Some Great Idea

by Edward Keenan

  A short time later, back in his van, we talked some more about children, as I had a ten-week-old son at the time. ‘He must be crying every three hours, you know. I don’t know how we live through it. It’s getting better with Stephanie now, she’s sleeping through the night. Now the problem is they can’t communicate, they can’t tell you what they want. You gotta do a checklist: check the diapers, see if they’re fed, the gas …’ I said that while that was true, I was also astonished watching my son start to learn about the world. ‘That’s the learning experience,’ he said. ‘Unbelievable. They’re so innocent. I’m just so amazed by the whole experience.’

  He gave me a bit of background. In high school and at Carleton University in Ottawa, he played football: ‘I was a centre, I was the guy who hiked the ball.’ His dad, Doug Sr., started the family business, Deco Labels & Tags, and then became a member of Mike Harris’s Conservative Party under the ‘Common Sense Revolution’ banner at Queen’s Park in 1995. That may be, he said, where he caught the political bug. ‘You know, I always had this itch. I was always a communicator, captain of the football team, on the student council. I’ve sort of been political all my life, even when I was a little tyke. My dad ran in 1995 and served one term there and I was right into it. Because I saw what Bob Rae did, I worked with Davis when I was a little, little tyke, and then I saw Peterson win. Then I saw Bob Rae get in and I saw how the province went from there – it was just a disaster. And then Harris came in and I guess they looked like they’re the evil ones, but he got elected and all I kept hearing was “Promises made, promises kept.” You may not have liked it, people may not have liked it, but he had a platform and he said he was going to do it and he did.’

  As we talked, he came back again and again to how he felt his obligation was doing what we were doing then – helping out constituents rather than blustering at city hall. ‘I always tell my constituents, “Call my office first; I will find the right people.”’ He returned every call to his office personally, often within hours, and usually would make a trip out to see anyone with a complaint, bringing city staffers with him. As we walked around Etobicoke, he was approached every minute or so by people thanking him for help he’d provided or telling him to stay the course in his penny-pinching. If constituents didn’t approach him, he often went to them, offering a business card and telling them to call him if they needed anything. I said it seemed like he never told a constituent that something was not his department.

  ‘That’s right. The first rule in my office is: never say no. I’ll never say no to anybody. But on the other hand, I never promise anyone. I don’t use that word, promise. I say, “I’ll try my best, I’ll come out and see you,” and, you know what? Ninety-five per cent of the time people are satisfied. You’re giving them the attention they want, you’ve come out, you’ve paid a personal visit. I like to come out and see the situation for myself because, especially in this area, there’s a language barrier sometimes. There’s a huge Indian, Sikh population, a huge European population, a huge Somalian population. It’s very, very multicultural; it’s probably one of the most diverse wards in the city. I’ve got a little bit of everyone here. I love my job, that’s for sure. Helping out people that don’t know where to turn. And I always help give them direction.’

  He said this is what all those people who hated him downtown were missing. ‘When people look at me down at city hall and they read the papers, I can understand how they think I’m a nutcase. But, you know, once people get to know me, they get a whole different perspective.’ Rob Ford may have been a raving lunatic, but he was a raving lunatic who would come to your home and stand in the rain to ensure you’d get your fifteen minutes with the city staffer who could help you. And for anyone not familiar with how to navigate the bureaucracy at city hall, and even for plenty of people who are familiar, that was no small thing.

  Later that week, Ford gave me a tour of Deco Labels & Tags, which he’d been running with his brothers since his father’s retirement. He demonstrated the machinery that put labels on jars and made stickers and other kinds of signs. He introduced me to his eldest brother, Randy, who runs the Toronto plant, and Randy nodded sternly at me when Rob told him I was a journalist working on a profile. Ford told me about how his brother Doug was expanding the operations into Chicago. I asked if it wasn’t difficult running a business while being a city councillor at the same time. ‘No, no, no. I’m the CEO but my brothers run the day-to-day operation. I come in here, make sure the numbers are where they are. I’m basically the penny-pincher at Deco. I come in once or twice a week to see what’s going on, and on Fridays I’m here to make sure the employees and invoices are paid. But you can’t do two things at once; it’s impossible.’

  In his large office at Deco, Ford told me to go ahead and ask him anything – no topic was off-limits. I ran through a list of his scandalous moments. About that famous drunken outburst at the hockey game, he said he wouldn’t even try to defend himself: ‘I was wrong. And my biggest mistake was lying about it. I don’t know why I lied about it. I’m not even a big drinker.’ Why did he call Giorgio Mammoliti a scammer? ‘He is a scammer, an outright scammer,’ he said, pointing to Mammoliti’s bloated expense accounts. He said he only bad-mouthed Gloria Lindsay Luby because of some political fight she’d had with his brother Doug in which she’d accused him of wrongdoing; he regretted the ‘waste of skin’ remark now.

  ‘I’m slowly but surely mellowing out,’ he said, but he noted that his fellow councillors marginalized him. They called him a ‘fat fuck,’ or otherwise mocked his weight. He was constantly enraged by their abuse of the public purse. ‘It just annoys me to see how politicians can get away with what they do. It hurts me. They sit there and laugh and giggle, and they think it’s a big joke. If the average person doesn’t get a free TTC pass, why should we? Why should we get into the zoo for free? Why should we get into the Ex for free? No one else does. Why? I try to get rid of this stuff, and they just ridicule me. You know, we spend $150,000 on free council food, so at every meeting, behind the council chambers, there’s a big spread of cheeses, grapes, cookies, all this stuff. It’s like, “Guys, you just ate lunch,” and at three o’clock, the whole chamber empties out. They’re back there like pigs at a trough, literally. And then I make motions, I try to eliminate it, and they laugh and snicker and say, “You haven’t missed many meals.” They’re just such selfish and greedy individuals. It drives me nuts and I’ll tell them that right to their face. But it’s one against forty-four, you know. Doug Holyday is really my only buddy down there, my personal support team.’

  He had no kind words for most of his fellow conservatives on council. ‘They call themselves conservatives until they get down there, and then they just spend, spend, spend. They won’t even talk to me in the hall. The so-called right wing – like Karen Stintz and Case Ootes – they vote against my motions to save money. I file a hundred motions every budget – we could save $100 million – but I haven’t been able to save anything, because they won’t vote with me. Not one red cent.’

  Did it bother him to be such a loner? He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to eat lunch with those guys anyway.’ And then he said that there was one councillor, besides Holyday, that he really liked personally. Surprisingly, it was the leader of the federal NDP. ‘Jack Layton was the one I respected most,’ Ford said. ‘He sat next to me when I first got to city hall. He really cared about people, and he was ten times better than all those spendaholics they got down there now. I didn’t agree with him on very much, we had different ideas about almost everything, but he gave me some good, honest advice about how to help constituents and work with people. He had manners.’

  Ford told me he planned to run for mayor someday. He already had his campaign worked out. ‘I'll have a basic, common-sense, easy-to-understand platform,’ he began. ‘The grass is gonna be cut, the litter’s gonna be picked up. When you phone city hall you’re going to get an answer; you’re not going to get bo
unced around to ten different departments. There’s gonna be people that are gonna be accountable down there. We’re gonna run it just like a business.’ He said the TTC worked only for people who lived downtown; other than Kipling station, the subway didn’t serve his constituents at all. There was no subway route to the airport. For people in the suburbs, he said, the TTC was terrible: ‘Realistically, we have to invest in subways. We have to get the feds to come on board to help pay for this.’ Lastman and Miller’s way of bashing the federal and provincial governments was not going to get them to pony up, he said. And he also felt the TTC needed to be declared an essential service so workers couldn’t go on strike and hold the city hostage.

  Ford said that if the city contracted out services like garbage collection and streamlined its operations, it could easily run on a budget of $6.5 billion rather than the $8 or $9 billion Miller was spending. And that was before you even got into the big banner projects of Miller’s administration. The waterfront redevelopment, for example, that didn’t, in his estimation, help anyone. ‘They get caught up funding huge projects,’ he said, ‘and, to me, maybe that helps you if you live down on the lake, but it doesn’t help anyone here in Etobicoke. You know, people worry about buses, but they just want a clean and safe area. People hear Rexdale, “Oh, it’s terrifying,” but it’s not a bad area. There are some isolated incidents, a few bad people, you know, which come out of the government housing areas. That’s 80 per cent of the problems and the shootings, too. Rexdale has more government housing than any part of the city, you know? It’s a real balance that you have to practice, if you want to use that word, to keep everyone happy. But to me, Clean and Beautiful City [Miller’s civic cleanup program] is just a farce. It’s just a make-work program to create jobs for people. I mean, the city’s no cleaner than what it was. The graffiti’s just terrible. The weeds. Now they can’t use pesticides. I never agreed with that, and the weeds are out of control now.’

  As he went on, his litany started to sound like a breathless child’s Christmas list: ‘We’re not going to have any fat, the roads are going to be paved, the transit system’s gonna be a well-oiled machine, and it’s going to be clean, and it’s going to be safe, and we’re going to have police and there’s going to be a police helicopter. And I’m going to bring in the Guardian Angels …’

  It was time for us to take some photos, and my photographer had Ford put on a neon yellow baseball cap that was hanging in his office. It had ‘Team Ford’ written on the front, a keepsake from his father’s provincial campaign. We decided to go over to the football field at Don Bosco Catholic Secondary School, a place close to his heart. He coached the football team there, and had bought all the equipment to start the program himself. ‘I get criticized a lot, because in September and October, every day from three to five o’clock, I’m on the football field. And it drives people nuts. They’re like, “You’re leaving council to coach football.” And you know what? I do. I do leave council to coach football for two hours a day and I come right back to council. I’m back down there at six o’clock. My constituents know it and they agree 100 per cent. These kids, it’s unbelievable where they come from. But they’re playing football and they aren’t getting into trouble. A lot of them have been in and out of jail, a lot of them are in gangs, but they’re athletes. And if you give them an opportunity to play football, then it’s phenomenal, they can go to university. I’m very, very strict. If they don’t have a 60 average, they don’t play. If they miss a class at school that day, they cannot play the following day. If you come late to practice? Don’t bother coming. It’s discipline, and they love it and the parents love it.’

  On the field to take pictures, he was playful. He sat in the stands and spread out his arms, grinning wide and turning his head to the sky. He let out a laugh. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘people think I’m angry, right? I guess I should give you an angry look.’ He laughed again, and then contorted his forehead into a frown.

  ‘Think about all the waste at city hall,’ the photographer told him. He snarled.

  After we were done, the photographer, who’d sat through most of the interview in his office, gave me a lift home. On the way, she said, ‘You’re going to be nice to him, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m going to be honest,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it will make people like him much. He won’t like it.’ She looked distressed.

  I told her that scratching at the logic behind his ‘common sense,’ the childlike charm started to appear childish. He claimed pesticides couldn’t be as bad as everyone claims because our parents used them and they’re living longer than ever – and, besides, weeds are ugly. That we didn't need a tree-protection bylaw to grow the urban forest because ‘we’ve got thousands of trees.’ That incineration couldn’t possibly be dangerous since ‘they use it in close to 90 per cent of the rest of the world.’ His facts were often wrong; his math didn’t add up; his arguments often seemed at war with logic. His idea to bring the federal government in to pay for subways was a pipe dream. I said to the photographer that I thought his amiable simple-mindedness could be dangerous when it was applied to setting policy.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, wincing. ‘He’s just like a big teddy bear. He’s so nice. I like him.’

  The truth was I liked him well enough, too. Not as a leader or a politician, but as a human being. Even if he didn’t appear to be a deep thinker, he seemed to genuinely care about people, and wanted to help them. He was a man with only two real priorities: saving money and responding quickly and directly to what his constituents asked of him. Those were popular priorities, and his approach to them, especially the latter, I thought, could serve as lessons to his city council colleagues, especially those who wanted to beat him.

  But at the time, I had no idea he was going to take over my city, and would come to dominate – not just politically, but personally – Toronto’s headlines, and hijack my career as a writer. I didn’t foresee that one day in 2011, my six-year-old son, when asked to think of a celebrity as part of a family games night, would smile as we ran through every cartoon character and pop singer we could think of before he announced, ‘Nope: Rob Ford!’ I didn’t imagine then that I’d write whole essays about whether or not Ford had said to a 911 operator, ‘You bitches, don’t you fucking know, I’m Rob Fucking Ford, mayor of this city,’ and whether that was justified given that there was a female television comedian dressed like an amazon warrior – a federal government employee, in fact – trying to interview him in his driveway. Or that the city’s media would assemble once a week to watch him weigh himself on a giant scale while his brother cracked fat jokes at his expense. I didn’t know that his talking on his cellphone and reading while driving – behaviour I’d personally witnessed – would become city-wide debating points. I certainly never guessed that because of Rob Ford, I’d need to return again and again in my columns to seemingly ultra-local issues like bike lanes on Jarvis Street and trivial bullshit like the price and availability of plastic bags in grocery stores. Or that city council would become a long version of Groundhog Day in which the same basic issues were debated every few months, decisions made and unmade and made again as the trench warfare meaninglessly moved the battle lines by inches. I never foresaw renowned Toronto-based urbanist Richard Florida telling international audiences that we had ‘the worst mayor in the modern history of cities.’ Foreign countries would start thinking of Toronto as the place that rips out brand-new bike lanes. I couldn’t tell then that large parts of the city would be gripped by a Ford-inspired fever dream in which growing pains are imagined to be symptoms of an illness, and that the cure involved stamping out those things that are flourishing rather than tending to those that are suffering.

  After meeting him, I understood Rob Ford to be a guy who would answer your phone call and visit your house to repair a pothole. But the story of the city he told was very different from the one I experienced. So I wrote my story and stopped paying attention to him un
til his story of Toronto and mine collided in a huge civic identity crisis. How the story of Toronto moves forward in the wake of that collision is a big, puzzling question. What does Toronto even mean? What kind of city is it? What kind of place do we want it to be? That’s the big question, isn’t it?

  4

  But maybe that’s always been the question. The broad strokes of Toronto’s history as a city paint a picture of almost constant ascension over roughly two centuries – from a strategic Great Lakes trading and military post, to a manufacturing and economic hub at the centre of Ontario’s economy, to the financial and cultural capital of Canada, to a prominent global metropolis. Toronto is, today, among the safest, most prosperous, most livable and most important cities in the world.

  But when you study the history a bit closer, you see the storyline keeps halting and doubling back on itself. The whole thing is a chain of struggles: progress is met with reactionary and counter-reactionary movements at every turn; there’s a see-saw fight between those pushing rapid change and those battling for preservation, between a drive to centralize power and the desire to share it among an ever greater number of people. The winning sides in those historic battles don’t break down neatly along a left/right-wing spectrum (actually, those terms, as present as they are in the public conversation and sometimes even my own writing, seem barely applicable to most municipal issues). But the victors, those who have defined Toronto thus far, have almost always been on the side of greater democracy and more citizen involvement. They’ve tried to embrace the complexity and contradictions of the city and harness the energy those qualities create. Toronto’s always been propelled forward when it takes its lead from the people rather than from power brokers, when it structures its decisions so that the many voices that make up the city can be included in the conversation, when it allows for differences to coexist rather than be ironed out.