Why did Toronto officials travel to a gorgeous Italian locale? For a non-binding deal with no specific benefits

Thestar.com
August 7, 2018
Samantha Beattie

Toronto delegates were charmed by the small, southern Italian city of Matera where, in search of business opportunities, they hiked steep roads to tour famous caves and visited restaurants to dine on local cuisine.

The weeklong overseas trip in June, 2017 cost more than $8,000 of Toronto taxpayer money for Councillor Vincent Crisanti and economic development director George Spezza. MP Judy Sgro said her expenses were covered by a group of constituents. MP Francesco Sorbara said he paid for the trip himself.

Councillor Vincent Crisanti (front left) signs the memorandum of understanding alongside Matera officials during the trip last year. MPs Judy Sgro and Francesco Sorbara stand in the centre back row.

Since Mayor John Tory was elected in 2014, the City of Toronto has signed a flurry of non-binding agreements with other cities, often involving expensive taxpayer-funded travel, that have arguably yielded limited benefits for Toronto.

Read more: Toronto councillor says it was money well spent at $900-a-night hotel

One night on the Matera trip, the taxpayer-funded delegation listened to musicians play in an old quarry cave. The next day they watched a boy’s basketball tournament in Matera’s piazza where a team from Toronto placed second. Surrounding them was the same craggy skyline that set the scene for Hollywood blockbusters.

Other days they toured beyond the hillside city, discovering the lush Basilicata region with vineyards and vegetables, and to factories where machines spun out pasta.

In between the tours and dinners, they signed a four-page, non-binding “memorandum of understanding” with Matera, a landlocked outpost with a population 46 times smaller than Canada’s largest city.

Under the terms of the five-year agreement, the cities will help identify companies that are interested in doing business in either Toronto or Matera by sharing information about culture, film, education, tourism and sporting events.

More than a year later, economic development general manager Mike Williams, one of the approvers of the trip, could not name any benefits that have resulted from the Matera memorandum of understanding.

“I can’t point to a specific element now, but it was probably low down on our priority list,” he said of Toronto’s stronger relationship with Matera.

But a recent announcement from the federal government that it will fund artists exporting their work internationally is going to put Toronto’s relationship with Matera “back on the front burner,” he said.

He did say two manufacturing companies they visited while in Matera are exploring an expansion to the GTA. He also referred to a potential “partnership involving a Toronto post-secondary institution.”

Since Tory was elected, the city has signed or renewed 16 similar agreements, an unprecedented amount, with cities and organizations in the U.S., Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Japan and China.

During Rob Ford’s four-year term, the city signed six such agreements. Before that, no more than five were completed per term.

The increase in agreements “demonstrates the success the City of Toronto is achieving in promoting its attractiveness for investment to locations around the world,” Williams said in an email.

The Toronto delegation's trip to Matera, Italy included touring caves and visiting pasta factories.
The Toronto delegation's trip to Matera, Italy included touring caves and visiting pasta factories.  (DREAMSTIME)
Tory stands by the city’s recent upswing in international work, said spokesperson Don Peat.

“Mayor Tory firmly believes in doing everything possible to promote Toronto around the world as an exceptional place to do business,” Peat said. “Memorandums of understanding are one tool used by economic development staff to help build connections with cities around the world, but it is far from the only effort.”

On some occasions, city officials travelled to the same place more than once. Economic development chair Councillor Michael Thompson went to Sagamihara, Japan three times in two years in order for a friendship agreement to be renewed: once to prepare for the mayor’s symbolic signing, once for the symbolic signing and a third time for the actual signing of the one-page agreement.

Spezza was in Rome on city business a few weeks before the trip to Matera for a weekend trade mission that cost the city more than $3,500, including two nights in a five-star hotel for close to $800.

He didn’t facilitate the signing of the Matera memorandum of understanding then because it wasn’t scheduled and changing plans wasn’t possible from a “protocol or business relationship perspective,” Williams said.

Spezza and Crisanti said city staff got behind the trip to Matera after Toronto-area residents with ties to the region requested Toronto develop a relationship. The timing was right, Spezza said, with Matera named a European cultural capital for 2019. Both men also noted it is a popular film location and suggested the trip could benefit Toronto’s film industry.

Memorandums of understanding are the least formal type of intercity agreement Toronto can enter into and they signify the cities involved will share information and contacts to better understand business potential, said a staff report. They don’t require council approval.

Toronto also has “friendship agreements,” which are initiated by community groups and endorsed by council, and usually focus on economic development, the staff report said. “Partnerships,” on the other hand, come about for specific projects such as promoting trade or increasing Toronto’s profile.

Signing memorandums of understanding are the “most straightforward” way for two places to find economic opportunities with one another, Williams, the general manager, said in an interview.

And while representatives don’t need to be in the city when agreements are signed, meeting in person does help build successful relationships. Toronto’s agreements with Wuxi, China, and development agencies in Trayka, Turkey and Dubai, United Arab Emirates did not require travel beforehand.

Council does not need to approve specific trips funded through the economic development division if they’re for trade missions, to maintain friendship or partnership agreements, or to begin memorandums of understanding with new places, according to staff reports. This protocol dates back to 2005, when council approved a list of cities it wanted to have relationships with.

The economic development division has a set travel budget every year approved by council, a city spokesperson said. In 2017, council approved a $1.4 million budget for the division’s international trade development program that includes supporting travel abroad, foreign delegations coming to Toronto and a “significant increase in face-to-face selling.” Each trip taken by staff has to be approved by senior management.

Intercity agreements are merely symbolic and don’t oblige “either party to actually do anything unless they want to,” said Richard Stren, a University of Toronto professor emeritus who researches global cities.

While making these connections abroad is a natural progression for a large, multicultural city like Toronto, and a practice many cities undertake on a larger scale, how much travelling needs to be done is a “good question,” Stren said.

A city spokesperson told the Star “travel is for many reasons and is not done specifically to sign an agreement.” But while councillors and staff sometimes also attend trade shows or meet with businesses and officials, signing these agreements is often cited in city documents as the main reason for a trip, as the Star discovered through interviews, itineraries and freedom of information requests for staff expense reports and internal requests for travel.

In a briefing note to the city’s budget committee last year, economic development staff wrote that the “goal” of the Matera trip was “to sign the cultural and economic development memorandum of understanding agreement between Toronto and Matera on June 24, 2017 to promote the expansion of film, education, sports, cultural trade and economic exchange.”

Thompson and economic development staff’s three trips to Sagamihara were to help renew a friendship agreement created 25 years earlier, according to staff requests for travel.

The first visit was in February 2016, when he and Spezza went to attend “meetings with the City of Sagamihara staff and elected officials to plan . . . the formal visit of Mayor Tory to commemorate 25th anniversary of the friendship city agreement between both cities,” said Spezza’s request for travel. Spezza and Thompson also visited Tokyo, Hong Kong and Dubai for a total of $17,600.

A few months later, Thompson participated in the mayor’s mission to China and Japan, which included a large delegation to promote Toronto businesses and cost the city a total of $113,620. In Sagamihara, Tory did a “celebratory reaffirmation of the relationship,” but did not actually renew the agreement, a city spokesperson said.

When Thompson went to Japan this year, with Williams and another councillor, that’s when Toronto actually renewed the friendship agreement. The trip, which included another stop in Tokyo, cost the city an estimated $10,500.

Thompson didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Star.

As a result of renewing its friendship with Sagamihara, the City of Toronto said it has hosted a delegation this summer focused on the artificial intelligence industry in Toronto, and is arranging a university international exchange program.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong went to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2016 and 2017 for the purpose of “re-signing of friendship agreement,” according to a councillor expense report.

He added a five-year sunset clause to the two-page agreement in case they don’t accomplish “anything of substance,” he said in an interview. And so far, the relationship has been “a bit of a challenge.”

“The easiest thing is to sign the agreement, but the hardest thing is keeping the relationship going,” said Minnan-Wong.

On the second trip, he and economic development’s Susana Vaz also promoted Toronto as a study destination for Vietnamese students. These two trips cost the city about $9,600.

A more successful partnership has resulted from a memorandum of understanding signed between Shenzhen, China (“Silicon Valley of Asia”) and Toronto, Minnan-Wong said. He travelled there in 2016 to get the agreement signed and most of his expenses were covered by Shenzhen groups.

Since then, organizations in Toronto and Shenzhen have created a “high-tech competition” and the TTC is buying some electric buses from a Shenzhen-based company, Minnan-Wong said.

Compared to other large cities, Toronto has limited resources to do this type of economic development work, Minnan-Wong said.

“We have to be strategic about our choices,” he said. “There are some relationships that need to be re-examined to see if they’re worthwhile.”

Crisanti and the two MPs Francesco Sorbara and Judy Sgro said they went to Matera because constituents with the Basilicata region of Italy asked them to.

“They opened up to us very easily. They said, ‘Yes, why not?’ ” said Paolo Petrozza, treasurer of the Vaughan-based Basilicata Cultural Society of Canada, who was part of the delegation, referring to the politicians and the city. He described Matera and Toronto as different as a “mouse is an elephant” and thought it was “gracious” of the officials to spend time in the region.

The city reported Spezza and Crisanti’s trip to Matera cost $6,523. This total does not include all airfare, or a layover in Rome where Crisanti and Spezza took Matera officials out for dinner for $575. Crisanti stayed in a hotel in Rome for two nights, and Spezza for one, bringing the total to more than $8,000.

Councillor John Filion, who has not left North America for city business this term of council, said “before anyone travels anywhere on taxpayers’ money, there should be a sound case for doing it.

“If councillors or staff are travelling to sign (memorandums of understanding) that make no sense from an economic development point of view, that would really disturb me.”

Public officials on the trip to Matera initially gave different reasons for selecting it as a place to focus the city’s resources.

Crisanti said one of the reasons he wanted to pursue a partnership is because it’s where movies like The Passion of the Christ and parts of Wonder Woman were filmed and “it would be great to make those ties given we have a very strong film industry in Toronto.”

Sorbara went once to Matera on vacation and then twice professionally in pursuit of the memorandum and paid for all three trips himself, he said in an interview. While he said he didn’t know about the “economic stuff,” he thought of the memorandum as a “mutual recognition of the importance these two places play in the world.”

Sgro’s trip was funded through the Basilicata Cultural Society of Canada, she said. In Matera she saw opportunities for Canada to buy more pasta and was surprised at the efficiency of the factories.

Matera officials declined the Star’s repeated interview requests.