It often felt like Rob Ford could live forever. It was just as easy to imagine him living for another 50 years, or perhaps another 100, as it was to contemplate an imminent conclusion.
The former mayor of Toronto, who passed away today at the age of 46, possessed an almost mythic quality that suggested he could defy all expectations and rules of nature. His dogged determination to persevere in the face of monumental obstacles — most of which he erected himself — was staggering in its consistency. There was little he couldn’t will himself to overcome.
His legacy, however, was not one of greatness but of something else, something harder to pin down. Toronto’s history is studded with great politicians, people whose wisdom, leadership, and dedication to their values make them paragons worthy of emulation. The city has also had its share of scoundrels, crooks, and cheats, who corrupted the civic realm for their own personal enrichment.
Ford was neither of those things, exactly. But the man — whose mayoral tenure was bookended by stints as the councillor for Ward 2 (Etobicoke North) from 2000-2010 and from 2014 until his passing — carved a space of his very own that was no less starkly intense.
His predecessor in the mayor’s office, David Miller, may have been the one to clean up the organizational mess of amalgamation and guide the new City of Toronto to become a mature level of government. But Ford is the one who showed us how much work remains to be done — and that mending a stitched-together government isn’t the same as mending a stitched-together city. Miller accomplished the former but had only so much success with the latter.
It was ironically through his emphasis on, and exacerbation of, divisions that Ford helped the post-amalgamation Toronto see itself for the first time. In trying to grasp why some people loved him and others very much did not, Torontonians were forced to wrap our heads around the breadth of lives and experiences in the city, and come to terms with its startling inequalities.
In this way, Ford ushered in the modern era of Toronto, having wound its disparate threads into a unified, if fraying, whole. He became a common cultural touchstone of a sort that we had never had, binding us in shared fascination — and whether the glue was trauma or ecstasy, the supply of it seemed limitless.
In virtually every respect, he was a terrible mayor (and a not-very-good city councillor, though hardly the worst). But in other ways, he was more important for the social and psychological development of Toronto than just about any mayor we have ever had. How much of this was inadvertent and how much of it intentional will long be a subject for debate. But Ford’s visibility extended beyond that of the CN Tower and his cross-generational allure beyond that of Drake. He was, for better or for worse, the kind of symbol that we didn’t know we needed.
Jonathan Goldsbie
Prior to the most recent turns in his health, I was working on a post tentatively titled Things I Have Written About Rob Ford, With Donald Trump’s Name Substituted In. I may yet complete it, but in the meantime have discovered that the conceit works the other way as well.
This is a find-and-replace on David Brooks’s column from Friday’s New York Times:
Ford voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. . . .Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Ford to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
Few of us will ever know what it’s like to be loved in the way that Ford’s most devoted followers felt about him. And few of us will ever know what it is to seek salvation through a deeply troubled demagogue.
But Ford took me to corners of my city that, to my shame, I wouldn’t otherwise have reached. I became intimately familiar with the leafy Etobicoke neighbourhood in which he grew up. (Central Etobicoke must always be called “leafy.”) For his events, I schlepped out to Centennial Park, the Woodbine Banquet Hall, Thomson Memorial Park (twice), a Sears Outlet lot in Rexdale (twice), and the Toronto Congress Centre (four times). None of these were especially obscure locations, but for a downtown resident without a car, they were sufficiently afield of my comfortable bubble.
I never made it out to Steak Queen, but the fact that many political reporters felt compelled to visit a 24-hour cheap-meat diner in the city’s northwest pocket in order to cover a knotty act of cultural appropriation was in itself a kind of subversion.
Jonathan Goldsbie
On December 11, 2013, I found myself sitting on a couch opposite Ford as he watched hockey in the basement of his mother’s house.
It was the Christmas party for his family, friends, and staff, and for some bizarre reason his brother Doug had extended the invite to media. This was just over a month after he admitted to smoking crack, at the tail end of an unparallelled span of civic delirium. At this point in the saga, he had just doubled down on remarks baselessly insinuating that one of the reporters who covered him was a pedophile. (He later retracted the statements upon being served with a libel notice.)
I was there to cover him, not to enjoy myself, as there are few things less enjoyable than sitting down on a couch opposite a man who had just called your friend a pedophile. He was trying to lose himself in the hockey game, and the odds are excellent that he did.
It occurred to me just in that moment, however, that he was easily one of the most famous politicians in the world. In the previous 42 days, his celebrity had transcended his vocation, rendering him probably the best-known subnational leader on the planet.
I wanted to ask him if he knew this. If he appreciated it. How did he feel about achieving a measure of success beyond all of his wildest dreams but for all the most spectacularly wrong of reasons.
Is it a tragedy? Is it a victory? Do you understand who you are? Do you grasp that you are one of the most famous people in the world by sheer virtue of your overwhelming ill-suitedness to your job?
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say in that moment, in the presence of one of the most famous men in the world as he sat watching hockey on the couch.
Jonathan Goldsbie
Following the death of a public figure, there is a window of at least 12-18 hours during which saying anything unkind is generally taken as a sign of disrespect. Those who knew the dearly departed deserve a space to mourn, and there is seldom any reason to immediately disrupt it.
That period is typically followed by another 12-18 hours during which a fuller reckoning of a person’s life and legacy become acceptable. After that comes a contrarian backlash explaining why the second-phase reckonings were mistaken, and then everything devolves into a muddle of hot takes.
In the case of Rob Ford, feeling conflicted about his life and its consequences is not only natural but likely necessary, healthy, and appropriate. He was who he was, and that thing was unique. To deny it is to reduce him to just one of his many dimensions.
Even when you thought you understood him, he would surprise.
The best moment of Ford’s mayoralty came on August 22, 2011, following the passing from cancer of NDP leader Jack Layton, who’d sat next to him on council for a little more than two years.
In his reflections on what his ideological opponent had meant to him, Ford was touching, wise, and heartbreakingly sincere. As Torontonians drew chalk tributes to Layton in Nathan Phillips Square, Ford managed to be the leader the city needed in that moment, both channelling and shaping its grief.
“Today’s definitely one of the saddest days in Toronto — but not only in Toronto, in Canada,” he told media that afternoon.
“He taught me never to take things personal. He taught me you’re gonna be surprised on who votes with you sometimes and who votes against ya. And he joked around and said, ‘You and I are probably never gonna vote the same way.'”
A reporter asked for his best memories of Layton. Taking the briefest of moments to ponder the question, the mayor said simply: “His smile.”
