Chris Moise gets only partial city council bailout on legal fees
· Toronto Sun
Chris Moise will pay for his legal bill with thousands of dollars from his own pocket, but Toronto city council has made sure that’s unlikely to happen again.
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Councillors on Thursday afternoon quadrupled the amount they can spend on legal fees when defending against an integrity complaint – pushing the standard maximum far beyond the rate of inflation from $5,000 to $20,000 – by emphatically endorsing a motion from veteran member Paula Fletcher.
In recent months, Fletcher also brought forward motions to let Moise escape any sort of fault for his recent integrity complaint, then to delay the decision on his legal fees.
That new maximum is not retroactive, however. While Moise, a first-term downtown councillor, had sought $20,807.61, Jon Burnside brought forward a motion to limit Moise’s entitlement to just half of his expenses , minus what has already been reimbursed.
“Council colleagues said to me, they said: What if you were in Councillor Moise’s position?” Burnside said during Thursday’s meeting.
“So I thought about that, and there are definitely extenuating circumstances of what happened, and we don’t have to get into that. We don’t need to re-litigate, but I understand it. Could he have handled it differently? Yes. Could he have done a better job? Yes. Is he human? Yes.
“Here’s the thing, though: We found out through the (deputy city) clerk that he knew that the reimbursement was only $5,000, and for me, as a steward of public funds, I would never have gone and spent $23,000 more and put council in this position.”
While integrity commissioner Paul Muldoon was in the council chambers, Speaker Frances Nunziata ruled councillors couldn’t ask him questions as they had voted in March to effectively ignore his report on Moise’s conduct during a meeting in January 2025.
Moise previously told the Toronto Sun that council had “vindicated” him with that vote.
Moise’s legal fees were the topic of discussion during April’s meeting when city councillors abruptly delayed what little remained on the agenda by a month.
Muldoon had found Moise “crossed the line” during a 2025 incident, reported by the Sun , in which Moise told constituent Daniel Tate he had a “white supremacy view.” He did not, however, recommend any penalty.
Legal fees ‘doubled?’
Both the delay and the rejection of the report had been proposed by Moise’s political ally Fletcher.
But while the representative of the Toronto-Danforth ward has largely steered the rest of council on the Moise matter, her frustration was obvious on Thursday afternoon as her colleagues struggled to understand the way she had rewritten what they had to vote on.
“This is $20,000, that’s the maximum, dead stop, period, integrity commissioner’s not part of it,” Fletcher said. Before Thursday, Muldoon could permit a higher maximum for city councillors, depending on the degree of seriousness of his investigation.
“It’s your legal expenses once somebody has made a complaint. And I want to be very clear: There are a lot of people that are actually making – I don’t know if I can call them vexatious complaints, but political complaints. They’ve discovered they have a root.”
Earlier, Fletcher had asked the city solicitor, Wendy Walberg, if legal fees are higher today than in 2008, when the $5,000 maximum was established.
“If I had heard they had doubled, I would not be surprised,” Walberg said.
Raising the limit to $20,000, Fletcher told her colleagues, would mean they could pay for a defence after an integrity complaint “without coming here on broken glass, bending for something more than a 2008 number.”
‘Early version’ better for Moise
While her change didn’t bail out Moise, Fletcher wanted it to at one point. Councillor Rachel Chernos Lin asked Fletcher about a line in her motion that would’ve made the $20,000 figure retroactive.
Fletcher apologized and struck the line out. “I didn’t take that off … that was a very early version,” she said.
While Anthony Perruzza voted for Burnside’s motion to limit Moise’s reimbursement by half, he suggested he found his remarks sanctimonious.
Perruzza said he feared the legal bills that could be stuck with in an imaginary situation. What if he ran into a thief at a Home Depot and “put him in a headlock,” leading to a complaint to the integrity commissioner? (This was an apparent reference to a 2024 citizen’s arrest by Burnside , a former cop. It’s unclear if anyone complained to the integrity commissioner about that event.)
The full package passed 16-6, with Nunziata, Brad Bradford, Vincent Crisanti, Stephen Holyday, Parthi Kandavel and James Pasternak opposed.
Mayor Olivia Chow was not present for the vote, nor was Moise, who was required to leave the council chamber for the debate.