Deputy mayor’s pals given huge DEI payday by city hall

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Toronto city hall has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a DEI consulting firm with long, personal ties to both Olivia Chow’s most trusted staffer and one of her deputy mayors, the Toronto Sun has learned.

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Contracts, invoices and other documents, some obtained via freedom of information and some publicly available, show more than $500,000 in taxpayer money has been paid to Monumental Projects Inc. since 2022.

In the fall of that year, Ausma Malik was elected the councillor for Spadina-Fort York. Malik has personal relationships going back years with Monumental’s founders, Zahra Ebrahim and Kofi Hope.

Ebrahim and Hope are also listed as founding advisers by the political organization Progress Toronto. Despite that, Progress Toronto founder Michal Hay appears to have personally signed a Monumental Projects expense on behalf of Chow, while serving as chief of staff to the mayor in 2023.

In a series of statements, city hall confirmed its contracts with Monumental “on two separate projects” in 2022, but did not acknowledge invoices dated from 2023 to 2025, when Chow and Malik were in power.

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“The city’s procurement processes include conflict-of-interest requirements for both suppliers and staff,” Genevieve Sharkey, the city’s chief procurement officer, said in a statement.

“Suppliers are required to disclose potential conflicts, and staff involved in procurement activities must comply with the city’s procurement policies, ethical standards and applicable bylaws.”

‘Equity tool,’ ‘gender-specific lens’

Nora Cole, who works with Malik’s re-election campaign, said in a brief statement that none of Monumental’s work was for the councillor’s office and pointed to the city’s procurement protocols.

In a written statement, Monumental defended its work but did not address questions about the founders’ ties to Malik and Chow.

“We are proud that since 2020, Monumental has been delivering the highest quality work to a range of clients across Canada,” the statement said. “We approach every bid with the highest standards of integrity. For each tender we consider, we follow the qualification requirements, instructions and procurement processes established by our clients.”

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Representatives for Chow did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Progress Toronto.

Monumental was paid for DEI-related consulting work, including training, speaking and public engagement, involving a range of departments at city hall, from the parks division to housing and planning all the way to the mayor’s office.

Many of the contracts and invoices were provided to the Sun by the political advocacy group Integrity TO, which obtained them in a pair of freedom-of-information requests. That group was founded by Daniel Tate, a vocal critic of Chow and her allies on city council, who is running for council in a downtown ward next to Malik’s.

One request contained two six-figure Monumental contracts, one of them a sole-source deal.

The sole-source contract was for the planning department, with a listed delivery date of April 2023, totalling $107,563. Monumental was tasked with revising the city’s “equity tool with a gender-specific lens to support and reinforce work on the making space tool kit.”

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It’s unclear if Monumental got any of that money, as city hall said that as of this month, “no invoices have been processed against this purchase order.” The city confirmed, however, that in late 2022, it paid Monumental $28,999.19 for specialized “gender equity research.”

Another contract, dating from March 2022, was for $124,116.67. That bought five months of “public engagement services for the City of Toronto’s recognition review for the economic development and culture division,” with two options to renew for one month.

Part of that so-called recognition review was city hall’s maligned initiative to rename public assets bearing the name of Henry Dundas. A list of invoices makes that plain, saying Monumental’s contract was for a “City of Toronto naming project.”

Work for mayor’s office, police

That list comes from the other freedom-of-information request, which contains $254,617.79 worth of Monumental invoices since March 2022. However, $149,126.10 of it was payouts for Monumental’s naming project contract.

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The $28,999.19 “gender equity research” invoice is also part of that list. The city said that deal was awarded under delegated authority for contracts below $50,000.

The other invoices date from Chow’s term, from October 2023 to June 2025. Hay signed for an $8,475 “full-day strategy session” for Chow’s office, held in July 2023, a few weeks after her byelection win.

Other invoices include $17,515 for an unlabelled “team leadership meeting,” $22,035 for unspecified workshops and a $1,977.50 Nuit Blanche “artist fee.”

Hope, meanwhile, appears to have been paid $500 directly to speak on a panel at an anti-racist planning event at Metro Hall in November 2024. A flyer obtained by the Sun suggests the event was put on by the city’s housing secretariat’s Black Staff Community of Practice group.

Details on other payments were obtained from publicly available sources, such as an April report to the Toronto Police Services board. Documents show the police paid $152,640 in 2025 for Monumental’s “yearlong co-design engagement process … to address race- and identity-based disparities in police responses to mental-health crises in Toronto.”

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(Toronto Police had yet to provide a response at the time of publication.)

Another $107,615 to Monumental, paid out for two projects, was found in a city registry for consulting services expenses.

One project, done for $26,115 in 2023 for the city’s HR department, was to “identify the best practices of intersectional gender equity inclusion work.” The other, at a $81,500 cost to city taxpayers in 2024, involved engagement work related to Nuit Blanche, done for TO Live.

On the Waterfront

Monumental has also done work for Waterfront Toronto, which was founded by all three levels of government and operates at arm’s length from city hall. Malik has been on that agency’s board since 2022. (Andrew MacLeod, who is CEO of Postmedia, which owns the Sun, is also on the board.)

Waterfront Toronto said Monumental was part of a team last year that won an engagement deal for Ookwemin Minising, a chunk of land that had been known as Villiers Island before a rebranding under Chow. While the agency gave no details on the money spent, it said that contract was won in an open procurement process.

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A search of the city’s bids portal found only one publicly posted contract won by Monumental: a 2022 public engagement deal for $121,970, which was the initial estimate for its naming project work. It’s unclear how many other deals were put through competitive processes and how many were simply offered to Monumental.

It’s also possible that the records obtained by the Sun may account for individual payments more than once, given they come from an array of sources, or that other payments are unaccounted for. The Sun asked for definitive totals for payments to Monumental, both since its 2020 founding and since Malik won election in 2022, but city hall ignored that request.

Whatever conflict-of-interest rules were followed, Ebrahim did publicly endorse Chow for mayor in 2023 and, just recently, Malik for re-election in Spadina-Fort York.

Malik’s ties to the Monumental founders go back far before her time in politics. A Toronto Star article from 2017 said she had met Hope “more than a decade” before that year, while fighting police policies in the wake of the Summer of the Gun.

Meanwhile, Ebrahim already knew her “dear friend” well enough to sign her nomination papers in 2018 for Malik’s first planned council run, aborted when the city’s ward map was redrawn.

Ebrahim, Hope and Hay all contributed financially to Malik’s 2018 campaign, city filings show, with Hay pitching in the maximum $1,200.

jholmes@postmedia.com

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