What will Rob Ford do now that he’s run out of election promises to break? Build casinos, of course. And so continues the gangsta fairy tale of Robert Bruce Ford. We’ll get to that slippery casino business a little further down.
But first, to revisit that watershed moment in a mayoralty that’s careening dizzyingly out of control, the vote last week at a special meeting of council to effectively kill Ford’s privately funded Sheppard subway scheme and replace it with parts of the Transit City plan he declared dead his first day in office.
A dazed mayor – still reeling from that turn when his point man on the transit file, Gordon Chong, reported that he couldn’t find the billions to fund his subway plan – responded by calling council’s vote “irrelevant.” Ford then inexplicably hopped on the Bloor line in the wee hours, taking the subway from his Etobicoke home to Scarborough in a clumsy bit of PR.
Ford doesn’t seem prepared to let his Sheppard fantasy go. His executive voted this week “on a process to move forward with the development of a plan to complete the Sheppard subway.” But that train has left the station.
Try as he may to sell the fallacy that his plan is still in play, the reality is that – as far as the province is concerned, and it controls the purse strings on the transit file – council’s vote to revive LRTs on Finch and bring the Eglinton-Crosstown above ground in stretches is the final word.
Twitch, twitch – witness the convulsions of an administration adrift. Without a manufactured crisis to propel his agenda, Ford is lost.
Not to venture too far off course, but in the paralysis now setting in at 100 Queen West after the hat trick of political defeats for the mayor that started with January’s budget rebuff, it’s tempting to recall the administration of some guy named W.
Before 9/11 came along to save that guy’s presidency…. Wait a minute, wasn’t that W’s brother Jeb, the Florida governor, in T.O. last week paying Ford a “courtesy call”? Strange synchronicity.
One wonders what trouble Ford & Co. are hoping to stir up to recapture the political momentum. The push-polling to spread the canard the masses favour subways has already begun.
Maybe Ford will finally decide to table that plan to cut council in half. He never gets tired of reminding us of the mandate he won to do whatever he likes. Now he can argue that council’s getting in the way.
It won’t be as easy to pull a fast one now as it was when they leaked a city auditor’s report on civil servants’ supposed extravagant spending on chocolates, an “exposé” that put a sell-off of social housing in play.
The same old lies won’t do now. The public will need more convincing this time, whatever the PR offensive being concocted, and so will council, where Ford has seemingly exhausted his political capital.
Or hasn’t he noticed? Those on council – of all political stripes – who helped engineer his recent defeats are revelling in positive exposure and accolades in the press.
Their ascension – initially but no longer qualified by Ford’s allies’ claim that they still want to work with the mayor – is a sign that some Ford friendlies have cut their ties permanently with His Worship.
It may be too early to use the words “lame” and “duck” to describe Ford’s mayoralty – but some have used the word “emasculated” to describe his political fix. I’m not there yet.
He still has the power to salvage something from this wreck. Problem is, the mayor’s never shown himself particularly adept at wielding his influence, preferring blunt instruments to political compromise. His critics warned that he was ill-equipped to be mayor. Characteristically, he seems unprepared to seek the middle ground in the wake of his Sheppard defeat.
That obstinacy threatens to strangle his mayoralty altogether. The circle around Ford has drawn noticeably tighter. The brightest lights in his entourage – John Parker, Karen Stintz, Jaye Robinson, James Pasternak – are deserting him. Peter Milcyzn is still entertaining enough political ambitions to stick around (for now), but budget chief Mike Del Grande looks tired, and economic development chair Michael Thompson is increasingly marginalized. The talent pool is getting shallow.
Which explains in part why the Fordists are now talking about harebrained schemes like casinos, not only as a financial solution to the shelved subway plan, but as a fix for all that ails Toronto’s finances. (See here.)
I know the mayor used to live across the street from the racetrack and is a gamblin’ man where his politics are concerned. But the idea has all the earmarks of the insularity that’s marked Ford’s regime from the day he took office. You know what they say about absolute power, and Ford’s “irrelevant” crack post-Sheppard illustrates just how absolute he believes his power is.
In his year-plus as mayor, questions have been raised about his propensity to conduct business away from City Hall, illegal campaign donations (which Ford’s fighting in court) and shredding documents related to an investigation by the city’s integrity commissioner into his business card purchases, among other issues.
Before council sat to kill the Sheppard subway last week, it moved to sweep under the rug another report by ethics czar Janet Leiper – this time into the mayor’s accepting cash when he was councillor for his football foundation from 11 lobbyists and 26 corporations and trade associations doing business with the city, in contravention of the Code of Conduct for Members of Council.
Leiper’s report notes that Ford claimed some $100,000 in donations to his foundation on his website but that the arm’s-length agency overseeing the charity, the Toronto Community Foundation, could account for just under $40,000.
Not to suggest that Ford may have been on the take here. Leiper drew no such conclusion.
Still troubling, though, is that Leiper says Ford was more bothered about having to print new stationery (he was using city letterhead to ask for cash, which is illegal) than about questions over his solicitation of funds for his foundation from people doing business with the city. Nuff said.
enzom@nowtoronto.com
