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Almost exactly two
years after his election as Mayor (see
article November 2010) a November 2012
court found that Rob Ford had violated
the conflict of interest law. The law
provided a penalty of removal from
office and the date of December 10th
was set.
At the time of writing the Mayor
has been granted the right to stay in
office after December 10th
pending his appeal. This mayor has lived
up to my November 2010 expectations of
him. He ran a campaign drawing from the
ultra-conservative US Tea Party movement
which has since withered. Yet he doesn’t
wither! My
only hope was that his fellow
conservatives in Canada might be
embarrassed enough to rein him in. Instead,
he appeared to play a significant single
handed role in preventing the Hudak
conservatives from doing well enough to
win the 2011 Provincial election – his
style reminded Ontarians of the harsh
days of the Harris conservative
government. He
is an embarrassment to many, but not to
enough. As
Marcus Gee noted in the Globe and Mail
30th November: “The
ongoing drama of Rob Ford’s Toronto just
keeps getting richer. On
Monday a judge ousts the mayor of
Canada’s biggest city, making headlines
around the country. On Thursday, the
mayor engages in a shouting match on the
floor of city council. On
Friday, the judge says he can run in a
by-election if his ouster is confirmed
by an appeal court.” As Gee noted
elsewhere in his article, the August
2012 Economist magazine weighed in
describing the city as well as its
government as locked in gridlock. So
Ford’s ability to run council has
crossed the Atlantic! Most
writers felt the way lawyer Clayton Ruby
put it after Ruby won the case against
Ford over the latter’s violation of the
conflict of interest law: He brought it
on himself. Journalists
noted he had flouted the law, openly
setting himself above the law. To me he
presented and presents a sense of
special entitlement and his office is
there to be exploited for his personal
interests. Conservative
politicians experienced during my work
years were not necessarily all bad news. I
was able to do advocacy work with some
conservatives as well as liberals and
NDP.
Ford is different. Yet a number
of conservative writers seem to be
trying to find some good news in mayor
Ford’s two years in office. Margaret
Wente in the Globe on November 27th
managed to identify a few supposedly
good things albeit under a
damning headline “Rob
Ford: Too Stubborn to be Mayor.” Mayor Ford delayed
and tried to kill a perfectly reasonable
transit renewal system worked out near
the end of the term of his predecessor,
mayor Miller. The
“gravy train” which he was elected to
end mysteriously disappeared after his
election. Arguably,
he was elected under false pretensions. Balancing
a budget which, as my 2010 article
notes, was not initially unbalanced is
hardly an accomplishment. The
fact that Ford first cut the city’s auto
tax income out before his heralded work
to balance the budget seems to pass
unnoticed. Some argue that privatizing a
sizable fraction of the city’s waste
collection is an accomplishment. But
that could be a doctrinaire position. A
friend of mine who chairs a condominium
board advised me earlier that the city’s
rates for waste pick-up were the lowest. That
makes me suspicious in a way that our
non-investigative journalists seem not
to be. And I always worry that
privatizing is merely handing an
operation over to one’s business friends
to allow them to profit from it with
little benefit to the city. Some
think Ford’s negotiating with city
workers was well handled – while they
note his is not good at fostering
agreement! After
privatizing a hunk of waste management
with hardly a murmur, and with memories
of the Harris conservatives around, I’m
not too surprised the unions settled
relatively quickly with the Ford
administration. I
suppose that terror tactics might be
considered an accomplishment but I like
to think an outcome is fair all round. Yet as Margaret
Wente’s article title suggests, even
conservatives can now see a bad side to
mayor Ford. She
notes: “He
refuses to be the mayor of all the
people – or even most of the people. If
you’re not on his side, you’re the
enemy. He once said of cyclists, ‘My
heart bleeds for them when I hear
someone gets killed, but it’s their own
fault at the end of the day.’ “Mr.
Ford is a divider, not a uniter. His
head is thick as concrete. Not even his
brother Doug can pound an unwelcome idea
into it. He is impervious to good advice
and oblivious to the line between his
public and his private duties. Only a
blockhead would commandeer a city bus
(in service at the time) to take his
football players home from a game. (No
one will admit the mayor caused this to
be done, but everybody knows it wouldn’t
have happened without him.)” For once I can
resonate with Wente’s thoughts. Not
surprisingly in this case. These flaws
were clear to me in his record in 2010
before Toronto elected him. Now the holiday
season moves towards us and the dust is
settling over the court ruling. Of
course we had repetitions of the routine
Canadian court versus parliament issue -
a political election is somehow more
sacred than a judge’s decision that an
elected official broke a law and pays
the specified cost like anyone else. It
is the more remarkable that this arises
when the elected official is an
independently wealthy divider with a
record of continuous inappropriate
behaviour. The election was about a job
calling for coordinating a city council.
Remarkably, Ford will be allowed to stay
in office pending an appeal in January
2013.
Journalists are even saying he
could win election again if there were
to be a by-election. It
seems his supporters love his ignorant
behaviour, his one syllable words and
his promotion of the fact that he spends
an aweful lot of his time coaching a
junior football team. The usual balance
on CBC news showed someone unhappy with
him and a supporter who said that he had
been good for Etobicoke. Doing good for
Etobicoke is too vague an accomplishment
for me, I doubt there is much beyond the
publicized coaching of a football
team. Rarely
do municipal politicians do things
beyond the odd give away of a mini park
or monument to their area of election. The
suburban “aldermen” when
I ran for office in the 1980s were
mainly in it for themselves. The
then “aldermen” were in insurance
or real estate or business or law firms.
Being alderman exposed them to potential
clients.
Developers gave them donations
and the land those developers held could
then be rezoned giving it a higher value
and ensuring more election contributions
next time.
However, the Mayor of North
York at that time. Mayor Lastman, was an
exception. He benefited but he also
contributed to that city. I
hated his style and his methods, but he
implemented much of the best advice of
the day from city planners and he
brought about a remarkable urban
sub-centre. I
don’t have any glimmer of such a
possibility from Mayor Ford for Toronto.
And
I doubt there is any comparable Ford
legacy for Etobicoke. I
can only hope that reason and the
record will prevail over whatever
little jingle advertisement Mayor Ford
buys
for his next election bid. For
Toronto’s sake it is fortuitous that
an opportunity to remove him may come
sooner rather than later.  |