Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (11 page)

In January 2010, the Fords commissioned a poll.

The numbers showed that Rob Ford was the third-place choice for mayor. He saw an opening and made a run for that Hail Mary.

FIVE

THE GRAVY

TRAIN

N
ick Kouvalis pulled into the parking lot at Deco Labels & Tags in Etobicoke unsure of what to expect. He had never met Rob Ford. In fact, until a few weeks earlier, he’d never heard of him. But Kouvalis’s business partner, Richard Ciano, had gotten roped into joining the councillor’s mayoral campaign by a mutual friend of the Ford family. Ciano and Kouvalis, both in their mid-thirties, owned a political consulting firm called Campaign Research, which specialized in polling, voter identification, and strategy. The Fords wanted them to put together a campaign plan. Ciano had warned Kouvalis that they were in fact dealing with the Fords, plural. Brother Doug was the campaign manager, and he was very, uh, opinionated.

Ciano took Kouvalis through the sales office entrance and up to the second-floor boardroom. There was a wall of windows, a long grey table, some simple chairs, and a whiteboard. It was all very plain. The candidate stomped through the doors in an old black suit, a crooked collar, and a tacky red tie. He was big, nearly as big as Kouvalis had been before losing 180 pounds. “Hey, buddy, nice to meet you,” Ford said, extending a hand. “Listen, I just want to let you know, I’m not going to tolerate
any cancer on my team.” A startled Kouvalis wondered, That’s how you greet people? When Ford was out of earshot, he turned to Ciano. “How much are these guys into us for, and when are we getting paid?”

Next, Kouvalis met the brother, who was a slicker, thinner version of Ford. The team was small, maybe ten people. Most didn’t seem to have much political expertise. As far as Kouvalis could tell, the majority were just friends of the family. After some obligatory go-team sabre-rattling, Kouvalis got down to business. Where were they with fundraising? What policies were they promoting? He was greeted with blank stares.

Looking back at that first meeting still makes Kouvalis chuckle. “We were there to talk about the campaign and what it would be like. They were talking about door-knocking. They were talking about the lefties and the socialists, the Republican Party and the Tea Party, and their friends in the States who gave them advice. And I was trying to understand the policies.”

Despite the rhetoric and shabby suit, Kouvalis liked Ford. They had a lot in common, especially politically. Ford wanted to make the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service, because two years earlier chaos had reigned when the union went on strike. He wanted to cut the size of council in half, because there were forty-four municipal wards and only twenty-two provincial ridings. It would save millions. Ford said the size and cost of the public sector had exploded under Mayor Miller, who was a lefty-socialist who cared only about downtown Toronto. Ford wanted to cut the waste at City Hall.

Kouvalis bought the message, but he wasn’t sure how they could win. “They just didn’t strike me as normal political candidate types,” he said. “I didn’t realize, at that moment, that that’s
exactly the campaign we were going to be running: the antiestablishment campaign.”

THE CAMPAIGN THAT
Kouvalis and Ciano inherited on April 1, 2010, wasn’t really a campaign. Several people involved at the time described it to me as “a train wreck.” The Fords had done little more than register a website, make a bunch of T-shirts, and print a few hundred “Ford for Mayor” placards. There was no policy. No platform. No budget. No message. No fundraising strategy. No battle plan. And no real understanding about why that was a problem.

Kouvalis and Ciano needed a team. They recruited a twenty-four-year-old keener named Fraser Macdonald to handle communications. After graduating from Queen’s University, Macdonald had gone to work with Ciano at the Manning Centre, a conservative think tank founded by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning. Macdonald was ambitious, smart, and willing to work for peanuts, which is what the Fords were willing to pay.

Mark Towhey was one of the original staffers who had tangible experience. Towhey, a former infantry captain who had moved into the private sector at a crisis management consulting firm, was a long-time staple in Etobicoke conservative circles. Kouvalis and Ciano put him in charge of policy.

Roman Gawur, another Etobicoke conservative, was also assigned to help with policy. His wife and daughter signed up too. Liz ran the office, and young Stephanie became Kouvalis’s assistant. Gawur was eventually put in charge of sifting through all the councillor candidates in every ward, pulling out those who
would be most likely to vote with Ford. Then they would endorse them, sometimes helping out with signs and strategy. The Fords were essentially trying to put together a slate of like-minded councillors to get around the fact that the mayor had only one vote. It was a new concept in Toronto municipal elections.

Rounding out the early talent was data analyst Mitch Wexler, a political veteran who’d been a Queen’s Park staffer during the Mike Harris government and had a résumé stacked with federal, provincial, and municipal campaign experience. As a member of Team Ford, Wexler was to build a voter database. Ford had spent a decade telling people to call him personally if they ever needed anything. And they did. At the end of each day, Ford would get a sheet of blank printer paper and write down every missed call. After returning each one, he’d toss it in a cardboard box. When that box filled up, it would get stashed in a corner. Kouvalis shipped four of these fifteen-pound boxes to his call centre in Windsor, and one of his employees spent two weeks punching the numbers into a spreadsheet. Wexler’s job was to extract the value from that gold mine. He logged the numbers into a telemarketing program, and through automated phone polls he built a profile of each voter. If the election were held tomorrow, would they vote for Rob Ford? If yes, did they want a lawn sign? How about volunteering? Perhaps a donation? It could all be done at the push of a button.

Kouvalis and Ciano tackled the organizational charts. The campaign needed a fundraising arm, a communications arm, and a leadership structure. They needed a platform. Kouvalis looked to the voter data. People were unhappy. Transit was one of the biggest issues, and several of Ford’s competitors had honed in on it, thinking it a vote-winner. Kouvalis saw something different.
He saw a common theme in the issues. Complaints about unions, potholes, high taxes, congestion, those fancy espresso machines, all suggested one thing: frustration with the way the city wasted money on frills. “The gravy train” was a term Ford had used as a councillor to symbolize this waste, and it resonated with focus groups. It meant something to everyone. There were far more votes to be won by stopping the gravy train than by fixing transit. It would be victory by a thousand cuts.

“Rob won for all sorts of reasons, but this was really important,” said Stefano Pileggi, the Ford campaign’s fundraising manager. “Nick read the data right where the other campaigns didn’t.”

Avoiding the transit issue—besides the occasional rant about ripping up streetcar tracks—had another benefit. Ford did not do well in intellectual debates. That wasn’t his forte. He was the dark horse, the everyman’s man. He wasn’t going to talk down to you, or pull that politician’s thing of confusing you with stuff like “monetizing assets” or “revenue tools.” Straight talk was part of his brand.

The campaign crafted a simple three-point platform. Rob Ford would “stop the waste” by halving the size of council from forty-four seats to twenty-two and slashing councillors’ expense accounts. He would “make Toronto a better place to live” by contracting out garbage collection, hiring more police officers, improving customer service at City Hall, and making it illegal for transit workers to strike. Finally, he would “cut unnecessary taxes” by abolishing David Miller’s land transfer tax and the vehicle registration tax.

With a framework in place, the next challenge was their candidate.

Ford came with baggage. His ten years in public life had produced an arsenal of attack ad material. The trick was figuring out a way to neutralize his past. “We knew the mainstream media was going to question him harshly. We had to turn it around,” Macdonald said. First, Kouvalis and Ciano sat their candidate down for a grilling. Was there anything else about him they needed to know? Any skeletons the campaign should prepare for? Ford was adamant: absolutely not. So the team built a strategy to deal with what was already out there. They felt that all of it—the domestic assault charge, the incident at the Maple Leafs game, the AIDS comment, the comment that “Oriental people work like dogs”—was manageable. If questions came up, Ford would reiterate that he never claimed to be perfect, then turn the conversation back to the gravy train. In fact, no matter what was being asked, Ford’s answer was “gravy train.”

And the best way to handle unwanted questions from reporters? Avoid the reporters! Ford’s team devised a media strategy that sidestepped big news outlets. Kouvalis and Ciano were among the first to use phone-in town-hall forums in a major Canadian election. This emerging technology, popularized in the United States, allowed candidates to take questions from—and speak directly to—thousands of voters all at once, away from the glare of the media. For an unpredictable candidate like Ford, it was an invaluable secret weapon. Campaign staff got to screen which questions made it through to the candidate. Even when they tossed him a curveball—and it was a good place for Ford to practise answering the tough ones—the odds of a reporter being on the line to hear a stumble were slim.

Ford’s team started working on the candidate’s publicspeaking skills. He needed to sound less angry, more in control
and reasoned, to show voters he was a leader, not a critic in opposition. His staff gave him talking points to memorize, then techniques to redirect questions back to those key messages. In the safety of a boardroom, Ford did well. But in real-life interviews, he was still easily knocked off script. Sometimes with embarrassing consequences.

Three weeks into the campaign, in a
Toronto Sun
interview, Ford was asked about the domestic assault incident with his wife. “I’m glad you asked me about that,” he told columnist Michele Mandel. “I came home one night. She was drunk, and she said, ‘If you fucking touch the kids, I’ll call the cops and say you hit me.’ … I have never laid a hand on a woman in my life.” Mandel asked if Ford had ever considered divorce. “I don’t bail on people who make mistakes. I’ve been married 10 years. Is it perfect? No, but we have two beautiful kids … and she supports me.”

A senior campaign staffer phoned Ford the morning the
Sun
profile appeared. “We need to think about what kind of information we share with the media. If somebody asks you about private stuff, asks about your family, just say, ‘I’ve said what I’m going to say on that,’” the staffer told him. To the relief of the campaign, there was zero reaction to the story.

Ford had never before been politically coached. He and his family bridled at the control. Macdonald would write speeches that Ford wouldn’t read. Doug Ford spent money without asking. He showed up one morning in a giant Winnebago—the Fordmobile—slathered in campaign decals.

The brothers, for their part, struggled with the concept of a city-wide campaign. They knew how to run a campaign in Ward 2 Etobicoke North, which had about 55,000 residents, and to an extent Etobicoke Centre—the provincial riding where Doug
Ford Sr. was forced out in the nomination process in 1999— with its population of about 111,000. But a mayoral bid was an entirely different beast. No political candidate in Canada, at any level, had to win more individual votes than a candidate running for mayor of Toronto. At the provincial and federal levels, people voted once in their own riding for a local member of parliament. In the 2008 federal election, for example, only 38,548 people voted directly for the prime minister of Canada. No one outside of Stephen Harper’s Calgary Southwest electoral district even saw Harper’s name on a ballot. Premiers and the prime minister were determined based on which party won the most seats.

For this reason, a mayoral race in Toronto was much more like an American gubernatorial or senate race, where voters elected individuals, not parties. And in Toronto, there were 1.5 million votes up for grabs. Yet in the 2010 municipal election, the Fords kept trying to organize door-knocking blitzes, as if they were still campaigning in a small ward race.

“It would help with the area in terms of visibility, but not the bigger goal we were trying to achieve,” Wexler said. Worse, the Fords would plan time-consuming canvassing missions without consulting staff. This caused last-minute scrambling and stretched resources, and resulted in higher-priority events getting sidelined.

At one point, staff called in Ford’s mother, Diane. She was the only one who could get through to him. According to someone in the room, she turned to her youngest son and said, “You’re being ridiculous. Listen to these people, they know what they’re doing.”

Ford was learning fast, but brother Doug was still interfering. He would often gripe about not being included on the
campaign’s press releases, “because people are voting for the Ford family brand and the Ford brand is not just Rob.” (A few months later, Doug Ford announced that he too would be on the ballot, vying for his brother’s vacated Ward 2 seat.)

The campaign antics were too much for Ciano. He quit in May. Kouvalis would steer the ship solo.

NICK KOUVALIS HAS A LOT
of enemies. He’s built a career in business and in politics with a win-at-all-cost mantra. Standing six feet two with broad shoulders, Kouvalis cuts an imposing figure, although it would be much more intimidating if he didn’t always slouch. He’s Greek, with olive skin, jet black hair, which he keeps short, and a perfectly manicured goatee. Always well dressed, he takes pride in his appearance, because before Kouvalis became the shrewd strategizer behind Rob Ford, he was a poor fat kid growing up in public housing in Windsor, Ontario.