Mayor Rob Ford brushed off repeated warnings from his staff about using a city-paid special assistant to help with his high school football squad, a source told the National Post.

“We’d have big fights over this,” said a source.

The mayor’s response: “Don’t worry. We’re going to take care of it.”

The mayor saw it as volunteer work that the young staff member did on their own time, the individual recalled.

“But they didn’t have a choice,” the source said. The perception was “you got fired if you didn’t do it,” but no one was ever fired. George Christopoulos, the mayor’s press secretary, responded to the allegation that employees had no choice but to help with football by saying: “To my knowledge, that’s false.”

Mr. Ford is under fire this week following revelations that he appears to have enlisted staffers to help with football duties. The city-issued cellphone numbers of two employees, Isaac Shirokoff and Chris Fickel, appear on the Facebook page of the Rexdale Raiders as contacts.

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Mr. Shirokoff, who has left city hall to pursue graduate studies, did lots of “real work,” but sometimes he was picking up uniforms for the squad, the source said.

That Mr. Ford continued to coach football, which he had pledged to quit if elected during his 2010 campaign, has been a source of tension in and of itself in his office. This week, he missed the last five-and-a-half hours of his executive committee meeting to coach the Don Bosco Eagles during a pre-season four-team scrimmage in Newmarket.

His actions are now the subject of a complaint into the integrity commissioner. Toronto writer Jude MacDonald alleges Mr. Ford broke the city councillor code of conduct that prohibits elected officials from using staff, or other taxpayer-funded resources for anything other than city businesses.

National Post