I just finished writing the liner notes for a Ford-themed record due to be released in a couple weeks, and while we all know how damaged and corrupt this mayor has been, just sitting down and cataloguing his various misdeeds and controversies is something else. It truly is astonishing that one man can barrel through so much by virtue of shameless alone. The sheer extent of his wrong-doing is numbing when you start trying to quantify, and yet I'm sure I still missed a number of things that should have been included.
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On the evening of May 16, 2013, I was at home in downtown Toronto, sitting at the same desk I'm sitting at right now, listening to records and browsing the internet while I waited for Coulavin and Milo to collect me. We were going to see ex-Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek play a set just down the street, but literally a couple of minutes before my friends arrived, the net lit up with some incredible allegations on American gossip website Gawker.
According to Gawker's John Cook, he had flown down to Toronto just a few days before, then met in the city's NW projects with some Somali gangsters and their “community organiser†mediator to discuss purchasing an iPhone video of mayor Rob Ford smoking crack and making various bigoted remarks on camera. While cagey with the video, the phone's holders did allow Cook to watch the full minute in the back of their car, parked in a strip mall lot. The report was soon corroborated and fleshed out by a pair of journalists on the Toronto Star website, both of whom had seen the sordid little segment themselves but had kept mum whilst the newspaper worked on building a more substantial story. I love Radio Birdman, but I also already disliked Ford a great deal, so it was almost reluctantly that I left my house for the gig, impulsively checking my phone for updates all night.
As most will know, Ford had been a divisive figure in his tenure as a city councillor for years prior to a surprise victory in the October 2010 election that made him mayor. His predilection for ignorant statements and embarrassing public displays, often alcohol-fueled, was well-established, and there were already a documented drunk driving incident, hints of drug abuse and disconcerting rumours of trouble at home. Ford's first 30 months as the city's chief magistrate were far from free of drama themselves, full of absurd clashes with local media, misuse of office, an unprecedented hostility toward his ideological opponents and even a flagrant disregard for municipal regulations that saw him briefly lose his seat in a decision eventually over-turned on a technicality. While the mayor's various and ongoing controversies were never far from the public attention, a pair of humiliating incidents late that winter seemed to signal worse problems looming still. In mid-February, very drunk Ford had to be asked to leave the Garrison Ball, a military charity event attended by senior brass and the federal Minister of National Defence, due to his extreme inebriation. Two weeks later, a local businesswoman accused him of groping her while spewing creepy comments, going on to add that his condition seemed more in line with cocaine abuse than the mere drunken idiocy he was at that point more renowned for. Two and a half months later, in light of the Star's reporting, her comments appeared to carry some weight.
The next day, Ford refused to address the allegations of the night before, and he maintained this silence for a week. Such behaviour in a Canadian mayor was unprecedented; some expressed worries that the disgraced mayor might kill himself, while others simply hoped that he would do the obvious thing and resign, or at least announce that he recognised his substance abuse problems and would be taking a leave of absence to address them in rehab and therapy. When Ford called a press conference for the following Friday, this is exactly what most expected to happen, and there was some sympathy for his plight and well-being, even among such fervent detractors as myself. Instead, Ford issued a pathetic denial constructed so awkwardly that its very wording only gave new weight to the claims it purported to deny. And at this point, Mayor Rob Ford, who had long nourished a (very much mutual) vendetta against the liberal Toronto Star that already extended to an effective ex-communication, and his sleazy thug brother cum babysitter cum mouthpiece, Etobicoke councillor Doug Ford, only stepped up their attacks on the press, calling legitimate journalists “pathological liars†and “maggotsâ€, a grotesquely undignified campaign that led to Ford inferring that one Star reporter was a pedophile, in an interview with disgraced criminal windbag Conrad Black. That the accounts being filed by these journalists were, by the mayor's own belated admission, entirely true, did nothing to inspire any sort of remorse or real apology from the utterly shameless Ford brothers (other than the pro forma apology a looming lawsuit produced, of course).
Shortly after this municipal debacle, SFH recorded the song that you'll find you on the topside of this here single, topically titled “Mayor On Crack?†The band wrote and released the track quite specifically for online/Youtube release; I heard it and immediately thought it would make for a great 45, but it takes two and a half months to get a record pressed nowadays. In the long hot summer of 2013, I was still sufficiently naive to assume that the odds of Ford still being mayor by the end of a 45's production phase were slim to none. After all, he might be hanging on desperately now, but surely he had some shame, some dignity, some lingering, rudimentary understanding of the respect he was obliged to show for his office and for the city he represented-- surely he would have to resign or step down before long, right?
Wrong.
As the year progressed and the plot steadily thickened, new incidents seemed to occur on a near-daily basis, each more ridiculous than the last. Nagging questions remained about the death of Anthony Smith, seen in a photo with Ford outside a local crackhouse and murdered not long after under circumstances that hardly precluded connections to the crack video, while others in the Ford milieu were pushed from high-rise balconies, shot outside their apartments, beaten in home invasions and brutally attacked in jail. The Globe ran extensive revelations about Doug Ford's drug-dealing past. Rob showed up for a local food festival, hammered and almost certainly having driven himself there. His close friend and drug dealer Sandro “The Rat†Lisi-- a singularly distateful specimen himself, boasting an extensive record of vehicular assaults and violent behaviour toward women-- was arrested, and a succession of ITO releases detailed police surveillance capturing Ford in ever-worse circumstances, meeting Lisi for mysterious envelope exchanges, pissing in schoolyards and drinking in public parks.
There were revelations of drunken, abusive behaviour at bars, at home and in his own City Hall office, sexual harassment of his staff, a covert exchange of drugs for his lost phone and a disturbing video of Ford violently threatening to rip out the throat of an unnamed enemy. He knocked over an elderly female colleague at a council meeting, then made incredibly lewd remarks about his own wife at a press conference. He made a strange, unexplained late night attempt at visiting one convict buddy in jail while issuing other convicted criminal friends with reference letters on city letterhead and securing violent thugs positions working with youth. Other friends were hired at city hall, their lack of qualifications and inflated salaries conspicuously at odds with the tired rhetoric of efficiencies and gravy trains. Former allies and long-time enablers on the mainstream right moved to distance themselves from both Fords, thankfully stopping Doug's provincial aspirations short and resulting in yet another embarrassing spectacle when the gate-crashing mayor was snubbed by a visiting Prime Minister. He lost his football coaching job and his weekly radio gig, and a planned TV show was unceremoniously canned by the station after one episode.
When police chief Bill Blair confirmed in late October that investigators had found and viewed the crack video, Ford was even stripped of all the powers that council could take from him, and he continued to flail on, rarely deigning to arrive at work before lunch time or stay more than a couple of hours. When yet another ITO released in November cited gangsters discussing video of Ford on heroin, it became plain that there was absolutely nothing that could make this corrupt, amoral, drug-abusing, work-shirking thug give up his position, and that we were to endure another year of non-leadership before a better candidate might take his place. At that point, I emailed Warren to arrange the release of this record.
Months later, as I write this on April Fool's Day, campaigning for October's municipal election is well underway, and Ford has yet to resign. The clown act has barely slowed down, with our mayor apparently taking drugs at a Vancouver bar, humiliating himself on an American TV show, deliberately provoking incredibly ill-considered public wars against the police department (who Ford claims to support more than anyone even as he refuses to accept their requests for an interview related to ongoing serious criminal cases) and the gay community. The sheer number of scandalous, noxious, moronic and criminal acts and incidents surrounding this contemptible slob and his circle of family, friends and associates would be comical were it not truly depressing to see him appearing to get away with little in the way of real consequences.
Well, get away so far, at least. As the rumours of Ford's misdeeds have taken on a significantly darker tone over just the past few days, so too have rumours of an imminent arrest grown surer and more insistent. Credible sources speak of police action within days or weeks, and those of us who have grown mightily sick of seeing our city's highest office occupied and degraded by this porcine bobblehead, this sneering, whining, moral blackhole of a man, can now hardly wait to see him face the judgment that must surely result from such corruption. Otherwise, this will be a long and painful year for Toronto. We've got a mayor on crack, we want to give him the sack...and soon we will. Anything else?
