‘UNDER THE BUS’: COVID-era official’s ‘credibility’ in ruins since City Hall firing

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Five years ago, when most of Toronto was losing its cool, Charles Jansen was in his element.

Jansen, now 66, is the kind of guy who figures out how to get things done, often under pressure. That’s how he made his name in the military: managing logistics, from the Toronto G20 summit to Afghanistan.

That’s what he was doing in March 2020, when COVID was starting to change how Toronto residents lived. City Hall’s leaders came up with the what and the why, and he had to figure out the how.

“I’m the type of person that enjoys a challenge,” he said. “Give me a really good challenge, let me get my teeth into it, give me the latitude to explore and expand, and what you’ll get at the end of it will be wonders.”

That’s the part of Jansen’s story few Torontonians know about. The part that made front-page news was when he was fired, without warning or much of an explanation, on March 18, 2020.

“My credibility disappeared,” he said, “right for that one little thing.”

Jansen had retired from the military and was considering a second career in HR when, in late 2019, an opportunity with the city came along that “looked like a perfect fit,” and close enough to his longtime home in Bolton. Toronto’s office of emergency management (OEM), as it was known then, had back-to-back acting directors and needed stability.

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“To me,” Jansen said, emergency management was “a good challenge. It was an opportunity to serve again – you know, people. It was an opportunity to help people, especially in the time of their lives when the worst situation has happened, a disaster of some form.”

As director, Jansen reported to one of the deputy city managers, Tracey Cook. But “because I was new, they wanted me to report administratively” to Matthew Pegg, then chief of Toronto Fire Services, “so that I would learn the culture of the city and see how things are going.” (Pegg declined to be interviewed for this story. Cook did not respond to a request for comment.)

Jansen said things started well, but the political world of City Hall made for a culture clash.

“I think part of the problem is, in the military, you focus on your people – your people and the mission, right? And you make sure that your staff are looked after, you build the right kind of environment, you encourage, you motivate, you don’t throw anybody under the bus, you try to evolve and develop,” he said.

“And what I saw in the city environment, it was basically a bit cutthroat. Everybody was jumping to get to that next position up. They didn’t have an issue at all about tossing somebody under the bus.”

He said that included Pegg. When COVID really got rolling, Jansen said, the fire chief seemed to be positioning himself as if he were “saving the world, so to speak.”

“I started noticing a lot of things shifting and moving around, and me being pushed further and further aside so that the limelight was going his way,” Jansen said.

Meanwhile, Jansen was trying to direct the city’s limited pandemic supplies — surgical masks and the like — to municipal staff such as front-line workers and first responders. He was frustrated that directors of departments well inside City Hall’s walls were helping themselves to the goods – and few people were questioning that process.

“It’s a matter of co-ordination, which is really what the role of OEM was, to co-ordinate,” he said, “and unfortunately, it turned out that that really isn’t what they wanted. They really just wanted someone who was going to be like an incident commander and you’re just gonna direct some stuff, and leave it at that.”

Jansen worked with Dr. Eileen De Villa, who led Toronto Public Health during the pandemic, on a presentation on how to rethink City Hall during COVID.

“I sent it up to Pegg to look at, I sent it up to Tracey … nothing. No peeps, no word, nothing,” Jansen said. “I go to brief all the department heads and they were ready to hang me. ‘There’s no way we’re gonna look at having people remotely work during the pandemic. There’s no way we’re going to look at shutting down in-customer services just because there’s a pandemic.’

“The heads and that were so focused on maintaining that little empire that they had built,” he added, “as opposed to sitting back and saying: ‘How can we work together? … Can we change how we do some of our business?’ And they were completely unwilling to even think about that, even though, roll the clock forward, they did exactly that.”

Before long, Jansen said, Pegg had taken over a much larger role at emergency management, and he was now largely left with planning duties. One morning, he was directed to a meeting with Cook and an HR rep. He was out.

It was March 18, 2020. COVID was a full-on crisis – but, Jansen said, his probation was almost up, and they didn’t think he was the right fit.

Jobs come and go, but Jansen said the way his firing was handled “killed me the worst.” Reporters were told Pegg was in charge – and had been since the outbreak of COVID – but City Hall gave no details about Jansen’s departure.

“That basically meant OK, so, each of the newspapers, the media had to then come up with their own idea – ‘Well, why would they have fired the guy? What could have happened wrong?’ Nobody bothered to provide any kind of clarity or discussion about it, and so there was this whole flue of articles – you know, ‘Charles Jansen, director of OEM, fired at the height of COVID’ – big headlines,” Jansen said.

Even worse was when his family saw an old photo of Jansen with his wife attending a gala in the news coverage. “My wife was devastated,” he said. “Why do you drag my wife into something like this?”

The bad press dogged him on the job hunt. Jansen at the best of times battles PTSD, and this pushed him “over the deep edge.”

“There was a while there where, yeah, it was extremely dark,” he said.

A lot has changed since. Pegg, Cook and De Villa have retired from the city. Jansen’s ultimate successor, Joanna Beaven-Desjardins, was made executive director when emergency management became a stand-alone division at City Hall.

City Hall officials said they do not  comment on personnel matters and Pegg’s successor, Fire Chief Jim Jessop, declined to speak to the Sun about Jansen’s tenure. In a brief statement, a city representative said emergency management was “a unit inside Toronto Fire Services” until 2022, and Pegg would’ve had “oversight” of the office.

A person who worked in the office during Jansen’s tenure, who the Sun is not naming given the sensitivity of the subject, said staff heard nothing about the firing beyond what reporters were told at the time.

It simply appeared Pegg and Cook’s “displeasure with Jansen” had been building before he was let go, the person said.

Jansen wound up solving the hard problems again, this time with the federal government. He told the Sun about leading an app that serves as a one-stop hub for Canadians when a loved one dies. It’s a different kind of emergency to manage. One silver lining: The guy who helped bring the remote work revolution to Toronto doesn’t mind working from home himself.

Working for Ottawa is “night and day” compared with City Hall, he said. The feds are “very open, very collaborative, very willing to share thoughts, ideas.”

“It’s not just pontificating and then making sure all the minions down below do it,” Jansen said. “No, they’re all right into it and they’re all right doing it.”

jholmes@postmedia.com