This week on Mayor’s Behaving Badly Canada: Winnipeg mayor Sam Katz is the latest municipal magistrate to find themselves embroiled in legal trouble. Yesterday CBC reported that Katz and his company are being sued by WOW Hospitality for allegedly breaching management and concessions contracts signed in 2000 and 2003. That’s on top of Katz’s existing charges of conflict-of-interest. On Friday, the CBC reported that Winnipeg Mayor Sam Katz’s legal team had offered Joe Chan, a Winnipeg restaurant owner, a settlement in conflict-of-interest case that he was pursuing against the mayor. Chan, who rejected the settlement offer, alleges that Katz used $2,900 of public money in 2011 to throw Christmas parties for city staff at a restaurant that the mayor owned at the time. If Katz is found guilty, he could be removed from office.
The amount over which Sam Katz could be ousted is eerily similar to the $3,150 that lead to Rob Ford being ordered out of the Toronto Mayor’s office by a judge a few weeks ago. And much like Ford’s infamous football GIF, Sam Katz achieved notoriety on the Internet a few years ago for kicking a child in the face.
So, there you have it Toronto. We’re not the only city with a misbehaving mayor. In fact, 2012 will go down as the year in which several Canadian mayors saw their political transgressions catch up with them, including mayors from Montreal, Laval, and London. Basically, Canada, we need to be more careful about who we elect to govern our cities.
Correction: A previously published version of this article incorrectly stated that WOW Hospitality was owned by Katz. We regret the error.
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Igor Bonifacic is a writer working for the Toronto Standard. You can follow him on twitter @igorbonifacic.
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