Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (3 page)

With that announcement, it seemed that the 2010 municipal election was George Smitherman’s to lose.

I’d been on the job two months when Rob Ford, the beefy conservative councillor from Toronto’s suburban west end, announced his candidacy for mayor. Like most people in Toronto, I’d heard—and watched on YouTube several times— Ford’s speech at city council in which he said “Oriental people work like dogs.” I’d read about the Maple Leafs game, when he’d been escorted from the arena by security guards after drunkenly berating a couple in the crowd. And I was the
Toronto Star
police reporter when Ford had been briefly charged with domestic assault. Other than that, I best knew Ford as the councillor to call if I needed an angry quote about a left-leaning policy.

Did I think Rob Ford could be mayor? It seemed like a pipe dream.

The current chief magistrate was a Harvard-educated, thoughtful environmentalist who delighted in developing and debating policy. The contrast between David Miller and Rob Ford was almost comically stark.

At fifty-one, David Miller was tall and fit, with a full head of thick ashy-blond hair. He loved to pontificate in a deep authoritative voice, talking about “city building” and “civic engagement.” To a lot of people, Miller came across as arrogant. He was a proud progressive who fed tax dollars into cycling infrastructure, social programs, and the arts. Miller posed in black leather on the front of Toronto’s premier gay magazine,
fab
, before the city’s annual gay pride festival.

And then there was Ford.

Ford was big. Three-hundred-and-something pounds big. His bulging two-tiered chin pushed outward and upward, jutting out his bottom lip in a way that always made it seem as if he was sneering. Ford was a fanatical right-winger who vehemently opposed community grants, green initiatives, and funding anything cultural. He devoted most of his energy to four issues: slashing office budgets for councillors; battling against community grants; doing away with perks like free food at council meetings; and firing the people in charge of watering the plants in city buildings. “At home, we water our own plants, unless you have a butler or something,” he once told council.

But there was another big difference between David Miller and Rob Ford, and it would cast each in the role of champion for one of Toronto’s two warring factions—the downtowners and the suburbanites.

In 2009, Toronto celebrated its 175th anniversary. We were a city before Canada was a country. But the Toronto we know
today was a drastically different place as recently as 1997. Back then, the region was divided into six municipalities, including the much smaller old City of Toronto, the borough of East York, and four mini-cities: Etobicoke to the west, York, North York, and Scarborough in the east. Each had its own local government with its own mayor, but there was also an overarching regional body to manage issues like policing, which was headed by a chairman. This two-tiered system is how Metropolitan Toronto had been governed for four decades. But in 1997— despite intense public backlash—Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris’s provincial government voted to dissolve the five cities and one borough to form a “megacity” of close to 2.4 million residents as of January 1, 1998. The move was supposed to save money by removing duplication. Why have six finance offices when you could have one? Academics have since concluded that amalgamation was a financial failure. What it did do was drastically alter the political landscape.

Compared with people living outside Toronto’s core, downtown dwellers are more likely to rely on public transit and bicycles than cars, more likely to live in a high-rise than a house, and tend to be more liberal. It’s not surprising that these two groups, urban and suburban, have different expectations of their local government. Someone in a condo is naturally less invested in Toronto’s leaf-collection program than someone from Etobicoke who lives in a house with big trees in the yard. And it only makes sense that that Etobicoke resident cares much less about a multi-million-dollar renovation to a public square in downtown Toronto than someone who lives in a high-rise across the street. This matters at election time, because the residents of the old City of Toronto—which at the time of amalgamation
had just over 650,000 residents—are greatly outnumbered. The suburbs account for three-quarters of Toronto’s current 2.8 million population.

In Rob Ford’s perfect world, a city should have wellmaintained roads free of cyclists, streetcars, and gridlock; running water; working lights; punctual, privately operated garbage collection; a well-staffed police service; and as few taxes as possible. It’s not hard to understand why this philosophy proved popular in Toronto’s suburban neighbourhoods. Why should they subsidize the Toronto International Film Festival, or the National Ballet of Canada, or the Canadian Opera Company when the people actually going to these things, all decked out in their fancy clothes, had money to burn? The downtowners, the original City of Toronto people, could wax poetic about the economic benefits of arts funding—how the return on every dollar could be leveraged to create seventeen additional dollars, how a vibrant cultural sector attracted tourists, packed restaurants, filled hotels, and got people out shopping—but in the suburbs, that all just sounded like elitist malarkey.

Remember, by the summer and fall of 2010, while much of Canada had dug itself out of economic recession, Toronto had not. Many were still out of work and scared. Unemployment was at 10.36 percent, well above the national average of 8 percent. Bankruptcies in and around Toronto were nearly triple the rate elsewhere in Canada. So when Rob Ford vowed to cut taxes without reducing services, by ending the “gravy train,” people wanted to believe him. And why not? He had been beating that drum his entire career. “Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” he used to say.

Ford’s colleagues might have regarded him as an inarticulate
bumbler who was always losing his temper, but the people who lived in his ward adored him. They loved his crusade against spending. Sure, weighed against a nine-billion-dollar operating budget, a free dinner seemed like small potatoes, but if councillors were wasting money where people could see it, what were they doing behind closed doors? Most significantly, Ford’s constituents loved how accessible he was. Ford had a reputation for personally returning residents’ phone calls, listening to their complaints, and then showing up at their door with an entourage of bureaucrats to fix a problem that would otherwise have been strangled in red tape. Councillor Ford was so good at his constituent work that people living outside of his ward started calling. So he began helping them too. It was a practice that vexed other councillors. Eventually some complained to the integrity commissioner about it, which merely strengthened the perception in some parts of Toronto that hard-working Ford was the only sane person in office. Over his ten years on council, one phone call at a time, Ford built his base of support, a group that has come to be known as Ford Nation. They’re fiercely loyal, standing by their man through every storm.

And there have been many storms to weather. There was the time in 2002 when councillors heard him call an Italian colleague a “Gino boy.” In 2005, in a disagreement about potholes, he told a councillor she was “a waste of skin.” When Ford opposed spending $1.5 million on AIDS prevention, he rationalized, “If you’re not doing needles and you’re not gay, you won’t get AIDS, probably.” Then in 2006 Ford was dragged out of that Toronto Maple Leafs game by security guards after unleashing a drunken diatribe on a couple sitting nearby. It started when the man asked Ford to quiet down. Ford turned to him: “Who the
fuck do you think you are? … Are you a fucking teacher?” Then he looked to the man’s wife. “Do you want your little wife to go over to Iran and get raped and shot?” When reporters followed up, Ford initially claimed he wasn’t even at the game, apparently forgetting he’d been handing out his City Hall business cards. (This would become Ford’s play of choice in a crisis: lie and deny until someone can provide physical proof.) Most seriously, in 2008, Ford was arrested for domestic assault and uttering a death threat against his wife. The charge was dropped due to inconsistencies in Renata Ford’s testimony. When the press came knocking, Ford answered the door carrying his three-year-old daughter. He coached her to say “No comment.” That wouldn’t be the last time Ford enlisted the help of his children in times of trouble.

And yet with every scandal, Ford emerged stronger. More human. More relatable.

On March 25, 2010, the longshot Rob Ford declared his candidacy for mayor. Within three weeks, he was in second place. “Rob Ford has reshuffled the deck,” Jodi Shanoff, senior vice-president of polling firm Angus Reid, told the
Star
. “Depending on what he has to say and, frankly, how he deals with the attacks that undoubtedly are coming from Smitherman … those can either expose him for the not-so-serious candidate that the
Toronto Life
crowd takes him to be, or he can rise to the challenge and really galvanize his spot as a serious contender.”

Even as a candidate for mayor, Ford radiated controversy. During his campaign, news surfaced that in 1999 he’d been charged with drunk driving and marijuana possession while on vacation in Florida. When confronted, Ford denied it. But once it was obvious that the reporter had access to at least some of the
arrest paperwork, Ford apologized and claimed he’d forgotten about it. He held a press conference the next day and announced he had indeed been charged—with failing to provide a breath sample. That statement was also untrue—he was convicted of drunk driving—and the newspapers pointed it out. The public’s reaction? Ford got a 10-point bump in the polls. “The phone would not stop ringing that day,” recalls Stefano Pileggi, fundraising manager for the Ford campaign. “People calling in: ‘We don’t care, Rob. We love you!’ It was incredible.”

When the
Toronto Star
revealed that in 2001 Ford had been banned from coaching football at a Toronto high school following a heated altercation with a player, he supposedly raised close to twenty-five thousand dollars overnight in campaign donations. When Ford suggested that Toronto close its doors to immigrants until it could fix its current citizens’ problems, his office was inundated with calls of support, including from immigrants already here. Meanwhile, former frontrunner George Smitherman was blowing it. His campaign stood for nothing. To voters, he came across as angry and entitled. The Smitherman platform seemed to be built on one thing: he wasn’t Rob Ford.

By mid-June, Ford was tied for first. And the momentum continued. He took the lead in August and stayed there until election night. The polls were barely closed before the TV networks announced that Rob Ford would be Toronto’s sixtyfourth mayor. A little over half of the city’s eligible voters had cast a ballot, and 47 percent of them ticked off Ford’s name. The penny-pincher from Etobicoke hadn’t just won, he had crushed the competition. Ford finished with 383,501 votes, nearly 100,000 more than sure-thing Smitherman. Deputy
mayor Joe Pantalone—who had parachuted in as the progressive candidate after Giambrone’s implosion—came in a distant third. Ford won thirty-one of forty-four wards, including every one of the pre-amalgamation suburbs. And while the old City of Toronto electorate stuck with Smitherman, they did it while holding their noses. In fact, Ford had significant support in the land of lattes. The true geographic downtowners went 60 percent Smitherman. But in plenty of old Toronto neighbourhoods, such as Parkdale–High Park, Toronto-Danforth, and Davenport, Ford scooped up more than a third of the vote.

His victory left residents of Toronto’s core stunned. In those first days after the election, the confusion was everywhere. On the streetcar heading to work, in line at Starbucks, at the bank, the flower shop, the grocery store, the pub. The most discombobulated were staggering around the corridors of City Hall. One prominent Toronto politics professor sent me a note of apology, having dismissively brushed off my suggestion a month earlier that Ford would win. It was as if a giant protective bubble containing everyone who lived within fifteen kilometres of the CN Tower had been popped.

What it meant to be a “Torontonian” was no longer clear. Three years later—with Ford known the world over as the mayor whose approval rating stayed unchanged after he admitted to smoking crack cocaine—it was even less apparent.

What follows is the story of Rob Ford’s improbable rise to one of the most powerful jobs in Canada. It’s the story of how the mayor of Toronto found himself ensnared in a scandal so surreal, half of the city couldn’t believe it—a scandal with drugs, lies, an attempted cover-up, and extortion, which captivated the globe for weeks. It’s the story of a complicated family, wealthy
and secretive, with boundless ambition and a sincere belief that its members are destined to lead this country. It’s the story of sibling rivalry, an obsession with loyalty, and the never-ending struggle for a demanding father’s approval.

A public figure’s family life should ideally be private, but in this book it will be impossible to avoid talking about Ford’s family. He is who he is because of them. His political philosophy, his strategy in a crisis, his feelings about money, his compulsion to keep dirty laundry hidden—all can be explored through the lens of a fascinating family dynamic. These seeds were all planted on a quiet leafy street in Etobicoke.

TWO

DOUGIE

LOVED POLITICS

O
ne by one, the four Ford siblings made the trip to the office of Deco Labels & Tags, where Nelson Scharger, a retired Toronto police sergeant, was waiting with a polygraph machine.

It was the last weekend in April 1998, and the family patriarch, Doug Ford Sr., was furious. One of his children had stolen from him. He was sure of it. And now he was going to prove it.

Which of the four, he wasn’t sure, but Doug Sr. suspected it was one of the older two. His daughter, Kathy, then aged thirty-seven, was a heroin user. Randy, thirty-six, had spent years in and out of treatment for substance abuse. For their own good, Doug Sr. periodically cut them off financially. Even in good times, he kept them on a tight allowance. Neither held regular jobs.