Photographs by Donald Weber
Originally published on Oct. 12, 2010
Rob Ford leans back in the nook of his Rob-Ford-for-mayor RV and, sphinx-like, fixes his gaze on something at the far end of the universe. He is just back from a fundraiser at the Mandarin buffet, in uptown Toronto, where members of the local Chinese communities feted his coming victory over the forces of “waste” and “socialism” at city hall. (Ford passed on the chicken balls and deep-fried shrimp, dining instead on roast beef and mashed potatoes.) In a couple of hours he will square off against his opponents in a Citytv debate—a perhaps anxious prospect given that Ford, according to polls the front-runner, will be an even larger target than usual. Now, in the dark calm of the RV, he is ruddy-faced, disengaged, not altogether present. Is he gathering himself for the coming TV battle against George Smitherman, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s one-time pit bull and Ford’s closest rival? No, he says in a small voice. “I’m just digesting my food. That’s a lot I ate.”
However improbable it may seem to Toronto’s elites and the reporters who cover local politics, Ford has good reason to expect that Oct. 25 will make him mayor. Polls have him as far as 24 points ahead of Smitherman, whose victory in January seemed a foregone conclusion. (“In the absence of an incumbent, they made me the incumbent,” Smitherman told Maclean’s.) If Ford does win, it will be in spite of a history of almost Borat-sized faux pas and brushes with the law, including a 1999 Florida drunk-driving conviction that first came to light in August. “We all make mistakes,” says Ford, still in the midst of digestion. “It was bad. I was drinking and driving. But a lot of people drink and drive. I got caught.”
His campaign has combined a reckless use of facts—Ford repeats figures again and again that either do not bear scrutiny or are yanked badly out of context—with a message track that even Smitherman admits he’s followed “with a level of discipline that is admirable.” He will put an end to wasteful spending, eliminate government perks, cut taxes and reduce the size of city government—including halving the number of councillors from 44 to 22 and outsourcing garbage collection. He will do all this at the same time as he builds a new subway line. “People do not want streetcars in this city—they want subways,” Ford likes to say, his expression that of a man who has just taken a sip of sour milk. “If you get behind a streetcar—you’re stuck! Enough with the streetcars!”
Ford will, to sum up, “stop the gravy train”—a phrase the allegedly buffoonish former city councillor allegedly vetted with focus groups for maximum effect. Unlikely as it is that a Mayor Ford could ever live up to it, his pledge to return phone calls from Torontonians in need also resonates. “That is the most powerful thing he’s ever said,” remarks a strategist with a rival camp who is visibly pained by his own admiration for the Ford campaign, which he calls one of the most sophisticated ever seen in a Toronto mayoral race—largely due to its use of cheap but highly effective telephone-based voter-identification techniques.
The question of which political puppet master pulled Ford out of the chasm of his past—the joint that Florida police discovered in his back pocket, an assault charge involving his wife Renata, etc., etc. (both charges were later dropped)—and successfully moulded him into a bankable candidate is now a favourite Toronto parlour game. It is Ford’s image that turns his detractors off: he is enormous, uncultured, uncouth and déclassé, a high school football coach who presents more like a schoolyard bully. He sweats. His encounter with former Globe and Mail city hall columnist John Barber, in which Barber apparently calls Ford a “fat f–k” and Ford retaliates with all the high-pitched nasal intensity of an Anglo-Saxon Joe Pesci, has become the stuff of YouTube legend. How, people ask, is this guy the next mayor of Toronto?
Rival camps, where the city’s top political operatives have congealed around more traditional candidates, speak of mysterious Chicago-based Republican consultants, connections with U.S. Tea Party organizers—anything to soften the blow. Those nefarious forces are easier on the ego than what’s apparently the truth: that Ford’s campaign is being run by his brother Doug, Jr., an older, leaner, more polished version of Rob and a candidate for council in his kid brother’s old ward. Or, worse still, that Ford himself, in his bad suits and crude English, has somehow had a hand in transforming himself into a political force. His campaign has worked so well because, whether or not his platform makes sense, his message is clear. It combines anger over minor aggravations like bike lanes and speed bumps with big, simple populist promises: councillors should pay their own way and the city should focus on filling potholes and collecting garbage, leaving the vision thing—outgoing Mayor David Miller’s thing—out.
Ford, meanwhile, has apparently worked tirelessly in the decade since he became a councillor. Though his campaign handlers recognize how unlikely it sounds, they repeat the claim he’s returned 200,000 calls over the past decade, and say Ford stored away those names and numbers in bankers’ boxes. “I’ve seen them,” says Fraser Macdonald, at 24 years old Ford’s deputy communications director. Hand-scrawled on scraps, the backs of envelopes and napkins, those names became the Ford campaign’s nascent database. No wonder that in March, when he launched his campaign, 1,600 supporters turned out. “It came from out of the blue but it came early,” says Smitherman of Ford’s support. “He’s obviously had a strong base right from the get-go.”
Some attribute Ford’s appeal to Tea Party sympathies this side of the Great Lakes, others to recession, others still to Miller’s impotent handling of last year’s garbage strike, in which he is widely believed to have capitulated to a coddled union. Unifying these theories is a sense that city hall has favoured downtown sophisticates over the hoi polloi—a sense that runs particularly deep in largely working-class inner suburbs like Ford’s own west-end Etobicoke stomping grounds.
Taxes have risen: a four per cent property-tax hike last year, new land-transfer and car-registration dues, and such annoying fees as the $133 it costs to buy a new medium garbage bin. Municipal services, meanwhile, appear diminished, particularly for suburbanites who contend the downtown benefits disproportionately from city largesse. For Toronto’s angry motorists, taxpayers, streetcar-abstainers and non-cyclists, Ford’s outward lack of charm is a sort of political catnip—crazy-making but irresistible. “I want change badly, and Ford represents that,” says Patrick Maguire, a 44-year-old teacher who lives in Toronto’s reputedly granola Roncesvalles neighbourhood. “The fact that he scares people is a good thing.”
The interminable road works, endless traffic, plans for an $88-million multi-level hockey arena on Toronto’s waterfront—all of it skews the race toward Ford. “It doesn’t matter what the polls say, quite frankly,” one Toronto councillor who asked for anonymity argued. “If the suburbs come out like they did in 1997 to elect Mel Lastman—and they have not come out since—that’s going to deliver Rob Ford Toronto.” Even something as innocuous as the bicycle has become a kind of subliminal flashpoint. “I think the sense that the current government is anti-roads and cars is what is causing it to seem anti-the-ordinary-person,” says University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss. “The ordinary person in Toronto doesn’t ride a bicycle. And that’s important. The ordinary person drives a car.”
And so it may come as a shock to federal Conservative House leader John Baird that the “Toronto elites” he blames for the long-gun registry may soon see an anti-elitist elected their mayor—one who says charity marathons snarl traffic, so hold them elsewhere; that cyclists can stay safe by staying off the roads; that “Oriental people work like dogs” (“I say that too,” Harry Tsai, of the Taiwanese Canadian Association of Toronto, told Maclean’s amid the pink paper lanterns of the Mandarin buffet); a candidate who says he’s returned 200,000 phone calls in the 10 years he represented Etobicoke North as councillor, but who had only just begun carrying a BlackBerry.
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