For all the anger and pleading directed at the executive committee throughout the night, there was also a sense of gratitude. Because people who cared so much about whatever they were speaking to had sacrificed a day’s work and night’s sleep to say it, and they found at city hall an army of fellow citizens just as concerned, perplexed and suddenly motivated as they were. In the two overflow rooms, people were talking, rehearsing their speeches in front of each other and sharing complaints. They gathered their chairs into semicircles and plotted strategy. They exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and resolved to work together.
‘Have you been in there?’ my friend and former Eye Weekly colleague Councillor Gord Perks said to me, pointing at one of the overflow rooms and grinning. I had been speaking with him a lot in the previous months when he was losing every vote to the Ford steamroller. It was nice to see him smile. ‘It’s like a civics workshop. In two decades of activism – when I was with Greenpeace, the Toronto Environmental Alliance, here – I have never seen public participation like this. This is what I’ve been waiting for. People are talking to each other about the kind of city they want. It’s amazing.’
But when the meeting ended, it ended with a whimper. The executive committee voted to essentially ignore the deputations they’d heard and send all of the KPMG suggestions to the city manager for review. In the hallway, Mammoliti revelled in his role as a straight-talking killjoy, telling any reporters who would listen that they had just heard from the ‘usual suspects,’ the same band of professional protesters and paid union stooges from downtown who come out to whine at every council meeting. Already in the mumbled conversation of those milling about, and on Twitter, I could hear the giddiness of the sleepover high giving way to frustration. People were saying that the whole thing had been useless, a show trial with a foregone conclusion. The Ford juggernaut was going to roll over these people just as it had rolled over all the other opposition so far.
I smelled like coffee, cigarettes and sweat. Sluggishly, almost in slow motion, I emerged into the sunshine of Nathan Phillips Square, where bright-eyed people in skirts and suits were hustling across the concrete expanse to work, and slouched through the Financial District in a kind of exhaustion-induced intoxication. The phone in my pocket buzzed several times a minute as people just waking up and checking into their Twitter accounts responded to the reports I’d posted throughout the night. The cranes south of Lake Shore Boulevard added storeys to the growing cluster of glass skyscrapers as those living in the still-new buildings around them awoke; workers on dangling platforms ascended the outside of the Bank of Montreal tower at First Canadian Place to replace the marble that represented 1980s opulence with something more becoming of a global banking giant of the new millennium; excavators at Union Station dug out whole new pathways from beneath the railway tracks even as hundreds of thousands of people roared into the city upon them and then jostled out onto the sidewalk. I was taken by the tidy, obvious metaphor: it was a new day in Toronto, the end of a long, dark night that had given way to a morning shining with new possibilities. For the first time in a long time, Toronto’s prospects again struck me as unlimited.
‘It’s hard to predict anything in politics,’ I wrote in a story that would run on the cover of that week’s issue of The Grid, ‘but if at the end of this year, or a year from now, the mayor is fighting for his political life, July 2011 may just have been the point at which the tide turned against him.’
6
For a long time, the Sideshow Rob Extravaganza didn’t seem to hurt his public support. But if the massive and nonsensical nature of his policies raised the stakes for those who felt the mayor risked destroying the city, his gaffe-prone persona has made the whole thing fabulously entertaining. The mayor has provided ample, routine opportunities for mockery and self-righteous outrage, and a community of people has engaged in both as a regular pastime.
You can see the effect in the council chamber, where suddenly every meeting features a gallery full of new enthusiasts, almost all of them dead set against Ford’s agenda, watching and discussing even the most mundane business. In the Miller years you might have seen fifteen or twenty observers; in the Ford era, the gallery is regularly occupied by more than a hundred. When big issues are up for debate, the room overflows and people watch on television screens in the rotunda downstairs.
Activists started fighting the mayor more directly: Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, a former youth activist, member of the library board and failed candidate for school-board trustee, filed a campaign finance audit request that would investigate apparent violations of the law and, if successful, could see the mayor punished or removed from office. When Doug Ford saw Chaleff-Freudenthaler at city hall and warned him, ‘What goes around comes around,’ the activist filed another complaint with the integrity commissioner that saw the mayoral brother-in-chief forced to apologize. Jude MacDonald, a founder of the left-leaning website Rabble.ca, filed multiple complaints with the city’s integrity commissioner over Ford’s office expenses and use of his office resources to support his volunteer football coaching. Complaints from unnamed citizens about the civic appointments process led the city ombudsman to conclude that Ford’s office had compromised the integrity of the appointments process. The endless complaints were a result of the invigorated opposition to Ford, and news of them just served to further ramp up interest in the gong show.
I can feel the effects of this in my own career: before, my regular readership consisted largely of insiders at city hall and political activists. Since Ford was elected, tens of thousands of readers click through online to soak up anything I write about the mayor; the gas station attendant who sells me cigarettes recognized me from my column photo and now talks to me regularly about municipal affairs; suddenly national entertainment and media celebrities are reaching out to talk about Ford. On Twitter, a few thousand regular users dissect every council decision, and the social-media conversation really comes alive when the mayor does something demonstrably wrong – like giving the finger, allegedly, to a mother who scolded him for talking on his cell while driving. New political micro-celebrities – like Jonathan Goldsbie, the wonky leftist activist, and Matt Elliot, who runs a chart-heavy blog called Ford for Toronto – have emerged as their online punditry grows more popular than many newspaper columns. Many others – tweeters with handles like @neville_park, @madhatressTO, @cityslikr and @sol_chrom – were rounded up and nicknamed ‘the Scoobies’ in a column about their influence by the Globe’s Marcus Gee.
This online opposition began discussing how to actively mobilize against Ford’s administration, and in August 2011, about two months after the sleepover public meeting at city hall, they were presented with a key opportunity. Councillor Doug Ford appeared on the CBC radio program Metro Morning to unveil a vision for fast-tracked development of the Eastern Port Lands, the waterfront industrial district that represented the largest parcel of undeveloped land in the city, directly adjacent to the downtown core. An existing plan, he said, would be thrown out – too slow, he said, and too expensive – in favour of a proposal that included a giant Ferris wheel, a destination megamall and a hotel. The whole thing would be served by a monorail. The news was a surprise to the rest of city council, to the Waterfront Toronto organization that had long been working on the Port Lands and to the people of the city.
But things had changed. This wasn’t Transit City – the Fords could no longer simply undo years of work in favour of a half-baked scheme concocted in some backroom. Waterfront activists and local residents who had been involved in the planning for the Port Lands immediately began organizing, and soon found themselves working in close coordination with social-media regulars. An urban planner and popular tweeter named Laurence Lui met up with the activists and started tweeting about the issue under the Twitter hashtag #CodeBlueTO. He set up a website, while activist and Jude Macdonald set up a Facebook group. Coordinating together mostly online – and meeting up in person twice – the Code Blue group
gained 7,000 petition signatures in just three weeks and organized meetings with flexible city councillors (who, in turn, persuaded other potential swing votes). Meanwhile, nearly 151 planning experts wrote a stinging open letter opposing Ford’s plan. John Tory’s CivicAction group spoke out against it. Less than a month after Doug Ford had announced his new vision for the waterfront, city council definitively killed it in a unanimous vote as the Ford team agreed to a compromise that looked a lot like total surrender.
That turned out to be just a warm-up. In January, the budget – which had been the subject of that overnight meeting – came to city council for a vote. In the face of opposition from within his own inner circle, the mayor first watered things down: trial balloons about closing library branches, for example, got deflated and tossed; the budget committee itself saved school-nutrition programs and backed away from, among other things, closing some community centres and swimming pools. But even with that fiscal dilution, Ford still lost the vote. A majority of councillors revised the budget further to direct $20 million back into the TTC, libraries, environmental programs and community centres.
A sense of inevitability colours that result now, but until then, this city council had never defied Mayor Ford. Unlike with the waterfront, where he quickly backed down, this time Ford fought hard. But the centrists on council who had previously voted with Ford, and even some formerly loyal supporters, voted against the mayor in response to an overwhelming outcry from their constituents. The lesson was clear: council ruled the city, not the mayor, and council took its cues from the voters. The city is bigger than its mayor, and bigger even than city council: citizens showed, as they have throughout the city’s history, that you can fight city hall. That if the people of Toronto speak loudly and clearly enough, they can undo the most entrenched plans of the elites. It’s how democracy is supposed to work, and how it’s always served Toronto. Politically, it represented a thundering defeat for the mayor – a vote of non-confidence in his government, really – and a recalibration of the governing math at city hall. Policy-wise, it represented a shift in momentum, a slowing down of the childish, intentional crapification of the city, hinting perhaps at a deliberate turn toward city building.
The second week of February 2012 was the most significant one at city hall since amalgamation. It began as the week that the city’s largest labour union, CUPE Local 416, was wrestled into submission by a bullying administration. And then it became the week that the mayor’s administration effectively ended.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Ford’s very favourite day of the year, the mayor announced the first good news he’d had in quite a few months: in a miracle on the order of a Manning-to-Tyree late-game bomb, the city had drawn major concessions from the outside workers’ union (including garbage collectors) and a deal had been reached to avoid a work stoppage that had come to seem inevitable. In an attempt to live to fight another day, the union essentially folded in the face of Ford’s hardball tactics. But the details of that agreement were still being sorted out when the latest edition in a months-long series of Completely Unprecedented Biggest Meetings Ever took place on Wednesday, February 8.
For the first time in the megacity’s history, a meeting had been called by city council over the objections of the mayor. And that meeting, initiated by the mayor’s own TTC chair, Karen Stintz, was called for the sole purpose of overturning Ford’s plan for transit – the largest, most expensive and arguably most important file in the city – and implementing a completely different scheme. Stintz had remained loyal to the mayor even throughout the budget fight, but finally she went public to say that Ford would not listen to reason about transit. It was clear his plan was going to provide far less service at far greater cost. Journalist John Lorinc suggested it would be ‘the single most expensive infrastructure mistake in Toronto history.’
When, just as they had a month earlier in rewriting his budget, city council overruled the mayor and implemented a plan identical to Miller’s previous Transit City plan, Ford threw a hissy fit. He declared the council vote ‘irrelevant.’ He said that Premier Dalton McGuinty would disregard the vote – a statement contradicted less than an hour later by the premier, who made it clear he’d already told Ford he would listen to council. And then, rather than regrouping to negotiate with council’s centre on how he might regain confidence and implement his own agenda going forward, he went on a midnight TTC ride in Scarborough, commiserating with random riders about how city hall is a hellhole of waste and disrespect.
That sequence of actions explains a lot – good, bad and ugly – about Rob Ford. Ever since he entered politics, he’s held government in general, and city government in particular, in contempt. The kitchen-table wisdom he’s loudly proclaimed has been in stark contrast to observable reality. And he has always – always – preferred to go out into the street and meet with people to share complaints with them about the city’s government than attempt to govern.
Connecting with people in person is Ford’s only political skill. And that strength served him well in the past, helping him get elected thrice as a councillor and win the mayoralty. But getting votes is only one-third of a politician’s job. Another third is reconciling your policy proscriptions with reality, making sure that what sounded good on the stump will actually work to make the city better. And the remainder of the job is getting stuff done: doing the diplomacy, negotiation and persuasion necessary to win the support of those you need to implement your vision. On both the latter two responsibilities, Ford has consistently failed, and seemed almost constitutionally incapable of reversing course.
A wise politician would have looked down into his hands after the transit meeting, seen that he was holding his own ass and begun reconciling with the key members of council who handed it to him. Instead, Rob and Doug Ford went about immediately setting fire to the few remaining bridges that would allow them to travel back toward relevance and influence. They called Stintz a ‘backstabber.’ They accused Gordon Chong, their own subway advisor, of proposing ‘just another tax grab‘ for suggesting ways to raise the astronomical funds needed to consider subway expansion. They managed to fire Gary Webster, the manager of the TTC who had made clear his preference for LRT technology, but days later they saw council remove the Ford-friendly councillors on the transit commission and replace them with leftists and Stintz allies.
The news just got worse for the mayor. A new poll showed his approval rating had plunged. The first noticeable result of his budget cuts appeared in the form of a likely $100 increase in registration fees for every child joining a summer baseball or soccer league, a predictable result of new user fees that seemed to take Team Ford off guard (and that council promptly reversed once it became apparent). Even his ‘Cut the Waist’ weight-loss stunt – in which he weighed himself before a rapt press gallery once a week – stalled, becoming a constant source of animosity between himself, his brother and the media.
That last one, of course, was a purely personal setback, reflecting only Ford’s failure to fulfill his own proclaimed goals for his physical fitness. But here’s the thing: the entirety of Ford’s mayoralty leads to the inevitable conclusion that where he is concerned, the personal is political. The constant sideshow aspects of his political career – drunkenly berating hockey game attendees, offering to score drugs for a voter, etc. – are simply inseparable from the policy and political spheres of his career.
And finally, in September 2012, the collision of his personal failings and his political persona threatened to end his career as mayor.
7
Even his supporters would agree that Rob Ford is not a deep thinker, and he’s got a temperament that lends itself to outrageous outbursts and errors in judgment. He means well, I think, almost all the time. But he has a combination of qualities that make him a bit of a public-relations time bomb.
I wouldn’t accuse him of having anything like an ideology. He can sometimes look like a libertarian or a corporatist, but he does not cohere to the logic
al elements of those schools of thought. He starts from two, sometimes contradictory, premises: 1) No taxes are good taxes, and 2) The role of government is to give people what they want directly. As a corollary, he has complete faith in the ‘private sector’ to deliver anything that is needed, though he does not appear to understand market incentives or how the prospect of profit is necessary to motivate the private sector. This is how he can spend most of his time as mayor, reportedly, visiting tenants in affordable housing to commiserate with them about the crumbling state of their homes and then oppose any spending to address that crumbling infrastructure. He is enraged by ‘waste,’ but labels ‘waste’ public funding for anything he doesn’t understand – community economic development, health programs or office staff, for example. He can say in one breath that his own football program, run in a publicly funded school with charitable contributions from him and other corporate donors, is the best anti-gang program, that without it his players would be in jail. And then oppose not just spending money on community sports grants but accepting money from the federal government to support those programs, dismissing them as ‘hug-a-thug’ enterprises that do not work and are a waste of taxpayer dollars. This is how he can insist that a subway extension into Scarborough expected to cost $2.8 billion or more is his priority, but then not put a single cent of tax money into it. His logic is simple: the people of Scarborough would prefer a subway to any other kind of transit. But he is opposed to spending billions of dollars of tax money, on principle. Therefore, the private sector will pay for it. It is not an argument so much as a wish.
Some Great Idea Page 15
