Guido Masutti fights for the 'working people' of Vaughan
'I’ve got eyes and you can see what is right and what is wrong.'
Yorkregion.com
August 12, 2018
Adam Martin-Robbins
On a chilly January evening in 2013 a few dozen men and women -- mostly city officials -- settle into their seats in the cavernous council chambers on the second floor of the boxy, glass and terracotta city hall building.
They’re waiting for councillors to arrive so the budget meeting can start.
This particular night, councillors and staff are keen to hear from homeowners about the projects and programs they’d like to see their property taxes spent on.
Guido Masutti, a 75-year-old Italian immigrant known for railing against council’s spending decisions, sits in the front row, arms crossed over his thick chest.
After councillors take their seats and the city’s budget chief runs through some routine housekeeping items, staff launch into a brief budget presentation.
They’re recommending boosting the average homeowner’s property tax bill by $32.
Once the presentation wraps up, it’s time for the half-dozen or so residents at the meeting to share their thoughts.
Masutti stands and ambles to the podium.
He’s not happy.
“It doesn’t stop. Last year, there was another increase and this year there’s another increase,” the longtime Woodbridge resident bellows in a voice that still bears traces of an Italian accent though he’s lived in Canada for more than 50 years.
“With the tenfold population increase since 1980, there should be no reason why we should increase the taxes the way we have every year.”
He’s expressed this view to councillors many times over the years with little success.
But Masutti’s activism goes beyond questioning elected officials about how they spend taxpayers’ money.
In the last decade, he’s fought against the construction of condo towers in Woodbridge, rising hydro distribution costs and the bid to bring a casino to Vaughan.
I’m curious to know why he’s thrown himself into these battles.
A little more than five years later, on a scorching hot day in late June, we’re sitting on the shady back porch of his 3,400 square foot brick home in Woodbridge overlooking a large vegetable garden and, beyond that, a lush ravine.
He’s dressed in tan shorts and blue golf shirt.
I ask what drives his activism.
“I’ve got eyes and you can see what is right and what is wrong. And what bothers me most is when somebody says, ‘We are here to represent the population.’ To me, the population is 100 per cent, not the one per cent,” Masutti, now 80, says.
“Our (councillors) who come out and say they represent the people are liars and I hate that.”
Proudly frugal, Masutti says city council routinely squeezes tax dollars out of him and his hardworking neighbours to pay for projects that often benefit only a small group of wealthy people, typically their "friends and supporters."
To back this up, he points to the award-winning city hall building.
It wound up costing $30 million more than the original $89 million bid price and that was before the city wound up settling a lawsuit with the builder and architect for an additional $17 million.
Masutti doesn’t buy the argument that figuring out how to pay for infrastructure, programs and services for residents in a rapidly growing city such as Vaughan is complicated, in part, because the costs of those things aren't fully covered by the fees the city collects from property developers. And then there are the ongoing maintenance costs.
He thinks the population boom Vaughan has experienced since the 1990s should, in fact, drive property taxes down, or at least keep them steady, since there are more homeowners for the city to collect money from.
“When we built this house here (in the early 1980s), there were 35,000 people in Vaughan. Now we are 350,000 people, why is taxes up by double?” Masutti asks. “If you make a pair of pants, it costs you $10. If you make 100 pairs of pants, it costs you $8. So where is the money going? The money is not going back to the people.”
It’s those people -- “the working people” -- Masutti says he cares most about.
That’s why, a few years ago, he successfully lobbied to bring publicly funded physiotherapy services to Vaughan.
More recently, when construction along Hwy. 7 caused drivers to start using his street as a bypass, he went door-to-door collecting signatures on a petition calling on the city to implement traffic calming measures.
He also had city staff out to his house to witness what was happening and try to find a solution.
It’s just the way he is.
When he sees something that needs fixing, Masutti picks up the phone and calls city councillors or, sometimes, local reporters.
He’s also fond of writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper, which he faxes to the newsroom.
But that wasn’t always the case.
“I have not been as outspoken as I am now because I didn’t have the knowledge,” he said. “My character was a little shy.”
Masutti was born in January 1938 in Sarone, Italy, a small town about 100 km north of Venice.
The youngest of four children -- two boys and two girls -- he grew up relatively poor.
Masutti attended elementary school, but in his first year of middle school he suffered a serious injury.
It was a bitterly cold day, Masutti was riding his bike to school and took his hands off the handlebars to keep them warm because he didn’t own a pair of gloves.
He lost control and fell, badly gashing his thigh on a strand of barbed wire running along the road, Masutti recalls pulling up his shorts to reveals a long, jagged scar.
That ended his schooling.
After recovering, Masutti went to work alongside his father at a stone quarry in Val Gardena, nestled in the Dolomite mountains, to help earn money for his family.
He was 15. During the train trip to Val Gardena Masutti had an epiphany.
His father told him that when he reached the railway station in Bolzano, he should grab a bite at a particular restaurant frequented by working-class people.
“(He did that) to make it easy on me. It’s not (a place for) the rich people, the city people because I didn’t know how to behave in front of them,” Masutti said.
He ordered a steak and a bowl of soup, figuring that’s what others would obviously choose to eat in a restaurant.
As he ate, Masutti watched those around him.
He noticed they were ordering different things off the menu – one asked for a sandwich and a glass of wine, another slurped up a bowl of soup and quaffed a beer.
That’s when it hit him.
“I learned that if they accept me the way I am, then I accept them. We are all different,” he said. “Since that time I can go in front of everybody, bare naked, dressed up or whatever.”
After two years toiling in the quarry, Masutti landed a job as a mason in Switzerland.
He spent six years working seasonally alongside other masons who came from different regions of Italy.
Guido Masutti, who used to work as a mason, poses with a stone gryphon he made to replicate one he created years ago in Italy.
At age 22, he decided to follow in the footsteps of his sister and immigrate to Canada where he could find year-round work.
“I still regret it, here,” Masutti said lifting his right hand to his heart. “It was good to work, very good, very good.”
In January 1960, just days before his 22nd birthday, Masutti arrived in Toronto.
He rented a room and eventually landed a job in a factory, making asbestos gaskets.
In 1963, a casual encounter with a young woman named Edda Altieri set his life on a new path.
“She was at the bank putting in her money to provide food for her mother and she dropped her bank book, on purpose I suppose, so I said, ‘Hi’ and gave her the book,” he says laughing.
They dated awhile before tying the knot in 1964.
He took a job at an electroplating factory in Scarborough and the couple saved enough to buy a new, semi-detached house near Finch and Islington avenues.
They started a family, eventually raising three children – a girl and two boys.
In the early 70s, Masutti decided to switch careers and got his real estate licence.
A short time later, the family moved to the country, settling in Caledon East.
In the early 80s, Masutti bought a plot of land in Woodbridge and built the home he still lives in today.
He doesn’t remember exactly what triggered his activism in Vaughan, but one of his earliest battles with city hall was over a proposed condominium complex at the corner of Islington Avenue and Hwy. 7.
“The planners here they don’t know (what’s happening) from today to tomorrow, that’s not how you build a nation. … You build it with some sight of what’s happening in 500 years,” Masutti says.
Deb Schulte, Liberal MP for King-Vaughan, got to know Masutti fairly well during her four-year stint as a city councillor.
“I appreciate people like him in the community who are willing to speak up and are willing to hold us accountable,” she said.
“I’ve always appreciated his engagement in issues of relevance in the community and while we might not have always agreed, we always had a civil discussion about it. He was always open to seeing things differently, if that was appropriate.”
His wife, Edda, however would prefer he didn’t speak out, Masutti says.
As I’m getting ready to leave their house, she quips: “You’re not going to get my husband arrested?”
We both laugh, but she’s only half-joking. Guido admits that, sometimes, his emotions get the best of him.
He recounts the time he got carried away and made threatening remarks to a city staffer who came to investigate the need for traffic calming measures on Masutti's street and didn’t seem convinced it was needed.
The police paid Masutti a visit and scolded him. “I made a mistake and talked too much.”
