[URBAN NOTE] "How the Mayor’s “Sad, Desperate and Shameful” Scarborough Subway Op-ed Came to Be"

[rfmcdonald]

Torontoist's Jessica Smith Cross uses E-mail records to look at how, this summer, John Tory came to write such an offensively-worded article against a Scarborough subway, accusing opponents of racism.

[I]t wasn’t always like that. The original draft was a somewhat boring Tory-esque recitation of the merits of SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway extension. But, somewhere inside the mayor’s office, it changed.

Torontoist received a copy of that first draft of the op-ed and email correspondence about it in response to a Freedom of Information request, as part of the FOI Raccoon project. The email chain provides an interesting peek into the twin roles of the mayor’s office: to make policy decisions and to sell them to the councillors whose support must be obtained for anything to get done and voters in the next election.

The records don’t show why the mayor’s office went for a rhetorically charged attack on subway critics over a sober presentation of facts. They do show that the mayor’s staff was under time pressure to deliver the op-ed to the Star, and only managed to “put it in front of the mayor” an hour before it was sent to the newspaper—two-and-a-half hours after they’d promised to deliver it.

The email records also show that the Star’s editors, before seeing a word of the op-ed, had warned the mayor’s staff the paper wouldn’t publish a “warmed over press release” for the mayor, so the piece would have to add to the debate.

[. . .]

Here’s how it came together. Tory’s chief of staff, Chris Eby, emailed the original, rather mundane, draft about SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway—which bears almost no resemblance to the published product—to colleagues in the mayor’s office on Thursday, June 23, marked as a draft. The following Sunday, director of communications Amanda Galbraith contacted the Star to see if the paper would be interested in running an op-ed from the mayor on SmartTrack and the Scarborough subway. She agreed to send it in by 1 p.m. on Monday to run in the Tuesday morning paper.

By 3:30 Monday afternoon, the Star followed up to see where the op-ed was, while senior Tory advisor Siri Agrell emailed her colleagues the version that was eventually published and wrote that she’d received staff edits and “put it in front of the mayor.” It was no longer about SmartTrack, only the Scarborough subway, and the tone had dramatically changed. An hour later, the mayor’s staff sent it to the Star, and it was published online that evening and in the paper the next morning.