Rob Ford has
been given the greatest megaphone of all and if he can rise to the occasion has
many successful trips to the poles ahead of him. He certainly has to lay of the sauce but that
was blindingly obvious anyway and doing
just that will restore health and vigor and allow the voters to put his
outbursts behind them.
In the meantime
he is beautifully positioned to be a one man cheerleader team for the city of
Toronto and by extension for southern Ontario.
A couple years of that and his reputation will be awesome.
Recall how a B
actor named Ronald Reagan spent years crafting himself as a public speaker to
shift his reputation before he did tackle political office. This B actor has roads to go yet and I do not
see him out.
Conrad Black:
The salvation of Rob Ford
Conrad Black | 23/11/13 |
The Rob Ford controversy is following a traditional
pattern, but is now set to produce some surprises. It seemed to begin as the
mayor’s critics, and not everyone has to like his full-figured, Archie
Bunker-style, leaped with joy at suggestions that the mayor might be a crack
cocaine-user (like, on an occasional basis, a very large number of other
people). Then, as happens when a mob composed of the ideological left and the
vast mass of those who enjoy (no matter how tawdry or parochial the details)
watching the mighty fall begin to see a catastrophic career failure in
progress, the frenzy took hold. Everything is then invoked as proof of
ignobility, unfitness for a place of public trust, and moral turpitude.
Thus, I heard on one radio station while in my car,
a commentator virtually raving about “fiscal irresponsibility.” I assumed that
some new enormity had been unearthed, that the mayor was hurling money out of
the windows, presumably in the direction of cronies. Eventually, it turned out
to be a matter of asking one of his aides to do a few innocuous personal
favours for him. This is what go-fors do, in the public and private sector, and
what would be irresponsible, fiscally and otherwise, would be the holder of a
high office having to do everything, no matter how mundane, himself. To judge
from reports, this mayor doesn’t even avail himself of a chauffeur, which in my
observations is a first for a Toronto mayor going back to Allan Lamport. Was it
fiscally irresponsible for John Sewell or David Miller to have a chauffeur? I
would have thought not, though they had other shortcomings.
There were endless gratuitous reflections on every
aspect of the mayor’s taste, and the usual outpourings of alarm that Rob Ford
was a negative or even a degrading influence on the young people of Toronto. It
is not the role of the mayor of Toronto to be a pied piper of the young toward
a virtuous life, instead, he ought to ensure public security and sanitation and
zone the city and assist in improving public transit. Not since New York’s
Fiorello H. La Guardia read the comic pages over the radio to the children of
that city during a newspaper strike has there been such a connection between
the chief occupant of city hall and the contentment, not to say mental hygiene,
of the mayor’s voters’ children.
In such cases, the rules and practices are bent or
ignored to add to the momentum of the mighty push to evict the targeted
individual from his position. Thus did the chief of Toronto’s generally very
good police force announce that he could not comment on the evidence of the
mayor’s possible wrongdoing, but that the reflections of the rabidly hostile
and muck-inventing, raking and throwing Toronto Star were accurate
and he, the chief, Bill Blair, was “as a citizen, disappointed in the mayor.”
He is paid and sworn to uphold public security. “As a citizen,” in a press
conference he called as chief of police, he can keep such reflections to
himself. Nor should the opinions or fabrications of the Toronto Star and
its febrile and compulsively abrasive editor and publisher be given the
imprimatur of the police department, as if the chief were the Prince of Wales
selling the fact that he bought his handkerchiefs at Harrods.
Nothing has come to light that disqualifies him from
fulfilling the mandate the voters gave him, and I do not believe that the City
Council has any legal capacity to redefine his powers
And it is not clear by what perversion of justice a
judge is selectively making scraps of “evidence” public, while redacted chunks
of a 500-page police report that does not seem to contain anything that
justifies a charge, are receiving attention like film of death camps at the
Nuremberg Trials. We seem to have reached the turning: those who should not
have become so vocal do not seem able to put up or shut up, and the mayor, who
is not, for many people, a style-setter, appears to be competent to continue in
the task which he was elected to perform. Those who disapprove of him, but are
wary of the heavy numbers of his supporters, take refuge in the suggestion that
he take a break to deal with his “substance” or addiction “issues.” The capable
and normally politically astute Employment minister, Jason Kenney, an Alberta
MP who has no discernible dog in this hunt, suggested the mayor “step aside.”
I don’t see why he should. He should be more
careful, including in the avoidance of inflammatory malapropisms. But nothing
has come to light that disqualifies him from fulfilling the mandate his
electors gave him, and I do not believe that the City Council has any legal
capacity to redefine the powers of the mayor, unless the provincial legislature
assigns the authority over municipal government to the Toronto Star, shelter
for rabid editorial writers. No sane person could imagine that the City Council
is a teeming hotbed of Tocquevillian champions of disinterested local government,
and no one has conferred any power of usurpation of legally attributed powers
on those who fester in the council.
What the more learned political commentators note,
(such as Senator Mike Duffy in his blog), is that the entire political
community is wary of Ford Nation, that the Greater Toronto Area is picking up a
number of federal constituencies upon the next expansion of the House of
Commons to 338 legislators, and that Toronto’s contiguous built-up area, almost
from Niagara Falls to Oshawa, will have nearly 70 of them. About half of those are largely inhabited by people
who are not scandalized by obesity, occasional cocaine use, occasional
drunkenness, or the odd whirl at the wheel of a car when a breathalyzer, if
applied, could be problematical. They are, however, scandalized by rank
hypocrisy from mouthy journalists and gimcrack municipal politicians, and by
the confected and inflated sanctimony of prigs and twits.
The greatest wound democratic government has
suffered in 50 years was self-inflicted, and it was the popularization, for a
time the glorification, of the criminalization of policy differences in the
infamous Watergate affair. Not as
dangerous, because it does not involve so great an office as the presidency of
the United States, but just as reprehensible, is the mighty, heaving effort in
the Ford case to criminalize stylistic differences. Such concerns are one of
the reasons we have elections, and cannot be plausibly invoked to gut elections
of their meaning. At the time of the last election, I agreed with most of the
positions Rob Ford espoused, but was disconcerted by his inelegantly phrased
defence of a colleague, that he “has other fish to fry than feathering his own
nest.” When I was asked about the mayor ten days ago by the world’s most famous
mayor (and Britain’s most popular politician), London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, I
defended Mayor Ford, while mentioning that comment of his, and Boris responded
that he must have been referring to the well-known feathered Australian
porcupine fish.
Perhaps. But Mayor Ford’s detractors should realize
that instead of hounding him from office, they have probably, by their bestial
self-righteous excess and implicit mockery of a large echelon of the population
that identifies with the mayor, made
him more popular than ever. They have mocked human foibles a great many
voters share, without shame, if not proudly. And they have made Rob Ford the
most famous Canadian in the world. I found on my recent trip that Australians
and Britons found Rob Ford a refreshing change from their general impression of
Canadians as monochromatic aspirant Dudley Do-Rights. The law of unintended
consequences asserts itself again, and it will be interesting to see whom it
strikes.
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