The liberal elite’s gift to Rob Ford
Tabatha Southey
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, May. 31 2013, 7:29 PM EDT
Last updated Saturday, Jun. 01 2013, 4:53 PM EDT
There seem to be two schools of thought among those who don’t believe that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was, as has been alleged, filmed smoking crack cocaine. One school insists that, as Mr. Ford has said, “there is no video.” The other school, which, according to a Forum Research poll, includes nearly 50 per cent of those living in the inner suburbs, believes that any such recording is a fake.
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If this is a liberal plot, the left may have handed the Ford brothers a gift. The Fords need to be embattled to be politically alive. Their political personae are built on their outsider status. While I’m not suggesting they’re John Ralston Saul and the man from Dos Equis in their off-hours, when cornered they go more and more everyman-for-the-little-man. It’s their shtick.
Mr. Ford routinely speaks for the people he says he encounters at Tim Hortons who, it seems, universally support him. He does so almost as though he doesn’t understand that people who buy coffee at Tim Hortons also get to vote. When criticized, Mr. Ford references these people as though they have the moral weight (and the mental capacity) of small children – and as if almost everyone doesn’t go to Tim Hortons.
There he is, Saint Rob of the Doughnut Shop. Dunking with the downtrodden. You’d think he bought coffee at a leper colony.
I remember, when I was about 5, overhearing a normally taciturn friend of my dad, the first in his family to go through school, saying he would never let his children watch The Flintstones.
“It’s a parody of the working class,” he said. “It’s an insult to them, written by men with no real insight and sold back to the people they’re mocking.” That’s how I sometimes feel when I listen to the Fords.
The Fords are from a wealthy family. Their father was a member of provincial parliament. They were born into privilege, with access to power. It pains me to say this, but not as much as it might pain him to hear it: Rob Ford is Etobicoke’s Justin Trudeau.
