Mayor Rob Ford explained Thursday why he was the only member of council to vote against accepting federal money for an anti-gang program that will not cost the city anything — but one of his key assertions was strongly disputed by the expert who evaluated the program.

Council voted 33-1 in June to accept $350,000 from the federal government’s National Crime Prevention Centre. Until Thursday, Ford had not offered a justification for his stance.

The money will be used to extend a three-year pilot project called Prevention Intervention Toronto. The program was intended to help 300 young people “at high risk of gang attachment” in Rexdale, Jane-Finch and Weston-Mount Dennis transition into legitimate employment and to help the city to gain insight into which tactics work and which don’t.

Ford, a staunch fiscal conservative, said Thursday “there is only one taxpayer: provincial, federal, or municipal, it still comes out of your right pocket or your left pocket.” And repeating his opposition to what he calls “hug-a-thug programs,” he said Prevention Intervention Toronto had not resulted in even one person getting a job.

“You have to measure — in the private sector, we call it, it’s metrics. You know what, if you invest money, and you don’t see a result, you can’t measure how many jobs they got back. Last time I checked, they didn’t get any jobs back from all this investment,” Ford said on NewsTalk 1010.

“I’m saying I want to see results. They’re saying well, you know, we get all these kids jobs and all that. Well, out of that $300,000, I haven’t seen one job created,” he said.

The program, however, was evaluated in unusual detail by a University of Toronto team led by criminologist and gang expert Scot Wortley. Since the evaluation report has not yet been released by the city, Wortley said he cannot yet discuss his findings in detail — but that Ford is wrong about the program’s impact on jobs.

“I really don't know how he would draw such a conclusion. That is not what we found,” Wortley said in email Friday.

“The mayor's comments about youth employment and the PIT program do not provide an accurate depiction of the program evaluation results.”

Chris Brillinger, the executive director of the city’s social Development, finance and administration department, said the program was primarily intended as a research initiative. But he also said, “The number of youth who were employed at completion of the program was greater than the number of youth who were employed before they started the program.”

A city summary of a draft of the evaluation found that the program had produced numerous benefits:

• “Improving attitudes toward traditional modes of income generation and employment”

• “Reducing criminal offending among program participants, in particular violent offending”

• “Reducing pro-crime, pro-violence and pro-gang attitudes”

• “Significantly dropping the rate of gang membership after PIT participation”

• “Increasing youth confidence and self-esteem and participation in prosocial activities”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

• “Improving school attendance and conduct at school”

Wortley said in June there is “room for improvement” in the program but that it had generated “a number of promising findings.”