Doug Ford speaks to the media outside his mother's Etobicoke home as family members stand behind him on Sept. 12, 2014. Photo: Chris Young/The Canadian Press Where am I? Is this North Korea? Can we expect Dennis Rodman soon to grace Toronto with a visit?
I had intended to purge the shelves of my home office Friday. My paid friend, Pierre, came over to help me. I cranked up Q-107. We were deep into it when my cell rang. It was a volunteer friend, Mary, shrieking about the latest in the city’s mayoralty race.
I turned on the tube and watched, jaw agape, as the news broke, wave after wave of the utter madness that passes for politics now in this city.
Rob Ford, hospitalized with a tumour this week and facing what he admits “could be a battle of my lifetime,” was withdrawing from the mayor’s race. He’s sick and scared, you see; he didn’t say that directly, but that’s what his decision to drop out meant, and fair enough.
But as it turns out, neither he nor anyone else in the family is so sick or so scared that they didn’t didn’t also set in motion the old bait-and-switch, with Rob simultaneously announcing his candidacy for councillor in Ward 2, his home ward, and that he’d asked brother Doug to “finish what we started together,” and that Doug would now carry on in the mayoral race.
Oh, and as well, even as Doug was being registered at the clerk’s office downtown, so was their nephew, Michael Ford, withdrawing as a candidate for the Ward 2 seat to make room for the mayor, and instead throwing his hat into the ring for school trustee in neighbouring Ward 1.
It was as though it was inconceivable that Toronto, like Pyongyang, should manage without a Ford for every citizen. As Kim Jong-un took over as Supreme Leader upon the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, the Eternal General, in 2011, who himself took over the reins of power from his old man, Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, when he died in 1994, so were the Fords digging deep into their gene pool.
On the tube, no kidding, reporters were soon referring to the press conference Doug Ford would be holding that evening at “Mamma Ford’s house.” They might as well have called Diane Ford “Dear Mother,” you know?
For the most part too, they were still using their Serious Voices, the conciliatory ones everyone in the city adopted when Rob Ford fell ill.
Now, this was all appropriate and indeed very decent, when the mayor was still reeling from the news of his tumour and his family was devastated and heartfelt pleas for privacy were being made.
I thought it was a great couple of days for the city, actually, that even in the midst of a ferocious political battle, and even with an electorate that must be at least a tad weary of years of various Ford shenanigans/troubles/brushes with the law, the majority of Torontonians, including political adversaries, took the high road that has been such a rare sight in these parts the last four years. No one was more gracious in this than the current frontrunner in the mayor’s race, John Tory, and Olivia Chow, in third spot by the polls.
But that was all before the Fords dreamed up their Kim-like multi-pronged takeover bid.
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford speaks during the kick off of his re-election campaign at a rally in the city’s north end in this April 17, 2014, file photo. GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/FILES
Who are these people, that faced with the serious illness of one of their own they rally, apparently within hours, to plot and plan and connive? How does that conversation go, I wonder – “Rotten break for you Rob, but now, what will we do about the Ford dynasty?”
And what the heck is this dynasty nonsense anyway? What Ford legacy?
The late Douglas B. Ford, the father of the old mayor and the wannabe new mayor, was a one-term backbench Tory MPP in the long-ago and controversial Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris. Ford, Sr., was not blessing Toronto with future leaders when he gave the world his three sons and a daughter; what he was doing, with Dear Mother of course, was having kids, period.
The news came so fast Friday that many Torontonians were caught so flat-footed they kept on speaking in their hushed tones, when what they ought to have adopted was their WTF voices.
In this regard, good for Tory, who was quick to say flatly that Mayor Doug would not be so different than Mayor Rob, in that both are confrontational and divisive forces.
That’s true, but there’s something likeable about Mayor Rob, for all his flaws; he’s the nice one. Big brother Doug Ford has little of that likeability. I think he’s smarter, probably, but also more ruthless.
The Fords are not interchangeable parts of the same well-oiled machine, and if they are siblings who share an ideology, they are very different characters, and besides, they don’t get to make these decisions. We do.
The single-most most terrifying thing about Doug Ford’s press conference in the gathering dusk outside Dear Mother’s home was when he pointed to the clan standing behind him and said, “The family’s growing.”
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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