1--Sarah Dea/The Globe and Mail
In the decade-and-a-half or so after Toronto amalgamated in 1998, its city council was, by municipal standards, an outsized stage that launched nationally prominent political careers, influenced federal policy-making and attracted intensive media coverage, not least because of Rob Ford’s mayoralty.
Aside from the late Mr. Ford, a crack-smoking populist from Etobicoke, no Toronto councillor embodied City Hall’s theatricality and dysfunction more completely than Giorgio Mammoliti. He won seven consecutive municipal elections to represent diverse parts of suburban North York. During this time, Mr. Mammoliti, who died in hospital on Feb. 25 at age 64, revelled in the politically incorrect notoriety generated by his combativeness and outrageous stunts.
Giorgio Mammoliti was born in Toronto on Sept. 20, 1961. After high school, he studied labour relations and media broadcasting at Humber College, graduating with honours, while working in property management for the Ontario Housing Corp.
He first came to public attention in the late 1980s, as the scrappy twenty-something president of a public-sector union local that represented groundskeepers in one of Toronto’s subsidized housing agencies. At one point, Mr. Mammoliti publicly objected to a widely lauded volunteer effort by residents to clean up graffiti.
“We won’t be out to headhunt and try and stop the community from doing a nice thing,” he told the Toronto Star. “But if by chance something like this threatens any of our guys, then we’ll do something.”
Giorgio Mammoliti during a council meeting in October, 2012.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In 1990, he leveraged his reputation as a union leader to get elected as an MPP in the upset victory that brought Bob Rae’s NDP to power, serving as parliamentary assistant to the ministers of health and then correctional services. But Mr. Mammoliti quickly generated controversy, speaking out against proposed LGBTQ-rights legislation and then becoming embroiled in a scandal about expensing more than $5,200 for gas he used to drive around his constituency and to Queen’s Park.
“He was outspoken and an effective fighter for his community,” says Mr. Rae, who went on to a long career as a Liberal cabinet minister and a diplomat, “but [he] had trouble accepting the discipline of party politics.”
After the Ontario NDP’s defeat in 1995, Mr. Mammoliti jumped to local politics, getting elected first to North York City Council and then to the amalgamated council in 1998, where he represented North York Humber until 2000, and then York West until 2018.
During Mr. Mammoliti’s 20 years in the Toronto council chamber, he sat directly next to four successive mayors – a spot he boasted about. As David Miller, who served as mayor from 2003 to 2010, recalls, “He literally had the ear of four mayors, and used it effectively to benefit his constituents.”
He was well known for his appearances in the press gallery of the clam-shaped council chamber where he vented his grievances (toward social housing residents, the left, racial minorities, etc.), picked fights with fellow councillors and performed in front of the cameras in ways that produced unforgettable TV.
Mr. Mammoliti speaks to Toronto taxi drivers during a protest against Uber in December, 2015.Mark Blinch/The Globe and Mail
One of Mr. Mammoliti’s most memorable stunts in the chamber was when he showed up topless to protest a decision to allow nudity on a secluded LGBTQ beach on Toronto Island.
Mr. Miller, in his term as mayor, sought to keep Mr. Mammoliti busy by appointing him to head up housing taskforce. Mr. Ford, who once sparked an outcry by addressing Mr. Mammoliti using an anti-Italian slur, had also tried to co-opt him with an appointment to his executive committee.
Yet Mr. Mammoliti preferred to antagonize rather than build, says Myer Siemiatycki, a professor emeritus in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson Polytechnic University). Mr. Mammoliti fought the creation of the recently opened Finch West Light Rail Transit (LRT) line, which bisected his ward and aggravated local businesses. He also continually derided the thousands of low-income public housing residents in his district, once referring to them as “cockroaches.” Nor was he shy of playing the race card in local elections, as happened when he went up against rival Tiffany Ford in 2018.
He also had run-ins with the city’s accountability officers over election expenses and even threatened to sue Toronto’s then-integrity commissioner Janet Leiper, who in 2014 found he had improperly accepted an $80,000 gift from the proceeds of a fundraiser, a breach of the city’s code of conduct.
For all that, Mr. Mammoliti could be “charming and funny,” recalls former councillor John Filion. “He could read people really well, so he had a lot of natural political skills.” But, he adds, Mr. Mammoliti sought out the media spotlight and “knew how to use that attention to his benefit.”
Mr. Mammoliti listens during the executive committee on core service review in July, 2011.Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail
Western University political scientist Zack Taylor says characters like Mr. Mammoliti were a product of hyper-local, parochial preamalgamation politics, and then found themselves in the media glare after 1998.
“It was just a giant circus,” he says. With the demise of local coverage, the dramatic reduction in the size of council after 2018, and the massive growth in the city and its wards, Prof. Taylor says, council has since become more professionalized and less chaotic.
For Mr. Mammoliti, whose stint on council ended in 2018, all the attention-seeking failed to translate into the type of personal legacy that motivates many local politicians. For years, he pitched a plan to erect the world’s tallest flagpole at a suburban intersection known as Emery Village. While that scheme still exists in the imagination of a local business improvement area, the flagpole itself has never materialized.
“It’s hard to think of a tangible, specific legacy of his in terms of a policy, a program, something in Toronto that remains his mark,” says Prof. Siemiatycki, a veteran council watcher. “It was much more the politics of provocation and of performance.”
Mr. Rae recalls that Mr. Mammoliti contacted him some years ago to express regret for how he had conducted himself. “I told him then that the language he used deeply offended many people and that he needed to reach out to others as well, which he did,” he says. “Many never forgave him. His views and ambitions were constantly changing.”
Indeed, as Prof. Siemiatycki observes, Mr. Mammoliti belonged, at various points in his career, to every mainstream political party, and also stood as a candidate for the hard-right People’s Party of Canada in the riding of Simcoe–Grey, near his home in Wasaga Beach, Ont.
Mr. Mammoliti leaves his four siblings, three former spouses, five children and seven grandchildren.
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