Still, Ford’s is a meagre vision for the city. Asked how he sees Toronto in five years, when it is to host the 2015 Pan Am Games, he replies without hesitation: “The city will be spotless. We’re going to make sure it’s clean. And it’s going to be safe. And we’re going to make sure the city’s—um—Toronto’s going to be on the map by the time the Pan Am Games get here, that’s for sure.” It is sometimes unclear whether Ford actually likes Toronto. How would he describe it to people he might meet overseas—in Vienna, in Paris or Buenos Aires? “I wouldn’t tell them to come now,” Ford answers. “But I’d say in a year or two—come, enjoy.
Because right now I can’t say I’m really proud being part of council in Toronto, with all the money being spent and the high taxes. It’s just a dirty city. I sort of feel embarrassed. Maybe I’m a perfectionist. But I don’t like all the graffiti. The dirt. The long grass and weeds. And all that sort of stuff. I hate that stuff. And I know I’m going to get it all cleaned up when I’m mayor.”
Rob Ford runs a meaty hand over the sparse island of hair atop his head, yanks at his collar, tilts his chin up to expose the fleshy skin of his throat, then collects his face in his fingers. He is a collection of ticks. During debates, as his rivals tear one into the other, he stares stony-faced into space or squints into the audience as though into the sun. Often, and especially when attacked, he contemplates the ceiling, his thick fingers interlaced over his great belly, and grins—as his right-of-centre opponent Rocco Rossi put it during one debate, “sitting back like the Cheshire Cat.”
Ford has the physique of the over-the-hill football player he actually is, the spastic physicality of a Jackie Gleason, and a weakness for soft drinks. At a recent debate at York University, as left-leaning candidate and former Miller deputy Joe Pantalone outlined a policy position, Ford stepped away from his podium and strolled up-stage, where Mark Towhey, a Ford policy adviser, appeared on stage to hand him a bottle of Mug Root Beer. When Ford returned and loosened the cap, the bottle foamed and bubbled madly (Ford frowned and dabbed at the bottle with a napkin). “They’re running him on political Prozac,” says Coun. Brian Ashton, who recalls watching Ford during another debate, in Scarborough: “He sat there and he was literally picking the cuticles on his fingernails—to the point one started to bleed. And he was dabbing away the blood. And I thought, ‘Is this what they’ve got him doing? Stay focused, don’t get engaged, don’t lose your temper, stay on message.’ ”
At another debate focused on arts funding, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ford arrived five minutes late and pulled a huge white kerchief from his jacket, mopping his brow. He got laughs when in his opening statement he recalled his short-lived theatre career as a tights-wearing actor in a Grade 13 production of “The Princess and the Pea.” When the audience began hissing, the moderator stepped in to soothe the crowd. “I respect that you’re here,” he told Ford, who despite the hammering remained the most composed of the four candidates and left the barb-throwing to Pantalone, Rossi and Smitherman. “I’m not worried about what my opponents are doing or what they’re saying,” Ford tells Maclean’s. “I’m just focused on my message and making sure I deliver the message as directly as possible.”
That message is unchanging and concrete. When Toronto Star municipal affairs columnist Royson James, a frequent debate panellist, asked Ford about his governance vision for Toronto, Ford launched into a long dissertation on the humble speed bump (his antagonism toward the speed bump is well known: in 2007, Ford went as far as to say they “indirectly kill people” by reducing emergency response times). “I admit I’m not a smooth talker, a polished speaker,” he says. “But a lot of people like that. They see you’re just a normal person. I speak in layman’s terms, I speak in terms that people can understand, and answer the question as directly as I can.” Asked about Smitherman’s debate performance, he says: “He talks and talks and talks but I try and follow him and I just can’t follow him. I can’t make heads or tails what he says sometimes. As soon as you’re a smooth talker, something’s fishy. A lot of people told me.”
Sleek is the antithesis of the Ford campaign. A YouTube video released late last month outlining Ford’s financial plan contained the candidate’s strangely halting monotone, odd jump cuts, and a soundtrack reminiscent of the music SCTV once favoured in its parodies of TV kitsch. As Rossi has it in a line that he’s made part of his debate repertoire, the clip “makes Mr. [Stéphane] Dion’s videographer look like a genius.” Such criticism only seems to endear Ford further to his supporters. “When you insult him, you insult us, as far as I’m concerned,” Jeff Green, a 43-year-old camera operator who is between jobs, told Maclean’s before a debate in North York. “I’ll tell you right now, I’m voting for Rob Ford.”
Like many of his supporters, Green says he backs the former councillor because Ford once returned his call, then guided him through an arcane procedure at city hall—even though Green lives outside his ward. That reputation for customer service has delivered Ford some unlikely allies. Last spring, Peter Genest, owner of Hits and Misses, a punk record shop on the western edge of downtown Toronto, wanted to ask his councillor—Pantalone, as it happens—about a $555 licence he’d been required to buy to deal in second-hand goods.
Genest says Pantalone’s office sat on his query for over a month. When the Toronto Star published a story on Genest’s gripe, the reporter quoted Ford condemning the fee: “If they want to put people out of work it’s a good way of doing it.” Ford followed up with an email and a call to Genest offering further help. Not long ago, Genest took him up on that offer, and says Ford’s office got back to him the next day with a useful contact. “I don’t agree with everything he says,” Genest admits. “But I’ve only lived back in Toronto for 3½ years and his office has helped me out twice.”
Should Ford become Toronto’s mayor, it will be a win foreseen by his father, Doug Sr., a self-made businessman, backbencher in the Mike Harris Tories, and a towering figure in his son’s imagination. “Before he passed away in 2006, he knew I was going to be mayor,” recalls Ford. “He said, ‘You’re what people want.’ ” Doug Ford grew up on the Danforth—then a tough Toronto neighbourhood—without a dad, the youngest of 10 children. He later made his fortune with the Deco Labels & Tags company, which Ford and his two brothers now run. “He had a drive,” says Ford. “He had a desire that he wanted to be successful, nothing was going to stop him.”
That drive is now shared by Rob and Doug Ford, who at the Mandarin buffet fundraiser sit side by side. Left briefly alone, hovering above their plates, they confer in low voices with an almost telepathic sibling ease, never once turning to look at each other. They have gathered into their campaign team an equally conspiratorial group of outsiders, many of them new to the Toronto scene. One, Nick Kouvalis, who lives in Windsor, Ont., and who once led a populist rebellion within the Ontario Progressive Conservatives against John Tory’s leadership, runs the day-to-day operations, and has introduced for the first time in a Toronto mayoral race a technique borrowed from Barack Obama: the so-called “telephone town hall,” which sees a tranche of Toronto blanketed with calls inviting residents to participate in a phone meeting hosted by Ford, who discusses hot-button issues and takes questions; he eventually asks participants to indicate whether they plan to support him by punching a button. The calls have formed the basis of the campaign’s ever-growing database—and of Ford’s state-of-the-art campaign. His rivals have only just begun catching up to the technique.
Ford lumbers back to the table, settles in next to his brother and attacks another plate from the buffet. Watching him, slow moving and barely communicating with his hosts from Toronto’s Chinese communities, it’s still hard to believe his is the campaign to beat. Suddenly, a section of the group stands to say its goodbyes. Doug Ford stands too, but his brother the mayoral candidate keeps eating. Doug jabs him with a thick finger. “Rob! Rob!” he says. “Say goodbye!” And Rob Ford looks up from his plate.
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