Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  Seats in the council chamber were available by invitation only. Standing front and centre was Rob Ford. He was beaming, even blushing, in a crisp black suit, with cufflinks and a white pocket square to match his shirt. His thinning blond hair—slicked straight back for the occasion like his brother Doug’s—was the same colour as the stripes of gold on his necktie and City of Toronto pin. Standing next to Ford was a man in a thunderously loud flamingo-pink sports jacket, with an oversized white shirt collar up to his chin and a red rose in his lapel. The man was Don Cherry, a Canadian hockey and broadcasting icon, who was as famous for his outlandish taste and hockey smarts as he was for his knack of offending people. Cherry, a former player and NHL coach, co-hosted a TV segment during Hockey Night in Canada called “Coach’s Corner.” Cherry had used this platform to attack the federal government for not supporting the American invasion of Iraq, to scoff at multiculturalism, and to complain about the “whiners” in French Canada.

  Ford had selected Cherry, who lived just outside Toronto, to place the chain of office around his neck. (David Miller had opted for the chief justice of Ontario, Roy McMurtry.) Said Toronto Life of the decision, “Aside from the fact that they’re both coaches—though not even in the same sport—we can’t see what, exactly, is bringing these two together, except for their shared love of speaking without thinking.”

  Before the big moment, Ford and Cherry offered a thumbs-up to a mob of photographers. Then the city clerk approached with the chain of office. Attached to a blue velvet collar, it was adorned with eight gold medallions—one for each of the seven former municipal governments and one to represent the amalgamated megacity. Ford bowed forward and Cherry carefully draped it around his neck. Councillors left and right were on their feet clapping. Ford walked behind the speaker’s chair—which now bore his name—and grinned.

  The clerk called on Cherry to give his remarks. There was more applause as Cherry got behind the podium.

  “Well, actually I’m wearing pinko for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything”—eyes in the audience grew wide—“… but, you know, I am befuddled, because I thought I was just doing a good thing coming down with Rob.… I’m being ripped to shreds by the left-wing pinko newspapers out there.”

  The crowd outside in the rotunda howled their approval, but in the chamber mouths gaped open. Several of the councillors turned their backs on Cherry.

  With Rob Ford, “what you see is what you get,” Cherry continued.

  “I say he’s going to be the greatest mayor this city has ever, ever seen, as far as I’m concerned—and put that in your pipe, you left-wing kooks.”

  That’s how it began.

  SIX

  HE WON’T

  GIVE UP THE BLOW

  Renata Ford pulls into a Tim Hortons parking lot about an hour north of her Etobicoke home. She’s meeting with an acquaintance, a former drug addict, to get some advice. She’s worried. Her husband, Rob Ford, has recently been elected mayor. She knows this new status is going to put her family under intense scrutiny. Renata doesn’t have many friends, but she met John—not his real name—through someone in her small circle. He’d faced addiction and come through it. She’s hoping he can give her some tips to bring Rob on side. What she doesn’t know is that John is secretly recording the conversation.

  “Hey, Renata,” John says as she climbs into his front seat. “You want a coffee?”

  “Oh, no, no.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Renata trusts him completely. John steers the conversation into incriminating territory. He brings up Rob.

  “He still thinks he’s going to party,” Renata says. “He thinks that he, oh, you know, ‘I’ll get off the pills, but I’m not giving up the blow.’”

  “He’s a public figure, for Jesus Christ,” John says. “There’s a lot of people after him … that’s why you’ve got to be very careful.”

  “I know that,” Renata says. “I told him, ‘Fuck, you could ruin your whole fucking life.’”

  “If someone wants his ass, they’re going to get him.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell him that.”

  No one gets her, she says. She’s tried to talk to people before, but they can’t help her. She can’t trust them.

  “I got two kids. I’ve gotta, you know, I’ve gotta get this shit together. And like you said, we’re in the public.… You know, it’s just time. It’s fucking time,” she says. “So I really appreciate the help.”

  John gives her some advice about methadone, withdrawal symptoms, and clinics that will be discreet. She thanks him again.

  “I can trust you, because I know you’ve gone fucking through it,” she says before heading back to her car.

  This is the other side of Rob Ford’s world, the one that even his most trusted staff didn’t fully know about until the crack cocaine scandal. For two and a half years while running the city, the mayor managed to keep it secret.

  IT WAS NOVEMBER 2010, and councillor-elect Jaye Robinson was on her way to meet the mayor-elect. Robinson walked to the west elevator bank at City Hall and pressed 16. The transition team had summoned her. For now, they were working out of the tower offices until David Miller packed up and vacated the mayor’s digs on the second floor. The group was small and mostly made up of familiar faces. There was Nick Kouvalis and Mark Towhey from the campaign. Brother Doug. Two former councillors, Gordon Chong and veteran conservative Case Ootes, former city bureaucrat Claire Tucker-Reid, and a man named Amir Remtulla. Remtulla was the director of government relations for brewing company Molson Coors, but before that he worked as Ootes’s executive assistant at City Hall.

  The transition team’s work would be done by December, but many of its members would take up roles in the new Ford administration.

  Robinson was one of fourteen new councillors, although City Hall wasn’t new to her. She’d logged twenty years as a bureaucrat, most notably as the director of events. Many of Toronto’s most treasured cultural initiatives—the Nuit Blanche art festival, the Moose in the City statues, and the culinary event Winterlicious, among others—were Robinson’s work.

  The team was trying to meet all the councillors, both veteran and newly elected. Each had been asked to fill out a form indicating which of the seven standing committees—parks and recreation, economic development, public works, etc.—he or she was interested in joining. The most prestigious was the mayor’s executive committee. Robinson signed up for everything. “I figured, I’m not going to be a city councillor forever. I wanted to roll up my sleeves and get really involved in charting the course of Toronto,” she said.

  She entered a nondescript boardroom on the sixteenth floor. Three people were waiting for her: Rob Ford, Nick Kouvalis, and Doug Ford. She did a double take. Why was the mayor’s brother here? The conversation lasted less than thirty minutes. The mayor-elect barely opened his mouth. Doug Ford, who was “extraordinarily friendly,” did most of the talking. Later, he would turn on her, but that was still two years away.

  Kouvalis had three questions for Robinson. Would she support privatizing garbage collection in the city’s west side? Would she vote to make the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) an essential service? And would she help kill the vehicle registration tax? “If you’re comfortable with these three issues,” Kouvalis said, “then we’re happy to move forward with you being a member of our executive.”

  Robinson was thrilled. All three issues had been part of her platform. But now she had a question. If she joined the executive committee, would she be expected to vote with the administration on every matter all the time? She said she couldn’t commit to that. She considered herself an independent centrist. According to Robinson, Kouvalis made it clear that her allegiance was required only on those three issues. Kouvalis flatly denies this. He says every executive member was made aware that they were expected to vote with the administration on every issue. If a mayor couldn’t rely on his team to support him, the agenda
would never get passed, Kouvalis explained to me.

  City Hall doesn’t work like other levels of government. Ford would get just one vote on council—one out of forty-five. Unlike in some American cities, the mayor of Toronto doesn’t get to veto policy. The strength of the office is rooted in the individual mayor’s powers of persuasion. On any given issue, Ford would need to woo twenty-two councillors to support him. And that wasn’t necessarily going to be easy. About a third of those elected were hard-core lefties. Another half a dozen identified as centrists, and while the rest leaned right, only about ten were as conservative as the mayor-elect. Ford would need to bridge the vote gap. The mayor’s best bargaining tool was that he got to pick the chairs of each standing committee as well as the members of the all-important executive. City councillors wanted these positions. It gave them profile and power. For members of Team Ford, that power would come at a price.

  From the outset, the Ford administration took measures to try to ensure that its agenda was supported. Ford staffers began to distribute “cheat sheets” to like-minded councillors, with suggested votes on dozens of issues. Robinson says it got so bad that members of the executive were expected to show solidarity on simple procedural votes, such as whether someone could speak for three or five minutes during a debate. And it wasn’t just executive committee members who felt the administration’s muscle. The mayor’s office frequently used aggressive tactics to bring centrist votes on side. For example, the administration tried to bully Councillor Ana Bailão to fall in line by holding up, of all things, the installation of a traffic light she had requested for her ward. Councillor Josh Colle, the leader of the so-called Mighty Middle, said of the tactic, “If it’s a strategy to sway votes, I don’t think it’s a productive strategy.” Later in that council meeting, Ford caused problems for a project in Colle’s ward. The mayor relented after the councillor backed Ford’s controversial plan to rip up a major bike lane.

  Like Robinson, Councillor Karen Stintz says that when she accepted the TTC chair position, she didn’t think she had signed up for four years of following orders. “Nick [Kouvalis] had one question: Would I support making the TTC an essential service? I said, ‘Yes, sure.’” Stintz didn’t need selling on the broader Ford agenda. She was a stalwart fiscal conservative. Under the previous Miller regime, she had been a leader in a group of centre-right councillors who formed an unofficial opposition called the Responsible Government Group.

  For his part, Councillor Paul Ainslie said he understood right away what he had gotten himself into. “They talked about running it in a cabinet style,” typical of federal and provincial politics, where members are expected to vote as a bloc. Ainslie was offered the chair of the government management committee and a spot on the executive. He had been shut out from leadership during the Miller years, and now he had a chance to shape policy. He couldn’t pass it up. But not long after he accepted, he received a letter distributed by Ford’s staff to each member of the executive requesting him to pledge support for the Ford agenda. Each of them was to sign and return it immediately. “Some of my colleagues were saying, ‘Well, wait a second. We’re not a cabinet-style government here. We didn’t run on a Rob Ford ticket. We ran on our own tickets.’” Everyone started asking for amendments, and eventually the pledge was abandoned. But the tone was set.

  Robinson now admits she was a bit naive. “I took a huge pay cut to take this job. I wanted to effect change. I thought we were going to do that. Turns out that wasn’t the case.”

  ON ONE OF HIS last days as mayor-elect, November 29, 2010, Ford unveiled his team. There wasn’t a single left-winger or downtown councillor in the mix, and only two women had made it onto the executive. Both were rookies. In fact, eleven of the twelve councillors represented the former boroughs. David Miller had stacked his executive with enough sympathetic councillors to ensure his agenda would get through, but he was also mindful of geography, gender, and ideology. One conservative and three centrists served on his team, and fewer than half represented wards from pre-amalgamation Toronto.

  Ford claimed that his approach reflected a new direction. “This is not about left or right. This is about bringing respect for taxpayers back to City Hall. They’re hard-working, they understand customer service, and that’s the bottom line,” the mayor-elect told reporters as his de facto caucus looked on. Doug Holyday would be deputy mayor; Karen Stintz, chair of the TTC. Suburban councillor Frances Nunziata was Ford’s choice for council speaker. And the comically cantankerous Mike Del Grande, a right-winger from Scarborough, would be budget chief.

  Case Ootes said the transition team felt it was important to have “unanimous support” for the mayor’s agenda. Former mayor David Miller might have had a few more centrist councillors, Ootes said, but he didn’t invite any staunch conservatives onto his team either.

  “The mayor was elected on a platform to end the gravy train. The overwhelming majority of people wanted an end to the spending that was happening under Miller. The councillors on Ford’s executive reflected that. Why would you put a guy like Adam Vaughan on the executive committee?” Ootes said. Vaughan, a former journalist, was a downtown councillor and one of Ford’s most passionate critics.

  “We did take into consideration male–female representation and tried to balance that out in some form or another—like Karen Stintz with the TTC—and that was a challenge, because, as you know, there are more men on council than women,” especially on the right, Ootes said.

  With his team in place, Rob Ford used his first press conference as mayor to kill one of the pillars of Miller’s legacy, Transit City. At a cost of $8.15 billion, and seven years in the making, this massive transit expansion plan was funded almost entirely by the province, apart from one arm of light rail in Scarborough, where the federal government was kicking in $330 million. The network relied heavily on above-ground light rail trains, or LRTs. Where subways cost $300 million per kilometre to build, above-ground LRTs come at a bargain $100 million per kilometre. But in Rob Ford’s Toronto, the car reigned supreme, and anything that slowed drivers was bad.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the war on the car stops today,” Ford said. “We will not build any more rail tracks down the middle of our streets.” He called TTC general manager Gary Webster and instructed him to halt work on Transit City and start investigating how to build subways.

  The new chair of the TTC was incredulous. Karen Stintz didn’t believe the administration actually intended on ripping the whole thing up. “In my mind, we would kill Transit City, which was a David Miller plan, and rebrand it something else that was the Ford plan,” she said. Scrapping the whole project wasn’t financially prudent, and perhaps not even possible. The provincial transit agency, Metrolinx, had already spent $137 million on the project and signed a $770-million contract for the trains. Subways require high population densities to ensure sufficient ridership to pay back some of the increased costs, and many areas, particularly in Scarborough, didn’t have the densities to support one. Most significantly, the Fords had no idea how to pay for it. Stintz thought killing off Transit City was just political showboating from a new mayor eager to demonstrate his authority.

  During the election, once it became apparent Rob Ford might win, some left-wingers warned he would never be able to govern. “This man can’t even convince five people to vote with him. So if disaster happens and voters are sucked into this tale, the other members of council will steer the ship,” progressive councillor Pam McConnell told me at the time.

  But at the first meeting of city council in mid-December 2010, Ford proved his critics wrong. He scored a trio of quick victories with votes to spare. Council voted 39–6 to repeal the vehicle registration tax, 28–17 to make the TTC an essential service (the Ontario government had to approve of the change, which it did), and 40–5 to reduce councillors’ office budgets from $50,445 to $30,000.

  The momentum kept up in the New Year with his first budget. As promised, Ford balanced the books without service
reductions or tax increases. “This is the beginning of a new era,” he boasted. In truth, the mayor’s maiden budget was an unexceptional, stay-the-course document that relied, ironically, on surpluses from the Miller years. Partly acknowledging this, Ford cautioned that the real hunt for waste, or “gravy,” as he had memorably called it during the election, would start in March. The city was going to hire outside experts to comb through each department searching for efficiencies. They would leave “no stone unturned,” and if managers pushed back, “then we will have to find new managers.”

  On the surface, the Ford administration looked wellorganized and professional. Pull back the curtain, and it was a different story. Stintz caught her first glimpse during budget discussions. The mayor’s office had signed off on a ten-cent fare increase, so the TTC built its numbers around that revenue. Then, the night before the budget announcement, Kouvalis phoned. “The mayor doesn’t want a fare increase,” he told Stintz. “Go figure it out.” Officials spent the night altering months of work by hand. There would be no increase.

  It got worse from there. After the fare turnaround, Stintz was called to the mayor’s office in late January for a brainstorming session on the new transit plan. Upon arrival, she learned that they already had one: cancel the proposed LRT along Eglinton Street in the middle of the city and use that money to turn the proposed Sheppard LRT line in the north into a subway. Stintz looked around the room to see if they were serious. She was the councillor for Ward 16 Eglinton-Lawrence. “I invited them to replace me as chair. I also explained this was never going to get through council.” Eglinton impacts half a dozen wards on the east side of the city, meaning half a dozen councillors would be unlikely to support axing transit expansion along this corridor. Kouvalis, Towhey, the mayor, Doug Ford, and Stintz’s assistant were in the room. Rob Ford didn’t say much. Doug kept insisting the private sector would “give us billions!” to pay for subways, which Stintz said was completely unrealistic. “I left that meeting thinking, These guys are nuts. And you can put that in your book.”