High-profile Liberal appointees removed by Ford government

Thestar.com
September 5, 2018
Robert Benzie

The new Progressive Conservative government has axed a slew of high-profile Liberal appointees, including corrections reformer Howard Sapers, former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci and ex-minister David Collenette.

Premier Doug Ford, who toppled Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals in the June 7 election, has quietly been removing people from their government patronage posts since being sworn in on June 29.

Premier Doug Ford, right, has removed numerous Liberal appointees. No replacements have been announced for any of the positions.

The scope of the purge only recently became public when the government posted a list of cabinet orders in council revoking a bevy of Liberal appointments.

It was already known that Wynne’s privatization guru Ed Clark, the former TD Bank chair, was out as the premier’s business adviser and that former Liberal cabinet minister Monique Smith would no longer be Ontario’s representative in Washington.

As well, the departures of Ontario’s chief investment officer Allan O’Dette and chief scientist Molly Shoichet were reported in July.

But Sapers, the well-regarded special adviser on correctional system reform, had his $330,000-a-year contract terminated early. It was supposed to extend until the end of this year.

He has been instrumental in recommending improvements to Ontario jails, such as reducing the use of segregation in facilities.

Iacobucci was Ontario’s lead negotiator on the Ring of Fire talks with nine First Nations that make up the Matawa council. The massive chromite mining project is located about 575 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

A Supreme Court of Canada justice from 1991 until 2004, Iacobucci was appointed by former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney, father of Ontario Attorney General Caroline Mulroney.

While the departure of Collenette, a former federal Liberal cabinet minister who headed the high-speed rail advisory body, was reported by TVO on July 6, the whole advisory panel has now been derailed.

Wynne had tasked Collenette with working on a planned high-speed rail line between Toronto and Windsor, with stops at Pearson airport, Waterloo Region, Guelph and London.

The future of the 250 km/h train, similar to trains operating in China, France, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Spain, is now uncertain. The project was estimated to cost $20 billion and Ford is promising to cut $6 billion annually from provincial spending.

Other casualties include: John Godfrey, a former federal Liberal minister, who was the province’s $146,700-a-year special adviser for climate change; Dr. Kwame McKenzie, volunteer research and evaluation chair of the basic income pilot project that the Tories have scrapped despite promising during the election to see it through; and Gavin Menzies as special adviser on international missions and tours to the intergovernmental affairs minister.

Also moving on is Karen Pitre, who was Wynne’s special adviser on community hubs.

Pitre, who earned $750 a day with a maximum of $175,000 annually, helped neighbourhoods repurpose closed schools or other public buildings as multi-purpose community hubs instead of selling them off.

The showcase for the program is the 30,000-square-foot community hub that will be an integral part of the redevelopment of the Bloor-Dufferin area in Toronto.

No replacements have been announced for any of the positions vacated by Ford. The changes, after almost 15 years of Liberal rule, are more widespread than when the Grits took over from the Tories in 2003. They also appear to be more extensive than during the first weeks of both Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Tory predecessor, Stephen Harper, taking office.

The orders in council stem from the same June 29 cabinet meeting when the premier appointed Dr. Rueben Devlin, the former PC party president, to a $348,000-a-year job to head a new panel tackling hospital overcrowding.

Devlin, a key Ford adviser in the March 10 Tory leadership contest as well as the spring campaign, is now head of the premier’s council on improving health care and ending hallway medicine.