This meeting got more than it budgeted for.
On Tuesday night, near the end of three humdrum budget subcommittee meetings at Toronto City Hall, Councillor Shelley Carroll cut off one of the speakers, then suddenly said she was calling security.
The speaker was Daniel Tate and he had singled out his councillor, Chris Moise, who sits on the subcommittee – and who has clashed publicly with Tate before.
In his deputation, Tate called the city’s recent tax hikes a “crushing burden,” and said Moise was a “prime example” of Toronto’s spending problem, pointing to the Toronto Centre councillor’s travel, his role in the Sankofa Square renaming and his work to remove the board of Moss Park Arena. (Moise didn’t appear to speak or visibly react during Tate’s appearance before the subcommittee.)
Before cutting his mic, Carroll had warned Tate that he could complain about a city project or a decision of council, but not criticize a specific councillor.
“Sure, I was picking on Moise, but I wasn’t slandering him, I wasn’t calling him names,” Tate told the Sun.
Tate said the budget subcommittee should hear about “irresponsible spending” at City Hall, and of Moise, Tate said, “he’s the primary example, and he’s the adversary because he called me a racist.”
Tate said that, before Carroll cut him off, he intended to speak about a public confrontation with Moise that took place days before at a budget town hall meeting.
In a cellphone video Tate shot at that Jan. 16 meeting, he presses Moise on the possibility of further spending to change the names of other city assets “that hurt your feelings for whatever reason.” In reply, Moise tells Tate he has “a white supremacy view.”
“I find you appalling,” Moise says in the video. “You have harassed my staff. You have harassed me. … You have harassed me for months and you’re harassing me now. I will never apologize to you.”
Months earlier, at a June 2024 meeting of the city’s executive committee, Tate sparred with Moise when he brought forward a petition opposing the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square.
At the June meeting, Moise said it was “very telling” that Tate had no problem with the renaming of a stadium after former mayor Rob Ford, then apparently called Tate a “racist” when his mic was off.
Moise did not respond to requests for comment.
Tate denies he’s harassed Moise or his staff. He told the Sun that in the weeks after the June meeting, he paid two visits to Moise’s office in the hopes of getting an apology, but staff said the councillor wouldn’t meet with him. Tate and Moise had a short, uneventful exchange at another public meeting in the months since, Tate added.
“That’s not harassment. That’s participating in democracy,” Tate said. “The fact that he even thinks that’s harassment shows he’s not cut out for this.”
Tate said he was “hoping some humility would prevail” if he confronted Moise at the meeting. He knows he can adopt an “aggressive” tone, but said Moise’s accusation of racism “hurts me and my reputation.”
Tate worries that Moise’s claim will be the first thing people find if they look him up online. More than once he brought up Toronto school principal Richard Bilkszto, who took his own life in 2023 after questioning a DEI initiative, as an example of why City Hall needs to tone down the race rhetoric.
As for Moise saying he’s a white supremacist? “I lost family in the Holocaust, man,” Tate said. “How much can one concerned citizen handle?”
“What I’m trying to do here,” he said, “is establish two things: That No. 1, our city priorities with regards to spending are completely off and mismanaged, and No. 2, we have councillors who don’t respect their constituents and bully and harass them and call them names, and that is unacceptable, and it’s a black mark on the city, and on the city council and on the whole city government.”