The Toronto Community Housing Corporation

Toronto Community Housing Corporation CEO Keiko Nakamura, left,
and tight-lipped chair David Mitchell, right

These days in Toronto "TCHC" isn't a misspelling of the chemical in grass that gets you stoned. It's the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, the folks who run public housing, who were recently lacerated in an audit that uncovered interesting receipts such as:

* $40,000 on a staff Christmas party in 2009 plus $53,000 in 2008 -- the years of The Great Recession

* $3 million worth of bathroom and lighting fixtures from a single China-based supplier, Well Group Enterprises Ltd., made using 37 separate orders

* $5 million in purchases from that supplier since 2006, approved by then chief financial officer Gordon Chu, were inadequately documented, with no proof that the supplier was selected based on open and competitive bidding from local suppliers

You get the picture (read more at The Toronto Star). Contrast these shopping sprees to a huge waiting list of repairs that tenants are waiting for the TCHC to fix: bedbugs, water leaks, cockroaches, no heating. You know, little stuff like that that effects some of the 164,000 tenants who live Toronto's public housing. Take a look at one unit:

It's front page news all over Toronto, a city where people sleep on the streets in sub-zero temperatures. Like every Torontonian, Mayor Rob Ford is calling for heads to roll, and within days of the release of the audit the civilian board has resigned.

However, CEO Keiko Nakamura is hanging on, and at a public hearing this week some TCHC tenants actually applauded her. Perhaps she's a scapegoat since she's the new boss and a lot of these excesses were spent under the former CEO Derek Ballantyne who isn't saying a hell of a lot.

Whatever the outcome, Ford is going to far by threatening to privatize the TCHC. Do we need public housing to be profit-driven, where cut-backs in quality (i.e. repairs) generates profits? I mean, don't we suffer that already?