The salvation of Rob Ford

The Rob Ford controversy is following a traditional pattern, but is now set to produce some surprises. It seemed to begin as the mayor's critics, and not everyone has to like his full-figured, Archie Bunker-style, leaped with joy at suggestions that the mayor might be a crack cocaine-user (like, on an occasional basis, a very large number of other people). Then, as happens when a mob composed of the ideological left and the vast mass of those who enjoy (no matter how tawdry or parochial the details) watching the mighty fall begin to see a catastrophic career failure in progress, the frenzy took hold. Everything is then invoked as proof of ignobility, unfitness for a place of public trust, and moral turpitude.

Thus, I heard on one radio station while in my car, a commentator virtually raving about "fiscal irresponsibility." I assumed that some new enormity had been unearthed, that the mayor was hurling money out of the windows, presumably in the direction of cronies. Eventually, it turned out to be a matter of asking one of his aides to do a few innocuous personal favours for him. This is what go-fors do, in the public and private sector, and what would be irresponsible, fiscally and otherwise, would be the holder of a high office having to do everything, no matter how mundane, himself. To judge from reports, this mayor doesn't even avail himself of a chauffeur, which in my observations is a first for a Toronto mayor going back to Allan Lamport. Was it fiscally irresponsible for John Sewell or David Miller to have a chauffeur? I would have thought not, though they had other shortcomings.

There were endless gratuitous reflections on every aspect of the mayor's taste, and the usual outpourings of alarm that Rob Ford was a negative or even a degrading influence on the young people of Toronto. It is not the role of the mayor of Toronto to be a pied piper of the young toward a virtuous life, instead, he ought to ensure public security and sanitation and zone the city and assist in improving public transit. Not since New York's Fiorello H. La Guardia read the comic pages over the radio to the children of that city during a newspaper strike has there been such a connection between the chief occupant of city hall and the contentment, not to say mental hygiene, of the mayor's voters' children.

In such cases, the rules and practices are bent or ignored to add to the momentum of the mighty push to evict the targeted individual from his position. Thus did the chief of Toronto's generally very good police force announce that he could not comment on the evidence of the mayor's possible wrongdoing, but that the reflections of the rabidly hostile and muck-inventing, raking and throwing Toronto Star were accurate and he, the chief, Bill Blair, was "as a citizen, disappointed in the mayor." He is paid and sworn to uphold public security. "As a citizen," in a press conference he called as chief of police, he can keep such reflections to himself. Nor should the opinions or fabrications of the Toronto Star and its febrile and compulsively abrasive editor and publisher be given the imprimatur of the police department, as if the chief were the Prince of Wales selling the fact that he bought his handkerchiefs at Harrods.

And it is not clear by what perversion of justice a judge is selectively making scraps of "evidence" public, while redacted chunks of a 500-page police report that does not seem to contain anything that justifies a charge, are receiving attention like film of death camps at the Nuremberg Trials. We seem to have reached the turning: those who should not have become so vocal do not seem able to put up or shut up, and the mayor, who is not, for many people, a style-setter, appears to be competent to continue in the task which he was elected to perform. Those who disapprove of him, but are wary of the heavy numbers of his supporters, take refuge in the suggestion that he take a break to deal with his "substance" or addiction "issues." The capable and normally politically astute Employment minister, Jason Kenney, an Alberta MP who has no discernible dog in this hunt, suggested the mayor "step aside."

© 2025 Conrad Black