

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(Pugash told the Star that Blair will personally pay for the legal action.)

When asked by a reporter for his response to Blair, Ford said: “The chief’s called me many names I’m sure. What I’d tell him? Enjoy his retirement. Maybe what we’ll do is bury the hatchet and maybe go fishing.”

That barb may have alluded to an earlier dispute between the Fords and the chief after they accused Blair of improperly joining police board member Andy Pringle on a fishing trip in 2012.

Pringle, Blair and board chair Alok Mukherjee have each said the trip was not a conflict of interest.

That attack was part of an escalating battle between the political brothers and the police veteran. The fishing trip comments came just a day after Blair told the Star that Lisi had warned police the Fords were going to go after Blair in the wake of Lisi’s arrest and the release by the courts of detailed police allegations against the Rob Ford.

The Ford brothers have been critical of the chief ever since those police documents revealed Blair assigned top investigators to probe Rob Ford and his associates following reports of a video that appears to show the mayor smoking crack cocaine.

On Tuesday, Rob Ford said he could not comment on latest dispute, saying it was between his brother and the chief. He did again raise questions over how media learned about his brother being served.

“I’m a little baffled how the media knew two seconds after he received it,” Ford said at his campaign headquarters during an unrelated press conference.

The media learned of the notice after contacting a police spokesperson Tuesday — a day after it had been served.

Rob Ford himself has twice faced lawsuits in recent years. The first was ahead of his election as mayor in October 2010 when restaurant owner George Foulidis sued him for comments he made to the Sun’s editorial board. Foulidis lost the suit and an appeal was dismissed this summer.

Ford was served a libel notice by the Star’s Daniel Dale last year after Ford suggested he was a pedophile. Ford later apologized to Dale on the floor of council chambers and more fully in a two-page letter.

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