Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (9 page)

In January 2001, at one of Ford’s first council meetings, the baby-faced thirty-one-year-old chastised his new colleagues for wasting their office budgets. “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem,” he said, debuting a catchphrase he’d still be using as mayor.

Moments later, he was sparring with left-wing councillor Sandra Bussin after she made a crack about free business cards from a certain family printing company. Ford appeared furious. “If Councillor Bussin ever wants to go out and do what our family did for forty-five years and go out and create jobs which employ a hundred people and meet a payroll every week, she might understand the value of a dollar,” Ford said. “[I was] brought up with the mentality that if I’m driving down the highway one day and I look over and see a Mercedes-Benz, I don’t think the way some people think: ‘Why does he or she have it and why not me?’”

Bussin demanded an apology. Ford refused. And council continued. Later, when the cash-strapped council debated what to do with the decrepit public square in front of City Hall, Ford chimed in, “We have to start today cutting back, not looking for expenditures.… Etobicoke people don’t want tax increases. They want services but they don’t want [us] squandering hard-earned tax dollars!”

By the time he became mayor, Ford had been repeating the same talking points for ten years. Taxes didn’t need to go up. The politicians were wasting your money. Ford argued that he alone could take on the left. He was the one with private sector experience.

And it wasn’t just Ford’s rhetoric that caught the attention of voters. It was the delivery. The rookie councillor didn’t speak his mind, he screamed it, sometimes flailing his arms and banging things, while his face turned redder and redder. His targets were diverse: the size of council, the spend-happy socialists, Toronto’s squeegee kid program, unions, bike lanes, free food at council meetings, free parking passes for councillors, plant-watering in municipal offices. He once argued that money spent building suicide prevention barriers on a bridge would be better used catching child molesters, because child molesters were the main reason people jumped off bridges.

Less than four months into his term, Ford’s rantings inspired a column at the
National Post
by Don Wanagas.

What are the four words that people attending city council meetings most fear to hear these days?

The answer: “Councillor Ford to speak.”

That’s Councillor Ford as in Rob Ford. Young Mr. Ford (Ward 2—Etobicoke North) has only been hanging out at Toronto City Hall for a few months now, but he has already made quite a name for himself. Not for anything he has actually done, mind you. Ford’s claim to fame are the outrageously incoherent speeches he likes to make expounding the supposed virtues of neo-Conservatism.

The tirade that inspired Wanagas’s column was a soliloquy that meandered between bureaucratic red tape, special interest groups, and the Walkerton water crisis. It ended with Councillor Joe Pantalone shouting, “Prozac, get some Prozac!”

Ambitious politicians usually speak with an irritating amount of caution, fearful that a misplaced word could headline a future attack ad. Ford was clearly ambitious, but he didn’t seem interested in following the traditional path to becoming more electable. It was as if he knew that as long as he was consistent, he could be himself. How many times could the press write “Rob Ford said something crazy yesterday” before it looked like they were picking on him?

During his ten years as a city councillor, Ford amassed an extensive archive of politically incorrect quotable quotes which individually could have done in other politicians with their eye on the top job. And he did it during the advent of the YouTube age. In his first year on council, he advocated the environmentally unfriendly position of burning garbage. In 2003, he said, “Homelessness is a cancer. What you’re trying to do is spread the cancer across the city.” In 2003, he flipped out on Toronto Zoo board chair Giorgio Mammoliti, screaming so loudly that the council speaker threatened to have him removed. “You slithering snake!” Ford shouted. “I know he’s a weasel and weasels and snakes belong in the zoo!” He went after his former political opponent and now colleague Councillor Lindsay Luby in 2005, calling her a “waste of skin” and a “lowlife.” Then, in 2007, he suggested that cyclists killed on Toronto’s roads were asking for it. “Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. Not for people on bikes. And, you know, my heart bleeds for them when I hear someone gets killed, but it’s their own fault at the end of the day.” The remark made headlines, but few were surprised. Ford was not known for his sympathy.

When city council was considering a new harm-reduction drug strategy that would give so-called “crack kits” to drug
addicts to help prevent the spread of disease, Ford was harsh in his denunciation. “You’re not helping them, you’re enabling them,” he said. “They’re going to smoke that crack whether you give them those crack pipes or not. They’re going to shoot that heroin whether you give them clean needles or not. If people want a change, it has to come from within.” The Etobicoke councillor added that “tough love” was the only way to deal with drug use.

And then there were the diatribes that veered into homophobic and sometimes racist territory. Of transgendered people, Ford has said, “I don’t understand: is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy?” In 2001, he said it would be “absolutely disgusting” if council helped fund a documentary on gay South Asians. The next year, according to numerous people, Ford was overheard calling Mammoliti a “Gino boy,” though he denied making the slur. In 2003, after a male colleague suggested Ford kiss his butt, the Etobicoke councillor shot back, “I believe in Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Steve.” Most infamously, in 2006, Ford erroneously stated, “If you’re not doing needles and you’re not gay, you won’t get AIDS, probably.” And then, in 2008, while trying to pay a compliment to the work ethic of the Asian community, Ford said, “Those Oriental people work like dogs.… They sleep beside their machines.… The Oriental people, they’re slowly taking over.”

The comments would always make the news, and sometimes Ford would apologize and sometimes not. For the most part, the public was forgiving, even sympathetic, towards the Etobicoke councillor who was always getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing.

Regular rules don’t apply to Ford—which is a good thing, because Ford never cared much for following the rules. He has
been officially reprimanded half a dozen times for violating city policy or council’s Code of Conduct. Most of Ford’s transgressions involve inappropriately leveraging his influence as a councillor—such as when he included his councillor business card in a promotional package for Deco Labels and then distributed the material to members of provincial parliament. But Ford has also been scolded by the integrity commissioner for divulging confidential information about city business on talk radio, wrongly accusing a colleague of unethical practices, and using city resources for personal reasons. On more than one occasion, Ford’s temper nearly got him turfed from the council chamber. And the Etobicoke councillor was frequently in trouble with colleagues—especially right-wingers—for skipping afternoon council meetings to coach a high school football team. In 2001, Ford didn’t show up for a debate about a new recycling plan, and in 2003 he missed a vote about contracting out cleaning services with the Toronto police. His absence caused a tie, which meant the issue was dead. (As a mayoral candidate, Ford would campaign in favour of this very issue, saying it would save five million dollars.)

Councillor Ford was unrepentant.

In 2006, Ford told Toronto columnist Ed Keenan, “I get criticized a lot, because from September and October every day from three o’clock to five o’clock I’m on the football field. And it drives people nuts. They’re like, ‘You’re leaving council to coach football.’ And you know what? I do. I do leave council to coach football for two hours a day and I come right back to council.... My constituents know it, they agree one hundred percent. These kids, it’s unbelievable where they come from. But they’re playing football, they aren’t getting into trouble. A lot of them have
been in and out of jail, a lot of them are in gangs, but they’re athletes. And if you give them an opportunity to play football … then it’s phenomenal, that they go to university. Because I’m very, very strict. If they don’t have a 60 average, they don’t play.”

Even on the football field, Ford was known for causing trouble. Following the 2001 season, Ford was removed from his volunteer position at Newtonbrook Secondary School in North York after a heated altercation with a player after the teen messed up a play. The chemistry on the team “wasn’t great” to begin with, said the school’s former head of physical education, John Giuga, who asked Ford to step aside. Ford was already embroiled in a very public feud with school leadership over which division the boys were in. Ford had wanted his charges to compete at a higher level. In 2002, he started coaching at Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School in Etobicoke, and controversy followed him. Two years after he took over the Don Bosco Eagles, the senior squad was forced to drop out midway through the playoffs because Ford had dressed two ineligible players. Nonetheless, the school kept him on. In November 2012, Ford took his team all the way to the Metro Bowl championship but lost. Six months later, the Toronto District Catholic School Board banned Ford from coaching at any of their schools. The decision wasn’t related to the festering crack cocaine scandal, officials claimed. Rather, it was the result of an investigation launched by the board after Ford went on Sun News and claimed that many of his players came “from gangs” and “broken homes.” This upset many parents and teachers. On previous occasions, Ford had boasted that some of his players would be “dead or in jail” if not for his help.

Oddly enough, it was Ford’s private football foundation—which he created in 2008 to help schools start football teams—that landed him in the most trouble. It all started after amalgamation, when the city had signed a $43-million contract for computer equipment with a company called MFP Financial Services. The costs nearly doubled without council’s authorization, and an inquiry concluded that improper relationships between lobbyists and public officials were partly to blame. In 2004, as part of the fallout from the MFP scandal, Toronto created an “integrity commissioner” position. The commissioner’s job was to police councillors’ conduct, and the newly appointed David Mullan took his job seriously.

Ford first dealt with Mullan’s wrath in 2005, after he tried to market the Deco family business to provincial politicians while highlighting his position as a city councillor. Ford was warned about mixing business with politics, but the message didn’t stick. In November 2009, a member of the public informally complained when they received a letter from Councillor Ford asking for football charity donations accompanied by a Rob Ford fridge magnet, a sticker from Deco, and the councillor’s city business card. The integrity commissioner, now Janet Leiper, gave Ford a warning in December 2009. When the issue arose again in February 2010, she cautioned him once more. Again, he didn’t listen. In May, a Toronto resident filed a formal complaint after receiving a donation request for Ford’s football foundation on city letterhead. An investigation revealed something more troubling than improper use of stationery: Ford was soliciting donations from eleven active lobbyist firms or their clients, seven of which had either lobbied or registered to lobby the Etobicoke councillor.

It was exactly the kind of thing that led to the creation of the integrity commissioner position in the first place. On August 25, 2010, on the advice of Integrity Commissioner Leiper, city council ordered Councillor Ford to repay $3,150 in lobbyist donations. He ignored the demand, an act of defiance that would lead him to a legal precipice and nearly cost him his job as mayor.

THROUGHOUT HIS DECADE
as a councillor, Rob Ford never cared what anyone at City Hall thought of him. Instead, he was out earning the admiration of his constituents. He toured subsidized housing. He gave out his cell phone number to anyone who would take it. For the first time ever, residents could get their local councillor—not someone in their office—on the phone. In most areas of Toronto, a councillor’s assistant would take that call, forward the issue to city staff for investigation, and then the problem would get added to the heavily backlogged capital repair plan. Maybe a bureaucrat would schedule a band-aid solution a few months down the road, but maybe not. “With Rob, they would call, and he’d say, ‘How’s next Thursday,’ then have the guy from public works at your door,” said a staffer from Ford’s council days.

Why city staff went along with this is hard to know. Ford built relationships with some. Others recognized him as a guy who wanted to help. The former Ford staffer quoted above theorized that it might have been a strategic decision for some city bureaucrats. Councillor Ford was clearly ambitious, and he made no secret of the fact that he intended to run for mayor one day. At Toronto City Hall, the Public Service reports to the
city manager, not the mayor. However, the city manager and his deputy managers can all be fired by council. And under usual circumstances, council tends to back the mayor.

Ford Nation was built on those house calls. Through his constituent work as a councillor, Ford spent a decade recruiting volunteers and donors for the 2010 election. Every house he visited, every person he made feel important—whether he addressed their issue or not—became a walking campaign ad, loyal for life.

Soon, news of Ford’s first-class constituent work got around Toronto, and he began getting calls from residents living outside Ward 2 Etobicoke North, to the immense annoyance of other councillors. There had always been an unspoken code to stay off each other’s turf, but Ford didn’t care about that. He helped people in Scarborough and North York and downtown Toronto with the same vigour as he did his own residents. Councillors grumbled and complained. Councillor Karen Stintz recalled the time a resident in her ward had an issue with a neighbour’s property where no bylaws were being violated and nothing could be done about it. Stintz’s office had a file an inch thick on the issue and had spent months trying to find a compromise. “But it was like they wouldn’t accept our answer until Rob Ford said the same thing,” she said. Resentment snowballed. Eventually, a handful of councillors decided they needed to do something about Ford’s meddling. It backfired on them in spectacular fashion.