It’s a very sad story. That’s all there’s left to say in some respects.
I hope Rob Ford found some peace in his final days. He seemed to have arrived at some clarity and acceptance of his mortality before re-entering hospital in late February – for the last time, it turned out.
It must have been scary to face death, especially for Ford, who at 46 would be leaving two young children.
But for all the sympathy I feel for the man and his family, I have to say I don’t share the fascination of most in the press with Ford’s tenure as mayor and what it meant for Toronto.
A few took to Twitter after Ford’s death on March 22 to offer their thoughts on his “legacy.” Others weighed in with sympathetic retrospectives for a guy who for most us only succeeded in bringing out the worst in our city.
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The consensus now seems to be that, for all his faults, Ford was a guy with a common touch whose mayoralty revealed the deep divisions between Toronto’s downtown and its suburbs.
But more than revealing our differences, Ford exploited and exacerbated the divisions between so-called “downtown elites” (his code for gays) and the suburbs for his own political ends.
The impulse to try to decipher the meaning of Ford is understandable, but it was all very simple really – a perfect storm swept him into office, and a perfect storm blew him out. His election was more fluke than marvel, the product of a confluence of events.
It was easy for the press at City Hall to get sucked into the aura of power around Ford. To feel that they were not only witnessing history as the drama around Ford unfolded, but were part of it. It was all very intoxicating for those who hadn’t been there to see the unseemly 10-year tenure as councillor that proceeded it all.
But Ford wasn’t the first politician to tap into electoral anger. It happened with Mike Harris. It’s happening now stateside with Donald Trump, and it’ll happen again whenever there’s deep economic uncertainty and voters are looking for a scapegoat. Let’s not forget that a few Liberals and NDPers were among his supporters, too.
Ford caught lightning in a bottle. For a time he was untouchable. He looked a lot like a political phenomenon. All that was needed was a name. Thus “Ford nation” was born, but that was more marketing ploy than reality, a slogan to fit neatly on a bumper sticker, like “Respect for Taxpayers,” gravy train or “Subways, subways, subways.” In more ways than one Ford was a media creation.
One of the first people he thanked in his victory speech at the Congress Centre after his improbable win was AM640 host John Oakley, who gave the then councillor from Etobicoke a weekly slot to rant on his show. It proved invaluable in helping Ford amass his following. See also the Star’s hate-on for Ford predecessor David Miller, which helped prepare the ground for a guy just like Ford.
The reframing of his legacy continued this week, with CityNews offering some clickbait on Twitter on whether a statue should be erected in Ford’s honour. His notoriety says more about our obsession with celebrity, even in our politics, than anything else.
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On his first day in office, Ford didn’t hesitate to act against the interests of those so-called second-class citizens he claimed to represent in the burbs. He cancelled Transit City, which was conceived out of Miller’s experience living in the projects and having to watch his single mom schlep to three jobs without the transit to get there.
Ford followed that up with a pledge to build a Scarborough subway, swearing it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a penny. But when he couldn’t get developers to buy into his financing scheme, he passed the tab, a cool $1 billion and counting, to the taxpayers he claimed to be defending, who’ll be paying the levy on it for another 30 years.
Ford owed much of his political clout to the support of residents in Toronto Community Housing. But very early in his term, he orchestrated the resignation of the entire TCH board and its then CEO, Keiko Nakamura, so he could hand the reins to his pal Case Ootes to sell off its housing stock to the highest bidder. TCH has yet to recover from that shakeup. The handpicked CEO Ford eventually brought in got turfed in his turn.
The list goes on, unfortunately.
For a guy who made a career of accusing colleagues of corruption, Ford’s got into his share of conflict-of-interest scrapes. Then when no one was looking, the lucrative contract to privatize garbage collection west of Yonge, a major plank in his campaign, was handed out without a formal request for proposals.
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Ford compared himself in his inaugural speech to council to William Lyon Mackenzie and promised, like the revolutionary who led the Rebellion of 1837 against the Family Compact, to be a rebel for the people.
But in the hurly-burly of the first weeks, when Ford was winning every vote on the council floor with ease, something started to change in the man.
We know now that he went on a bender after the election, went missing for days and weeks at a time, leaving reporters to file Access to Information requests to learn what he’d been up to after the fact.
When Ford did make himself available to the press, he’d deal with a handful of questions and then, poof, he’d be gone again. When questions about his whereabouts got louder, Ford threatened not to take questions at all. It was all very different from the self-discipline he’d shown during the election. Word began filtering out about Ford sightings around town at all hours.
Folks who’d supported his election bid in 2010 said he’d become “a lazy prick.” The “man of the people” had changed. He gave up his beater of a van with the Ford vanity plate for a Cadillac SUV and went all gangsta on us. He was the rock star mayor. Friends were saying then that if Ford didn’t stop the boozing he’d end up in the gutter. And if the job didn’t kill him…
Eventually his council colleagues saw what his enablers were ignoring. He would be sidelined, as he had been as a councillor, a year into his term after council voted to reverse his decision on Transit City. He lost all power officially a year later when a judge found him guilty of a conflict of interest over soliciting funds from lobbyists for his football foundation.
Stubborn. Entitled. Dismissive. Confrontational. Ignorant. That’s how Justice Charles Hackland described Ford in his decision. Another judge would overturn that decision, but Ford was halfway into his headlong fall into ignominy by then.
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On the morning the crack video scandal broke and reporters were camped outside his house, an earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale hit Toronto. It was hard not to think the gods were angry.
In the aftermath of Ford’s death, it’s been easy to forget just how crazy things got: Men in shades started showing up in Rexdale housing projects beating the bushes for the mysterious video, making threats against locals to turn it over or else. Police reported that someone with a bat showed up at the house of Ford’s high school friend where the crack video was allegedly shot. The gangsta fairy tale went full bore when one of the players in the video scandal ended up getting shot and another beat up in jail.
Ford called the allegations against him a vast left-wing conspiracy, and he could deny them as long as there was no video. (The original story on Gawker, followed by the Star, was only that the reporters had seen the video). Fellow councillors called on Ford to check himself into rehab. Who knows? If he had, maybe it would have bought him more time. But Ford soldiered on until a second crack video emerged unlike the first time, there was photographic evidence splashed across the front page of the Globe.
He headed to an undisclosed location in the Muskokas to enter rehab, but not before trying to fly to the U.S. and getting turned around at the border. Was the plan not to go into rehab at all? Just as likely he was skipping town to avoid questions about the “kikes,” “wops” and “niggers” tirade that also came out at the time.
A plan was hatched for Doug to run for mayor and Rob for Doug’s Ward 2 council seat.
Then Rob backed out. According to his former bodyguard David Price, it was hubris that made him do it: a Toronto Sun poll showing voters preferred big brother Doug over him against John Tory. In the end, Rob had no choice. Cancer intervened. Doug got the family patriarch’s name, the multi-million-dollar label business – and now what’s left of the family’s political inheritance. Can another run for mayor be far?
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NOW has received a few calls and an email or two from supporters opining that we must be happy that Ford’s dead. The sentiment is certainly out there that somehow, some way, somebody else was responsible just a little bit for Ford’s ill health. His supporters, just like Rob, want to make politics personal. That’s the problem. For most of the rest of us it’s just business.
Giorgio Mammoliti, the mayor’s right-hand thumb, tried to guilt-trip Ford’s critics, issuing a statement before his death to say he hoped “everyone who made a living hell of his life while he was mayor would respect the family’s wishes for privacy now.” He invited Ford supporters to Nathan Phillips Square to chalk their appreciation on the concrete. But the expected outpouring has been muted.
In her only interview since his death, Ford’s wife, Renata, said his problems with booze and drugs were blown out of proportion. And that whatever happened between them, it was all water under the bridge now. We should all be so forgiving. The true measure of a person, however, should not be how they died, but how they lived their life.
We saw a lot of that kind of play for sympathy for Ford when he was mayor. And we’re seeing it now in attempts to keep the myth alive, most crassly in Doug’s selfies at visitation ceremonies at City Hall this week. By Tuesday, they were all the rage on Twitter.
enzom@nowtoronto.com | @enzodimatteo
