By Daniel Dale
In the wake of Mayor Rob Ford’s stunning ouster from office on Monday, someone started a “Thank You Paul Magder” group on Facebook.
The group would have more aptly been called Thank You Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler.
Magder, a businessman, was the Average Joe face of the lawsuit that brought Ford down. Celebrated lawyer Clayton Ruby tried the case pro bono. But it was Chaleff-Freudenthaler — labour relations professional, Ryerson student, near-lifelong left-leaning activist, canny observer of City Hall procedure, 28 years old on Wednesday — who set the wheels in motion from the shadows.
Ontario Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland found Ford breached the province’s conflict of interest law when he voted in February to excuse himself from paying back a total of $3,150 to lobbyists whose donations to his football foundation he improperly accepted.
Ford, who plans to appeal, will remain mayor for at least the two-week grace period Hackland allowed. He will immediately seek a “stay” that would let him keep his job until the end of the appeals process.
If the stay request is denied, council will have until the second week of February to decide whether to appoint a new mayor, who would serve until December 2014, or call a byelection that would cost about $7 million. Lawyers differed on whether Hackland’s ruling prevents Ford from running in a byelection.
For now, at least, the larger-than-life mayor of Canada’s largest city has been banished over an error that went mostly unnoticed on the day it was committed — but that Chaleff-Freudenthaler thought worth pursuing.
“History will write him up as a hero,” left-leaning Councillor Joe Mihevc, who has known Chaleff-Freudenthaler since the latter’s childhood, said on Monday.
“He’s an obstructionist who’s never been happy with Rob Ford getting elected as mayor,” said right-leaning Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong.
Chaleff-Freudenthaler works as a labour relations specialist for the Association of Management, Administrative and Professional Crown Employees of Ontario, which represents provincial civil servants. He is taking night classes at Ryerson for a bachelor’s degree in public administration.
A member of the library board from 2007 to 2011, a former leader of the Toronto Youth Cabinet, and a familiar face at City Hall since his late teens, Chaleff-Freudenthaler is something of an expert in the workings of the city government. After Ford’s Feb. 7 speech and vote, he researched the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act to see if Ford had possibly broken the law.
He then spoke to Magder, whose children he went to school with and who had volunteered on his unsuccessful 2010 school trustee campaign. With Magder on board for a potential lawsuit, he contacted Ruby, whom he had never met, to ask if he would be interested in taking the case. Ruby agreed.
Magder and Ruby have spoken publicly about their challenge and Hackland’s decision. Chaleff-Freudenthaler has refused to do so.
Silence is unusual for him: he has been an activist since the fifth grade, when he fought the proposed closure of his alternative elementary school. He later co-founded a high school student network that protested the Iraq war and demanded tuition freezes from Mike Harris’s provincial government.
As an adult, he proved a formidable Ford foe even before Monday’s landmark triumph. His detailed challenge to Ford’s campaign financial practices prompted a city committee to order an audit that may soon result in Municipal Elections Act charges.
After an angry Doug Ford confronted him in a City Hall hallway, he filed a successful complaint to the integrity commissioner. Ford apologized on the council floor — though he later called Chaleff-Freudenthaler a “little snake.”
And as vice-chair of the library board, to which he was appointed under David Miller, Chaleff-Freudenthaler was one of the most vocal opponents of Rob Ford-proposed budget cuts that council ultimately rejected.
Ford told reporters Monday that the case “comes down to left-wing politics. The left wing wants me out of here and they’ll do anything in their power to (do so),” Ford said.
Mihevc, who endorsed Chaleff-Freudenthaler for trustee, scoffed. “Adam is a community advocate, and he believes in good government,” he said. “He’s a sharp thinker, and he believes in the city. I say all power to him. He did for the city — he and Paul, working with Clayton Ruby — an important service. And that is to call politicians to account for their behaviour.”
In 2003, NOW Magazine named Chaleff-Freudenthaler one of 10 local “teens taking over.” Its title for him: “The Tory toppler.”
Daniel Dale writers for the Hamilton Spectator.
