This retiring city official used to cry into his beer after work
Executive directors of municipal licensing and standards, they’re just like us
After 32 years with the city, Toronto’s executive director of municipal licensing and standards, Carleton Grant, is retiring this week, and Torontonians are getting some exit interview tea on his way out.
In an interview with the Toronto Star, Grant said that it wasn’t criminals or pandemic rule-breakers who caused him the most grief, but being a “punching bag” for Toronto city councillors who disagreed with him during his seven years overseeing municipal by-laws.
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His tenure included developing the RentSafe program, which ensures landlords follow building maintenance standards, and adding decibel limits to the city’s previously loose noise regulations. (You may also know him as the guy who swore on a hot mic during a lagging council meeting.)
Grant told the Star that he internalizes criticism to an unhealthy degree. “I take things very personally,” he said. “I beat myself up. I’m a perfectionist, all of which are traits that don’t work in this job.”
Back in May, an accountability watchdog determined that the city left rooming house tenants without basic utilities for six full months. Mayor Olivia Chow criticized the public service, and Grant apologized, but the Star’s story lays out the kind of in-fighting that would stall policy changes for years. Grant said, for example, that he pitched council 12 times on a city-wide licensing system for rooming houses before they finally approved it in 2022.
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Former by-law chief Tracey Cook echoed Grant’s agony: “We’re everything to everybody and nothing to anybody. And you’re always in the wrong, no matter what you do.”
In perhaps the most transparent moment of the Star story, Cook shared that she and Grant would tearfully commiserate over post-work beers. “Lots of nights we would cry together,” she said.
Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
