Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (16 page)

Jason Hebert and two friends were standing next to the young women when Ford came by. The twenty-six-year-old got in touch with the
Star
and came into the office shortly after. “He stunk like booze. He was definitely drunk.” The photo with the girls made it online, but the media largely left it alone.

“This was the first time anything like this had happened,” said a member of the mayor’s staff. Ford wasn’t supposed to be
by himself that August night. He should have been watching the Ontario varsity football championships at the Rogers Centre with a young aide, but he hadn’t shown up and wasn’t answering his phone. The game was nearly done, so the staffer went home. Then Ford decided to go after all. From then on, the mayor’s office instituted a new rule: the mayor’s designated handler on any given day had to wait at City Hall until 10
P.M.
in case Ford called—even if he’d been MIA.

BY THE END OF AUGUST 2011
—just weeks away from the big showdown at council over service cuts—Rob Ford’s honeymoon with voters was winding down. The public was angry. The mayor had promised he could slash the budget without cutting services. But so far, the core service review had yet to find the gravy. The agenda was unravelling. And tensions were mounting on Team Ford. It was at this fragile time that Doug chose to hijack the limelight.

During a morning interview with CBC Radio’s
Metro Morning
, the mayor’s brother triumphantly announced that he had secretly been developing a plan for Toronto’s eastern waterfront, a plan he had recently revealed to a group of stakeholders. “We had fifteen people in the room, and everyone’s jaw just dropped when they saw it. It is spectacular, just spectacular.” There would be a sleek monorail, a 1.6-million-square-foot megamall, with a Nordstrom and a Bloomingdale’s and a Macy’s department store, a Venice-style hotel that you could sail up to by boat. And overlooking the whole utopia would be a Ferris wheel so big it would put the London Eye to shame.

It turned out to be more of a political Hindenburg.

Doug Ford’s scheme jettisoned an existing plan for Toronto’s eastern shoreline, a plan more than a decade in the making and which had already cost eight hundred million dollars. To handle the project, all three levels of government had joined to form Waterfront Toronto. After years of studying and planning and assessing and surveying, the agency had designed a vibrant mixed-use community, with stores, parks and public spaces, bistros and cafés. It was a slow process for a host of reasons—the soil was contaminated, the area was prone to flooding, and there were a number of parties to please—but the Fords weren’t interested in hearing about it.

The reaction to Doug’s scheme was fierce.

Councillor Jaye Robinson was the first member of the Ford bloc to denounce Doug Ford’s plan, followed by Stintz, Michelle Berardinetti, and John Parker. Councillors’ offices were inundated with calls from angry citizens. In an open letter to the administration, nearly 150 academics, planners, activists, architects, and designers, including the celebrated Richard Florida and Paul Bedford, denounced the scheme as “ill-conceived” and “reckless.” If adopted, it would “result in irrevocable harm to the City, as well as higher costs and further delays.” Even the centrist councillors—who at this point were still trying to avoid public fights—took a stand against it. All this while the administration was supposed to be selling people on its budget.

CUPE Local 79, which represents city employees, seized on the chaos and commissioned one of the biggest polls in Toronto’s history—a telephone survey of thirteen thousand people— to test the public mood. The poll revealed that more than three-quarters of residents wanted their city councillor to “vote in the interests of protecting city services in your community,
even if it conflicts with the wishes of Mayor Ford.” Only 27 percent said they would vote for Rob Ford if an election were held the next day.

By mid-September 2011, the mayor was backtracking on service cuts and Doug Ford gave up on his Ferris wheel.

In November, the mayor pitched a drastically scaled-back budget that hinged on a ten-cent transit fare hike, a modest property tax increase, and savings generated by 2,300 layoffs. The city had pulled in a $154-million surplus in the current year, but Ford still wanted cuts to daycare service, transit, ice times at city rinks, and leaf collection, as well as a few homeless shelter and swimming pool closures. Council wasn’t having it. Centrist leader Josh Colle orchestrated a deal between progressives, independents, and some conservatives that required using a small chunk of the unexpected surplus to save many of the programs Ford wanted cut. He took the deal to his embattled mayor, saying, “You can take it. It can be your win,” but Ford refused.

Colle’s compromise budget passed 23–21.

The Ford brothers voted against it.

It was the beginning of the end in terms of Ford setting the agenda at City Hall. City council pretty much ran the show after the budget coup. The mayor did score one more important victory—albeit with council’s blessing—on the labour front. In early 2012, the Ford administration negotiated new contracts with the public-sector unions that garnered significant concessions around job protection as well as an estimated $139 million in savings.

It would arguably be his greatest achievement as mayor.
From then on, the Ford administration descended into sideshow territory.

I WAS IN MEXICO
covering the Pan American Games when one of the more bizarre events of the Ford mayoralty occurred. It was October 2011. I had been dispatched to Guadalajara for three weeks because Toronto would be the next host city in 2015. I wasn’t there for the sports; I was there to see what it was like during the Pan Ams. The traffic, security, the impact on the local economy, whether people were interested enough to buy tickets. Ford was supposed to visit a few days before the October 30 handover ceremony, when the mayor of Guadalajara would pass the Pan Am Games flag to the mayor of Toronto. At the time I headed for Mexico, Toronto Pan Am organizers confessed to me that they still had no idea if Ford was going to show.

Then, just days before Ford was supposed to leave, news broke that the mayor had called 911 when a comedian from CBC’s
This Hour Has 22 Minutes
—Canada’s version of
The Daily Show
—showed up in his driveway. Actress Mary Walsh, dressed as her alter ego Marg Delahunty in a red warriorprincess costume, accosted the mayor as he was about to get into his van around 9
A.M.

“Ford! It’s me, Marg Delahunty!” the fifty-nine-year-old Walsh shouted in an exaggerated Newfoundland accent. The mayor looked furious. “Can I go into my car, please? Can I go into my car, please?” he said, growing more and more agitated as she touched his arm. “Oh, Mayor Ford, please, I came all the way from Newfoundland to talk to you, honey.” At this point,
Ford got out of the driver’s seat and headed back inside. “One good thing about being stubborn, though, Mayor Ford, is you always know what you’re going to be thinking the next day,” said Walsh. “God love ya! Take care of yourself, now.”

The Marg Delahunty ambush is a well-known, some might say treasured, comedy sketch in Canada. Walsh’s long list of victims includes former Ontario premier Mike Harris, former prime minister Jean Chrétien, Prince Philip, and Governor Sarah Palin. Most have gritted their teeth and played along. Instead, Ford called the police. Later, the mayor claimed he had no idea who Walsh was and that his daughter was afraid, although there’s no indication the girl was outside at the time.

The story took a sinister twist later in the week. The CBC reported that multiple sources had told them the mayor lost his temper on the phone to the 911 dispatcher when he felt they weren’t moving fast enough. According to the CBC, Ford said, “You … bitches! Don’t you fucking know? I’m Rob fucking Ford, the mayor of this city!” Ford categorically denied using the slur or leveraging his title, but he admitted to using “the F-word.” The fiasco inspired American TV host Keith Olbermann to feature Ford on the “Worst Persons” segment of his show. The police refused to release the tape, but both Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner Chris Lewis said they had listened to the recording and that the CBC report was inaccurate. (Adrienne Batra, the mayor’s press secretary at the time, told me after she’d left his office that “[Ford] absolutely doesn’t say [‘bitches’ or ‘Rob fucking Ford’]. I promise.”)

I made some calls from Mexico. The source I finally got a hold of didn’t know anything about the tape, but he had another
tip—one that would ultimately shape my reporting for the next two years. “From what I hear, that wasn’t the only time 911 got called from that address that day.” Rumour was, there had been a domestic dispute between Ford and Renata. And it wasn’t the first. Confirming something so sensitive from Mexico was going to be impossible. It would have to wait until I was back.

Meanwhile, with controversy brewing in Toronto, Ford decided to make the trip south, and unusually he brought Renata with him, although she mostly stayed at the hotel. One night, Ford and I ended up at the same party. It wasn’t the right moment to ask about a domestic dispute. “Hi, Mayor Ford!” I said. “We should get a photo.” He looked over and smiled warmly. “Sure.” I realized he had no idea who I was. “Great! Just to confirm, it’s me, Robyn Doolittle, from the
Star
.” His eyes got wide and he shook his head. “Oh, nah, sorry.” I handed my camera to someone standing nearby. “No, no, no,” I said. “We’re doing this.” He relented, and we both flashed big grins. It’s a lovely photo. I sent both the mayor and Doug a copy. For the next year, Doug referred to me as Rob’s “girlfriend.”

At the handover ceremony in Guadalajara, Ford conducted himself like the mayor of a major North American city. Organizers told me he was nervous about getting up in front of fifty thousand screaming people, but when the Canadian national anthem started to play, he sang along and smiled. In a sharp black suit and fresh haircut, he beamed as Guadalajara’s Mayor Jorge Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz handed him the Pan Am flag.

As soon as my plane touched down in Toronto, I got to work on the domestic call story. I contacted sources in police and emergency services, as well as some folks in Ford’s
neighbourhood. The trick would be catching the next incident shortly after it happened.

I got my break at 8
P.M.
on Christmas Day. I was at my parents’ place three hours outside of the city.

“Robyn?” It was a police source I had gotten to know during my crime reporting days, and he was whispering.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Look, I can’t talk. I just wanted to let you know there was another domestic dispute at Ford’s place this morning. Apparently, he was drunk and taking the kids to the airport to go to Florida or something. The wife’s parents phoned it in.”

“Any idea what time?”

“Sometime between 4 and 5
A.M.
I gotta go.”

There was no sense calling the police division for comment. All they’d do is tell headquarters that the media was asking questions. None of my people were going to talk over the phone. I’d head back to the city early the next day and start chasing it then.

CANADIANS MIGHT NOT REALIZE IT,
but they live in one of the more secretive countries in the developed world. In 2013, Canada ranked fifty-sixth out of ninety-five countries in an annual transparency report card produced by the Centre for Law and Democracy. The Halifax-based human rights organization helped develop an internationally respected method to assess countries with “right-to-information” laws. In the inaugural ranking, Canada came in at forty-second out of eighty-nine countries. We’re now in the bottom half, below Mongolia, Russia, and Romania. So what does that have to do with City Hall reporting? When it comes to Toronto’s mayor, rumours
and gossip are as common as football references. The problem is, you can’t separate fact from fiction under our archaic access-to-information laws.

“Canada is utterly behind. It’s not because of anything we’re doing, it’s because other countries are getting better,” said Toby Mendel, the centre’s executive director. And at this rate, he added, we will continue to slip.

In 1983, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to adopt access-to-information legislation (the first being Sweden in 1766) under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The provinces followed suit in subsequent years, and municipal freedom-of-information laws were crafted by the provinces. With a five-dollar cheque, Canadians were suddenly able to demand that public institutions release internal documents such as budgets, letters, memos, and staff reports. But over the years, we fell behind. There are huge gaps in the Canadian system. The requests take too long to process, and bureaucrats have too many excuses to deny access.

This lack of transparency has made it extraordinarily difficult for journalists to confirm basic information about public figures like Rob Ford. Even the mayor’s schedule, something routinely released by previous mayors, must be obtained under a freedom-of-information request. And what does get released is largely incomplete. Huge chunks are marked “private.” Ford himself has conceded that these schedules are only “a tidbit of what’s really going on.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Canadian access laws don’t cover the judicial system. Most paperwork filed in Ontario’s court system, such as transcripts and case “information”— essentially a summary of the allegations, court appearances,
and any outcomes—is supposed to be public. In reality, it’s not that simple.

As the law stands, someone trying to access a public document in our publicly funded judicial system is at the mercy of whatever court clerk happens to be on duty. While records filed in court are supposed to be accessible, you can only get them if you have exact details about the case, such as the incident date, the charges, and the accused’s birthday. For a reporter following up on a lead, this is information you are likely hoping to learn from the document you’re requesting. To recap this absurd situation: to get the paperwork, you need to know information that can only be learned from the paperwork. It’s a Catch-22.