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Rebel, made to order

If Rob Ford, individual oddity that he is, didn’t exist, the times would have created a facsimile of him.

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You have to ask how a politician with a deep aversion to government as a concept plus a few crafty handlers could have snagged one of North America’s most progressive cities.

The sad truth is, he was manufactured, made to order by a series of intentional steps and happenings generated by conservative players with state-withering aspirations. History is not a conspiracy, but there are conspiracies in history, as the saying goes.

The Harris Tories dreamed all this. They not only worked to dump responsibilities on cities and divest higher levels of government of accountability, they also aspired to download the tax revolt. The idea was that if you endlessly contract senior governmental functions and continue to hand them down the line, the rebellion would break out at the weakest link, the municipal level. And so it has.

Add to this a recession where senior jurisdictions have basically abandoned the population to their own devices and fears. From the Tories’ refusal to use EI as a real safety net to the provincial Libs’ official policy of fostering employment poverty through a low minimum wage, their insistence on non-sustainable social assistance rates and limp job creation, it’s no wonder people are weathering the downturn with a mixture of pessimism and fury.

Cities don’t control the broader forces of the economy – they are the mop-up operations for tragedies fostered at a higher level. And in this first recession-time election, the mass emotion bubbled up right about here.

Spare a little blame, as well, for the fabricated attacks on the David Miller regime and its “fiscal irresponsibility” by, of all sources, the so-called liberal Toronto Star. Royson James worked to establish a climate of hostility and a disrespect for the simple facts of the matter. He may have thought he was opening the door for George Smitherman, but turns out it was Ford who darkened the welcome mat.

As for Smitherman, he plainly was no help at all. Sure, he knew how to deftly lift the best policies from the Miller plan – from local procurement to jobs for challenged youth that was his left cover. But his chief message, the one he went to war with, was all about Miller’s “waste and abuse.” He began his bid with this message and stayed on theme, on track, on target right to the bitter end.

His language and cadence were meant to pump indignation, to create suspicion and skepticism about politicians’ relationship to public money and, in the end, detracted from governance itself. His examples of misuse were so out of proportion that the hopelessly charitable concluded he couldn’t possibly mean it and forgave him his excesses on the basis that he was just making tactical overtures to Ford’s base. If only.

So what’s next? I was at the Fox and Fiddle on the Danforth Monday night, where Paula Fletcher was celebrating her victory over a vicious “anyone but” campaign and folks were toasting winning Mary Fragedakis, who cleaned out the Case Ootes demons from Ward 29.

NDP leader Jack Layton was there, walking on air over his son’s triumph in Ward 19, and the room was jubilant, optimistic and awash in a sense of mission. Fletcher said it best when she told the cheering crowd that people now had to stick together to work for the social justice “we all believe in in this room.”

We’ve been here before, of course, during the Harris years. And along with the social trauma, the grassroots movements grew like crazy. It was the feds who shut the downtown for the G20, but during the Harris years it was labour and community groups who locked the city tight during the Days of Action.

Now watch for a new wave of citizen self-expression, aimed at backing progressive councillors on the front lines. The council chambers will be teeming and deputants will flood like the seas into committee meetings. And if the feeling in the Fox and Fiddle Monday night sticks, there we could all be, a little while hence, sitting on the tracks to save our streetcars.

ellie@nowtoronto.com

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