Underdog (14 page)

I knew Mr. Ford's home life was unsettled and that he liked to drink, but I always thought it was his wife, Renata, who had the drug problem. Over dinner in 2010 with his campaign manager, Nick Kouvalis, and his communications advisor and now
Sun
editor-in-chief, Adrienne Batra, they hinted to me that they wished Mr. Ford had waited to get through his personal problems before running for mayor. They never elaborated, and I just assumed the comment was referencing his wife's drug issues. When I was provided the tape of Mr. Ford's fifty-two-minute conversation with a then thirty-year-old gay man by the name of Dieter Doneit-Henderson in June of that year – who was begging Mr. Ford to score him the extremely addictive painkiller OxyContin – I pushed the would-be mayor to tell his side of the story. The fact that Doneit-Henderson taped the conversation and subsequently gave the tape to the
Toronto Star,
and to
Xtra
and
fab
magazines, only made me suspicious of the whole thing. Still, I didn't think Mr. Ford showed terribly sound judgment in talking to a man I considered a nutcase and a drug addict, and certainly not in advising him to buy drugs off the street. But at the time it appeared that he was trying to do so to prove he was not homophobic. He told me during our interview that he didn't know any drug dealers and didn't know what OxyContin was. Perhaps Mr. Ford knew more about drug deals and OxyContin than he admitted at
the time – given everything that came to light in 2013 – but I had no reason and certainly no evidence to disbelieve him. It seemed most voters sympathized with him, and a potential crisis was averted.

It was Labour Day of 2010 when the campaign to discredit Mr. Ford's mayoralty bid went into overdrive – in what would prove to be a dramatic foreshadowing of the vicious attempts to drive him from office. I'd learned that, about a month before the municipal election, Kathleen Wynne (functioning then as transportation minister in the pathetic, controversy-plagued Dalton McGuinty government) had sent an e-mail to her constituents using her office resources and raising fears about Rob Ford's style of governance. As she was later to prove in the 2014 provincial election, Ms. Wynne was and is adept at doing whatever it takes, even being confrontational or engaging in fear mongering, to win. She contended that Mr. Ford would not have the “best interests” of the city at heart, or compassion for the people who live in it. “I believe that he has a very small view of Toronto,” she wrote. We all know, of course, that the Liberals have a lock on compassion, especially when they refuse to fund cancer drugs for dying moms or when they cancel OHIP-funded physiotherapy for frail seniors. But that is beside the point. This attempt by Ms. Wynne to change the channel from her own sorry record would become a pattern throughout Mr. Ford's time in office.

By the end of September, half-baked pseudo-Rastafarian (can we say “trustafarian”?) and perennial political candidate Sarah Thomson dropped out of the mayoral race, throwing what meagre support she had to the very man she'd labelled as a “completely irresponsible, corrupt boondoggle of a career politician.” No, not Rob Ford but George Smitherman, a walking
trunkful of personal baggage and, of course, a good chum of Kathleen Wynne. It seemed Ms. Thomson had experienced a sudden epiphany and thought Toronto would be “severely hurt” by a mayor like Mr. Ford. The “Anybody but Ford” movement gained momentum, propped up by the
Toronto Star,
the Women for George Smitherman, former mayors Art Eggleton and David Crombie, MP Carolyn Bennett, and most of the Liberal caucus at Queen's Park. Even officials of YWCA Toronto leapt into the fray, worried that their gravy train might end, and came out with a statement knocking Mr. Ford for his lack of vision and his history of poor-bashing. My goodness, this was war, man. There was no shortage of professional grant-getters, has-beens, and hacks prepared to hop on the George Smitherman bandwagon in their desperation to keep Toronto Liberal Red. But despite all of these groups' efforts to paint Mr. Ford as the bogeyman, the voters were angry with David Miller and they were not prepared to pretend Mr. Smitherman was their saviour. They saw through the Liberal propaganda and brought in Mr. Ford with a sweeping 47 per cent of the vote. I was sitting in a CBC-radio studio waiting to go on air when the election night results were confirmed. I watched the faces of those around me go white. I have to admit I enjoyed the upset, although I suspected even that night Mr. Ford's term would not be without a sideshow. I just never imagined how decidedly both Mr. Ford and his fiscally sound agenda would fall apart.

Mr. Ford had little more than a year of grace in office before the media and his detractors started to gang up on him in earnest. To this day, I suspect that this delay was because they didn't really believe at the outset he had the cojones to make good on his promises. When he started to make major
and very lasting gains with the union contracts, with contracting out garbage, and with trimming what had been an unsustainable budget and a soaring debt under Mr. Miller, the knives came out. Their intent was to throw him off his game, and they proved to be adept at it. Before the wheels started to fall off the bus, Mr. Ford kept many of his campaign promises. He got rid of Mr. Miller's personal vehicle tax grab, contracted out cleaning at police stations, contracted out garbage pickup for all residential homes west of Yonge Street (to save eleven million dollars a year) and got ground-breaking contract deals with both CUPE 416 and 79 – ones that did away with the unions' “jobs for life” provisions without inciting a strike. Under the excellent stewardship of his deputy mayor Doug Holyday, the contract deals were made in the early spring when the unions couldn't use the hot weather and the threat of stinky garbage piling up – as it had in the thirty-nine-day strike in 2009 under Mr. Miller – as a bargaining chip. For the first time in all of my thirteen years at City Hall, council under Rob Ford and Doug Holyday not only had the guts to say no, but didn't allow the unions to manipulate the timing of the negotiations. This was a crucial factor in the negotiating process. Both Mel Lastman and David Miller had forever allowed the unions to set the agenda and back council against the wall.

In his early days in office, Mr. Ford put strong members of his inner circle on key files: Mr. Holyday on labour relations and Denzil Minnan-Wong on public works and the contracting out of garbage. And Mike Del Grande worked tirelessly as budget chief to balance the city's books. One of the mayor's biggest mistakes early on was that he was not adept at letting the public know about his accomplishments. He could have
learned from his successor, John Tory, who even in his first hundred days in office seemed to hold a photo op or press opportunity daily. Mr. Tory's shameless self-promotion continues to this day. Mr. Ford's other big mistake was putting Karen Stintz in the position of TTC chair. As he was soon to learn, Ms. Stintz, a backstabbing opportunist, would renege on her promise to back his subway plan and would turn on him in a very public way. I'd warned the mayor's brother Doug, when he appointed Ms. Stintz in their first weeks in office, that I'd watched her, from the time she was elected in 2003, flip-flop many times in council, saying one thing on the council floor and then voting the exact opposite way. But these mistakes aside, the changes Mr. Ford achieved during his first eighteen months as mayor were long overdue. This is what made his fall from grace – the crack cocaine smoking, the binge drinking, the consorting with criminals, and the crude outbursts – so disheartening. He could have done so much to turn the city around. Or could he? I'm convinced to this day that the champagne socialists, the downtown elites, and the left-wing media (always led by the
Toronto Star
) would have never let him get too far without bringing him down. His control of the agenda was too good to be true, and is now a mere dream that quickly turned into a nightmare.

While I can't be sure of the exact moment the daggers were drawn, it was likely when that washed-up comedienne Mary Walsh of CBC's
This Hour Has 22 Minutes,
in a desperate attempt to resurrect her career, showed up dressed as her character Marg Delahunty at the mayor's home at 8 a.m. one Monday morning in October of 2011. When Mr. Ford called 9-1-1, not knowing who the heck she was and what her little game of
sabotage was all about, Toronto's elitists laughed hysterically at his reaction to her visit. Never mind that she had no business showing up on his property, or that her stab at humour was terribly unfunny – the point was to make the mayor look pathetic. I can only imagine how the left would have reacted if a journalist critical of David Miller – me, for example – had turned up at his home one morning at 8 a.m. uninvited and dressed in a ridiculous Viking costume with a CBC camera in tow. The fact is, that would never happen.

By the spring of 2012 – eighteen months into the new mayor's mandate – the natives were growing restless. Mr. Ford had been too successful in his efforts to stop the gravy train, the unions had been kneecapped, and a series of reviews from accountancy consultant firm KPMG on how to really dig into the fat at City Hall were about to be released. The mayor had not been distracted by insults or persistent attacks by left-wing columnists, or by the tasteless photo-shopped picture of his head on a naked body on the front cover of
NOW
magazine. It was time to pull out the heavy artillery. The objectors turned to the most opportunistic, malleable, and easily flattered member of his so-called inner circle – Karen Stintz. With the help of Gary Webster, the chief general manager of the TTC, they convinced Ms. Stintz to flip-flop on her subway promise to the mayor and to start advocating, once again, for LRTs for Scarborough's Sheppard Avenue. I sat on a panel with her in March 2012, when she was jeered and booed by the Scarborough audience for claiming there was no money for a subway – even as long-time transit insider Gordon Chong sat beside her holding up a plan for how to fund it. Ms. Stintz would flip-flop so many times on subways
versus LRTs for Scarborough in 2012 and 2013 that she single-handedly managed to delay the decision by at least a year or more. Although the mayor eventually got his Scarborough subway (now whittled down to one stop by his successor John Tory), Ms. Stintz, egged on by council's lefties, was the first to try to undermine and derail Mr. Ford's agenda. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if at the time she was already thinking of running for mayor and needed to shore up the support of the usual suspects.

Then came an item at a council meeting in February that would be the first of many issues to distract the mayor from his agenda and one I suspect began his downward slide into alcohol and drug addiction. I'm sure no one in the media but me bothered to review the readily available tapes of that evening's session. Mr. Ford was encouraged by the Speaker in the chair at the time, John Parker – who was seen to follow Ms. Stintz around like a lovesick puppy and was not at all well-schooled in council proceedings – to not only stay in the council chamber but to speak about the Rob Ford Football Foundation and to vote on a ridiculous ruling by the David Miller–appointed integrity commissioner, Janet Leiper. Leiper, or Miss Manners, as I had come to call her for her single-minded focus on the so-called indiscretions of the Ford brothers (to the exclusion of anyone else on council) and her constant demands to exact apologies from them for what I deemed politically incorrect slights, had her nose out of joint because Mr. Ford, while a councillor, had inadvertently solicited donations to his football foundation on his councillor letterhead instead of using his personal note paper. She had ruled that he should repay the donors the $3,150 he'd collected, even though the
donations had gone directly to his foundation serving underprivileged kids. Ms. Manners was dogged about trying to exact her pound of flesh from Mr. Ford, having written him six letters reminding him of that obligation even after he indicated the donors did not want the money returned. He repeatedly told her that they had made a donation to a great cause and they wanted the money to remain where it was. It was not that Mr. Ford couldn't afford the $3,150; but out of principle, he refused. It was later learned that Ms. Leiper's obsessive repayment demands – her very ruling that ended up dragging Ford through the courts – were well beyond her mandate. I always wondered why she gave such short shrift to the many other issues that were brought to her attention regarding the spending and code-of-conduct abuses by the rest of council – like the twelve-thousand-dollar taxpayer-funded farewell party Kyle Rae threw for himself, or the fact that Sandra Bussin left her office unattended for thirty days after losing the October 2010 election.

In any event, her ruling and Mr. Ford's decision to stay in council to vote, after being encouraged to do so, was the exact loophole Ms. Leiper's lawyer friend, the King of Champagne Socialists, Clayton Ruby, needed to launch a vexatious court case against the mayor under the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. The plot was concocted by a professional protester, the highly irritating Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who'd learned the art of being vindictive at the knee of Olivia Chow while serving on her Toronto Youth Cabinet, one of Ms. Chow's expensive pet projects in the days of Mel Lastman. Knowing full well that his actions would be interpreted as sour grapes, Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler
solicited his milquetoast friend Paul Magder (not to be confused with the furrier) to be his front man on the lawsuit. Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler, who thought himself part of the political in-crowd, never got over the fact that David Miller was an abysmal failure, that someone like Mr. Ford had been voted into office, and that, as a consequence, his good councillor friend NDPer Joe Mihevc had been sidelined. Following me so far? To add to his woes, when Mr. Ford came to office, Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler was bounced from a seat on the library board – a move for which he never forgave the mayor. Anyway, if the shoe had been on the other foot, right-wing objectors would have been laughed out of court for wasting valuable time and resources on such a vexatious lawsuit, one announced with great fanfare by the pompous Mr. Ruby (who took on the case pro-bono). But somehow it all became perfectly acceptable for these combined forces to use the courts to try to get the mayor out of office. And in a surreal twist of fate, they very nearly did.