The Villager

Ford, of course, has built a political career on being entertaining - sometimes, as when he horrified a visiting family at a hockey game last term, unintentionally, but usually with a very intentional regular-guy-from-Etobicoke knuckle-headedness that endears him to his constituents and infuriates his colleagues.

This week, those colleagues no doubt thought they had him. Integrity Commissioner David Mullan and Auditor General Jeff Griffiths - together, as close as this city comes to a bureaucratic conscience - delivered a pair of reports on Ford's unique approach to financing his city council office, which regularly shows expenditures in the single digits each year.

Ford's secret? Rather than use the $53,100 office budget we taxpayers provide him, he pays for it out of pocket. His other secret is more literal: He doesn't say exactly how much he spends, and doesn't submit receipts.

This might seem like nothing to worry about to those of us who are hired rather than elected into our professions. But for elected officials, it is a big deal. A politician spends money to do their job; constituents are entitled to know how much is spent and where. And a rich person shouldn't have the advantage of providing gold-plated service to their constituents courtesy of the family trust fund, when other more modestly-funded politicians are left with nothing but hard work and their winning smiles to gather and maintain the love of their constituents.

Yes, Ford's many detractors must have thought they had him in the cross-hairs when they voted to demand that he pony up his receipts, make known just where all his money and services comes from (including the family printing business) and start spending that expense account.

And yet Ford managed to dodge that bullet using a maneuver brilliant in its simplicity. In a news scrum reminiscent of the old 'Who's On First' routine held just moments after the vote, Ford just said no.

The refusal had repercussions through the week. Toronto's Corporate Communications department - which until this summer's controversy over the land transfer tax had remained appropriately a-political - issued a news release/clarification helpfully explaining that in spite of the city's written policy stating otherwise, Ford could submit his receipts without fear of dipping into the taxpayer-funded office budget.

And Ford's own website - a little hobby site of his at www.robford.ca - probably got the largest number of hits since he put it online.

The website details, among other things, some of the highly questionable expenses that some of his colleagues have passed on to the taxpayer: a cab ride from Metro Hall to Bolton; meals out for more than $700; $1,000 digital cameras; and in one city councillor's case, a McDonald's habit dangerous both politically and gastronomically.

Granted, Rob Ford is in the wrong for failing to report his own trips to the neighbourhood Swiss Chalet or extra-municipal cab rides. But it doesn't seem so wrong as the extravagance that his more forthcoming colleagues are exhibiting.

What does it all mean, though? Ultimately, nothing - the largesse of those big-spending councillors have no more effect on the $8-billion city budget than does Ford's disobedient spending habits on Toronto's post-MFP corruption level.

It does, however, show another side to the political acrimony that came to a head during the land transfer tax debate earlier this year. It may be true that sometimes that acrimony is paralysis-inducing. But sometimes, as this week, all it induces is a belly-laugh.