Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (37 page)

Crack didn’t move the needle.

Now, approval rating is not the same thing as voting intention. But it’s also not something to dismiss out of hand.

Polls suggest that Ford Nation—the mayor’s rock-solid base, who would vote for him no matter what—makes up about 20 percent of Toronto’s electorate. What the approval rating tells us is that another 20 percent, at the very least, support his political agenda. If Ford plays it straight until election day, if he can persuade voters that he has actually had a “come-to-Jesus moment,” as he claimed to the CBC in November 2013, I believe he can bring these people on side. And maybe others too.

In the next election, Ford will once again be running as an underdog. And that could help him. A weakened Ford means more competition. In a crowded field, someone could win with less than 40 percent of the vote.

If Ford can convince voters that his personal problems don’t change the fact that he’s still the best person to be watching their money, I think it’s entirely conceivable that he could win back enough support.

The reality is, the mayor’s record boils down to a not-so-bad sound bite. In 2010 Ford talked a lot about general goals, such as slashing spending, cutting taxes, and making Toronto a better place to live. These are difficult things to measure in terms of success or failure. When it came to the quantifiable specifics, Ford kept it short and he’s delivered on a lot of them.

He promised to cut office expense accounts. Contract out garbage collection. Make the TTC an essential service to prohibit
strikes. And rescind two unpopular taxes for home buyers and car owners. Ford can claim “promise kept” on all of these, except for one of the taxes, which he’d vowed to partially reduce in the 2014 budget year. Now that his power has been taken away, Ford can reasonably claim he would have done this too, had it not been for an “undemocratic” coup by council, as the Ford brothers have described it.

Ford has not, as he claims, saved Toronto taxpayers “a billion dollars.” But he can legitimately take credit for wrestling spending into submission. On Ford’s watch, the city’s gross operating budget has stayed more or less the same, increasing from $9.38 billion in 2011 to $9.43 billion in 2013. The non-partisan city manager, Joe Pennachetti, has said Ford has legitimately saved about four hundred million dollars.

Late in his mayoral campaign, Ford added “subways, subways, subways” to his platform. It was a gamble that he stood by throughout his term, and it paid off. In September 2013, the federal government agreed to contribute a portion of the cost to extend a subway line into Scarborough. With the added financial support, city council got behind the subway plan, despite having rejected it earlier on. Whether a subway gets built or not, highly populated Scarborough knows Ford championed the issue when no one else would. And as a bonus, now that Ford is marginalized at council, he can distance himself from any local tax increase needed to make the subway happen.

Finally, there is the mayor’s crowning achievement, something even his critics concede was a major accomplishment: his administration’s contract negotiations with the unions. The 2008–2009 recession tested public patience with public-sector unions in
Canada and abroad. Ford took on labour and won. City staff say the collective agreements negotiated with workers will save $139 million over four years.

If it hadn’t been for the crack story and drinking allegations, it’s hard to imagine a situation where Ford couldn’t have won re-election on that record. And I still believe that there are many voters in Toronto whose primary concern when selecting a mayor is the impact that person will have on their property tax bill. As right-wing pundit Ezra Levant said on Sun News Network the night city council stripped Ford of his power, “He’s run the city well despite his private life.… Ford is a deeply flawed man, but I’d take him drunk over his left-wing predecessor sober.”

Levant said Ford offends the “fancy people,” the folk who live downtown, enjoy the gay pride parade, and support bike lanes. Levant was stoking the urban–suburban rift that got Ford elected in the first place. That divide hasn’t gotten any better since 2010.

In fact, little has changed since amalgamation. Back in 1997, when the provincial government led by Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris decided to dissolve the six municipalities in and around Toronto and resurrect them as one giant city of 2.3 million, six mayors were left eyeing one job. In the end, it was North York’s Mel Lastman, an outspoken populist right-winger, against old Toronto’s Barbara Hall, a theatre-loving former lawyer and New Democrat. Lastman campaigned on a businesslike approach to government and a property tax freeze. Hall promised to protect the environment, promote business, and help neighbourhoods “flourish” after amalgamation. She won the core: Toronto, East York, York. He won the much more populous suburbs: Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough. So Lastman became mayor.

In the alternative weekly
NOW
magazine, former Toronto mayor John Sewell, a fervent progressive, wrote that Barbara Hall had done “well in the older cities of Toronto, York and East York where there is a strong democratic tradition that rewards those who respect the complexity of city life. But in the single-use suburbs which have been planned to emphasize blandness, Lastman’s offer of stupid certainty—can you believe he actually suggested a 10-year tax freeze?—won the day.”

Of the mood in the city after Lastman’s victory, the
Toronto Star
’s Royson James wrote, “The air went out of Toronto’s balloon last Monday night. The old Toronto, that is. The one dominated by left-leaning politicians, artists, journalists and the university-centred crowd. Their hip, theatre-loving mayor Barbara Hall was handily defeated by a brash millionaire from the suburbs and, oh no, the world will never be the same again.”

Sound familiar?

That’s not to say that an old City of Toronto candidate can’t win the mayoralty. Certainly, David Miller was able to overcome the suburban hurdle. He did this, partly, by running as a populist, vowing to sweep out corruption in the wake of the MFP scandal, rather than as a hardcore progressive. But it’s certainly more challenging for a left-winger in the current climate.

Darrell Bricker, the global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, would agree with me. In their book
The Big Shift
, Bricker and John Ibbitson, a political correspondent with
The Globe and Mail
, argue that Canada as a whole is poised for a lengthy period of conservative rule. The reason? New Canadians. Since 2006, Canada has had the fastest-growing population of all the G8 countries, and immigration is responsible for two-thirds of it.
And the majority of these people are moving into major metropolises, such as Toronto and Vancouver.
The Big Shift
argues that immigrants find they have more in common with those on the right in this country. They tend to be more religious, socially conservative, and averse to debt. These people are “strivers,” who dream of working hard to own a home in a safe neighbourhood. On the other side there are the “creatives,” who are more concerned about “community supports, the environment and international engagement.”

The Big Shift
concentrates on national politics, but Bricker believes the concept also applies to Toronto. “The way that I think the elites in Toronto have treated the likes of Rob Ford— as though it’s almost an aberration, that it was a specific creation of a very unique political circumstance and it will never be replicated—I think that’s wrong,” he told me. “Leaving aside all the social pathologies of the Ford administration, the agenda of privatization, lower taxes, more questioning of unionization in terms of city staff—somebody running on that agenda will have a very good chance of winning.”

So will that somebody be Ford, or a fiscal conservative like Karen Stintz, John Tory, or even Denzil Minnan-Wong? I think the polls show that Ford still has a shot.

Throughout his term, the mayor has enjoyed continuing strong support in the old boroughs. Even by November 2013, when the entire world was reporting on Toronto’s “crack mayor,” an Ipsos poll showed that 49 percent of people in Scarborough, 45 percent of people in Etobicoke, and 43 percent of people in North York approved of the job he was doing. Considering what he’d been through, those were pretty remarkable numbers. And they’re only going to go up if he keeps his nose clean.

When it comes down to it, Rob Ford’s political obituary has been rewritten countless times through the years. Yet, it’s never run. The man has used up all nine lives and then some, and still he endures. Now, he’s a global celebrity. A rock star who gets mobbed everywhere he goes. With his reputation in supposed tatters, he can haul out novelty bobble-heads of himself and people will line up for hours to pay for one. In normal times, admitting to smoking crack cocaine, being exposed as a compulsive liar, and getting caught up in two massive police investigations into guns, gangs, and drugs would spell the end of a political career. But these are Rob Ford times. They are not normal.

Despite everything, the mayor has, by and large, lived up to his election promises. If Ford does in fact follow through with his promise to sober up, lose weight, and get to work, how many voters could be won over by that kind of redemption story?

But suppose Rob Ford runs and loses in 2014. If history is any indication, that won’t be the last of him or his family. For them, retreat is defeat, and the Fords won’t quit. Their ambition may seem disconnected from reality—at the climax of Ford’s fall from grace, he told Fox News, “Yes, one day I do want to run for prime minister,” and on AM640 he said that Doug Ford “will be premier [of Ontario] one day”—but that does not appear to lessen its force. And if by chance something does happen that would remove Rob Ford from contention, the Ford family has in Doug another member ready and willing to pick up the torch. The notion that a Ford ought to lead, that another Ford will be ready to step in and assume the family’s rightful place at the helm of government, seems obvious to them.

They are, after all—according to them—the Canadian Kennedys. Were the Kennedys not also dogged by drugs,
drinking, and scandal? Why should the Fords not get a pass the same way they did? (Ezra Levant actually made this argument on Sun News.) But of course the Fords are no Kennedys. The Kennedys were flawed, yes, but they were also brilliant leaders who were instrumental in the civil rights movement, championing education reform and health care. The Kennedys’ personal issues did not prevent them from accomplishing great things that made their country a better, more inclusive place to live.

The Fords’ victories are neither grand nor inspiring. And after a term in power they have yet to produce a vision of what Toronto ought to be. Only what it shouldn’t be. What the last mayoral election revealed is that, in Toronto’s fractured political landscape, that’s enough to get elected.

At 8:30 A
.M.
on January 2, 2014, Rob Ford filed his nomination papers. He’d arrived half an hour early to make sure he was first in line to see the city clerk. “Ford More Years,” he said, debuting his campaign slogan while Doug looked on from the side. Doug Ford later told reporters he wouldn’t be running for city council again, but that he was “eyeing” a provincial seat. In the meantime, he’d be running his brother’s re-election bid.

To kick off his campaign, Rob Ford gave a short statement to reporters. “I’ve got the strongest track record, I’ve been the best mayor that this city’s ever had. My record speaks for itself.”

NOTES

In writing this book, I relied on close to two thousand hours of interviews that I conducted over the four years I’ve been covering City Hall. I interviewed hundreds of individuals: people in politics and law enforcement; friends and family of the Fords; opponents and critics of Rob and Doug Ford; former employees and political staff, including those who worked under Rob Ford as a councillor and others from his time as mayor; and business associates and former classmates. I have consulted thousands of pages of court documents, arrest paperwork, political debate transcripts, and Ford family records when possible, as well as thousands of news stories and television and radio broadcasts. In some cases, I have relied on information from sources who for a variety of reasons did not want their names printed, some because of their close relationship with the Ford family, others out of fear of professional repercussions, and still others who worried about legal implications. Most notably these individuals include two members of the extended Ford family, six former members of Rob Ford’s mayoral staff, two former classmates of the Ford brothers, three members of the Garrison Ball organizing committee, and an associate of Renata Ford’s. Neither
the mayor nor his brother Doug agreed to be interviewed. To Doug Ford, I promised that if he sat down with me I would run an unedited transcript of our conversation. In writing this book—and preparing these notes—I have tried to be as open and transparent as possible about my reporting process and how I know the things I know. It’s also worth noting that allegations contained in search warrant documents connected to Project Brazen 2 have not been proven in court.

PROLOGUE

pg.  5
he didn’t want to talk:
Months after the meeting in the car, the
Star
learned the alleged dealer’s name: Mohamed Siad, aged twenty-seven. “Rob Ford Crack Scandal: Man Who Showed Rob Ford Crack Video Caught Up in Police Raids,”
Toronto Star
, August 2, 2013.

CHAPTER 1:
RESPECT THE TAXPAYER

pg.  7
closing a twenty-five-point gap:
On September 19, 2010, Nanos Research released a poll that showed Rob Ford with 45.8 percent of the decided vote, George Smitherman with 21.3 percent, Joe Pantalone with 16.8 percent, Rocco Rossi with 9.7 percent, and Sarah Thomson with 6.4 percent. By the time voters went to the ballot box a month later, Rossi and Thomson had dropped out.