Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Page 8

  Ultimately, it was Ford’s reputation as the topmost tightwad that would come to define him. Even as a first-term rookie, his miserly ways made him one of the most talked-about councillors at City Hall. Six months into his first term, Ford had spent just ten dollars of his annual $53,100 office budget. Contrasted with Giorgio Mammoliti’s tab of $43,150, it made for a good news story, again to the immense annoyance of other councillors. Said budget chief David Shiner, “I don’t understand how you can be communicating and really keeping in touch with your community for ten dollars.” The media did Ford’s communicating for him. Every year, the annual expense reports would come out, and every year Ford’s refusal to spend tax dollars made the front page. Ford upped the ante when he started posting his colleagues’ expenses on his website in chart form, with columns for tickets and donations, food and drink, promotion and taxis, as well as “office.” There were zeros across the board for Ford. He delighted in finding items like “espresso machine” and “bunny suit” (for an Easter parade) among his colleagues’ receipts. In reality, it was not that Ford wasn’t spending money to run his office, he just wasn’t spending tax dollars. Ford, unlike most of his colleagues, was a millionaire. He used his own cash. The public didn’t care about that nuance. They ate up the sentiment.

  “The Sun and the Star made him,” Councillor Doug Holyday said. Before Ford came along, Holyday had always been crowned council’s lowest spender, usually billing around $1,500 on basic essentials like paper, pens, and stamps. “These were legitimate expenses,” said Holyday. “Ford pays for them all himself. He built a reputation on it. For that $1,500, Ford was buying publicity. It got even worse when councillors started grandstanding about it.”

  Whenever the office expense debate flared up—which was often—councillors would attack Ford for his low numbers while defending their own purchases. The years-long dispute came to a head in 2007 when council ordered the integrity commissioner to investigate how it was possible for Ford and Holyday to spend so little. “You know what?” Ford told reporters. “I don’t know. This is how stupid this council can be.” Ford was open about the fact that he was buying his own printer toner and stamps, as well as spending “thousands” on an annual backyard barbecue for constituents. Councillors wanted those expenditures tracked. Councillor Pam McConnell said there needed to be a “level playing field” between regular councillors and independently wealthy ones. Later that year, the city’s auditor and the integrity commissioner released a joint report concluding that councillors must disclose their expenses, even if the money was coming out of their own pocket. Holyday was pleased. “That’s so a councillor can’t spend a small fortune running their office just because they happen to have a small fortune, to make themselves look good politically,” he said at the time. Ford mostly ignored the edict.

  In 2009, Ford reported spending just $708 of his own money on folders, toner, calendar pads, and a few other items, leaving significant gaps in supplies you’d usually expect an office to need. City council eventually passed a number of restrictions about expense accounts, largely thanks to years of pressure and shaming from Ford. In 2008, councillors agreed to cap their annual restaurant bill at five hundred dollars, not to charge taxpayers for alcoholic beverages, and to post their expenses online on a quarterly basis. (Even as mayor, Ford still didn’t disclose all his office expenses, and neither did Doug Ford once he became a councillor. In 2011, Toronto activist Jude MacDonald complained about this to the integrity commissioner. Ford was cleared after he sent in the missing invoices. He blamed delays processing invoices and staff turnover.)

  Looking back, Sandra Bussin thinks that this was the issue that made him. “Even then, I thought that the general public would say, ‘Well, if he doesn’t want to spend it, that’s great.’ I think that put a huge spotlight on him as this great guy, working hard without spending their money.”

  THE FIRST SIGN that something serious was happening behind the scenes in the Ford family came in March 2005, when Rob’s sister, Kathy, was shot in the head. The shocking story was reported across the country.

  Three years later, Ford was charged with assault and uttering a death threat against his wife. His lawyer, Dennis Morris, accused Renata of making up the allegations. On March 25, 2008, Morris said the councillor had come home to a “torrent of verbal abuse,” and when Ford refused to do something Renata asked him to do, someone from the home called 911. Ford took the couple’s two young children to his mother’s home nearby.

  The public’s reaction was a mix of sympathy, suspicion, and morbid interest. “Now that there is nothing funny about the story of Councillor Rob Ford, every detail of his sickening slide becomes simply awful,” wrote John Barber, a columnist with The Globe and Mail. Barber noted the distasteful optics of Ford “blandly carrying on business as usual while his lawyer goes on television to denounce the ‘irrational behaviour’ of the woman he allegedly threatened to kill.… Recent events confirm that the Rob Ford farce is the public face of personal tragedy. Watching is ghoulish, not watching impossible.”

  I was an intern at the Toronto Star at the time. The assignment editor sent me to try to find Renata. I started at the house. Renata’s mother, Henryka Brejniak, answered the door. She let me inside. It didn’t look like the home of a wealthy man. There were toys and clutter everywhere. The decor looked tired. I asked if Renata was home. Brejniak didn’t speak much English. She said her daughter was “getting help” at the doctor’s. I asked if she was hurt. Brejniak just said she was “okay.” Could I speak with her, to hear her version of what happened? “There’s no way she can talk, give her side. She’s so upset.”

  Ford later spoke to reporters with his daughter, Stephanie, in his arms, urging the toddler to say “no comment.”

  In May 2008, prosecutor Leanne Townsend said she was withdrawing the charges against Ford due to “some serious issues” and inconsistencies in Renata’s testimony. Outside the courthouse, Ford said, “I’m just glad this is over,” and that he was “glad to be back with my family.” He said they were in counselling, doing “whatever it takes.”

  Once the charges were dropped, the media backed away from the story. It became apparent that Rob and Renata Ford were dealing with some messy family problems.

  With each drama, the public appeared generally willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt. This had been the case back in 2006, after one of Ford’s most egregious missteps. It was April 15, Saturday night at the Air Canada Centre, and the Toronto Maple Leafs were playing the Ottawa Senators. Ford was sitting behind Dan and Rebecca Hope, who were in town visiting from Enniskillen, a hamlet just outside the city. According to the couple, with less than ten minutes left in the third period, the “rather large gentleman” behind them was “becoming extremely loud and obnoxious.” He was standing up, waving his arms, and shouting. They particularly remember him yelling, “My sister was a heroin addict and was shot in the head.” The Hopes wrote a detailed account of the night to Toronto’s city clerk.

  The gentleman continued on in an extremely loud way with his belligerence and obscenities to the point where I turned and calmly asked him to “tone it down a little.” He responded, again in an extremely loud way with a verbal assault on me personally. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Are you some kind of right wing commy [sic] bastard?” Fearing that the situation would escalate further, I did my best to avoid any conversation and/or eye contact with the gentleman. At one point he shouted the following question at my wife and I, “Do you want your little wife to go over to Iran and get raped and shot” and continued on with other extremely asinine comments.

  Security guards eventually removed Ford. The Hopes turned to two men sitting behind them to see if they knew the screaming guy’s name. It turned out that Ford had been doling out his city business card. The Hopes went to the City of Toronto website to find Rob Ford’s picture. It was him.

  When first confronted with the allegations, Ford accused the couple of lying. “This is unbeli
evable, I wasn’t even at the game. So someone’s trying to do a real hatchet job on me.” The next day, he came clean. Ford told reporters he had lied because he was “completely embarrassed and humiliated about the whole situation.”

  “I’m going through a few personal problems, but it doesn’t justify, you know, getting drunk in public and pretty well acting like an idiot if you ask me,” he said. “I was inebriated. I’m not a heavy drinker at all. I guess it hit me pretty hard and it was an unfortunate situation.”

  The public humiliation didn’t hurt Ford with his constituents.

  In November 2006, Ford was re-elected in Ward 2 Etobicoke North with 66 percent of the vote. It was just two months after his father had died of cancer.

  According to those close to him, this was the moment when things changed—for the whole family. The authoritarian figure was gone. The boys had lost their hero.

  Ford would come home at night and drink himself into another world. He sometimes used hard drugs or prescription pills.

  Soon, Ford was spending time at Kathy’s home, which is just around the corner from the Royal York Plaza and his mother’s house. Some old family friends tried to warn him to stop, but he refused to listen. He was increasingly isolating himself from positive influences. This seems to be the period when Ford transitioned to using crack cocaine, although his drug of choice continued to be alcohol.

  A convicted heroin dealer who used to sell to Kathy Ford recalls partying one time with her baby brother in a grungy hotel not far from the soon-to-be-mayor’s Etobicoke home.

  “He didn’t like that I was there. He was with a few guys he’d known for years,” said the man. “Rob doesn’t like strangers.”

  A MYTHOLOGY ABOUT Rob Ford had taken shape. Average citizens didn’t follow the daily dramas in City Hall back then. People didn’t know councillors’ names, and they knew even less about what any of them stood for. Yet year by year, Ford was able to build a profile for himself. Rob Ford? Wasn’t that the guy who never spent any money and sometimes got in trouble? Partway through his career as councillor, Ford landed a Thursdaymorning radio segment on AM640’s John Oakley Show called “What’s Eating Rob Ford?” The show gave him unfiltered access to voters, and he used his airtime to slam enemies and promote his work. Ford was controversial, he was shaking things up, and to many that was refreshing.

  In a 2004 interview with the Hamilton Spectator’s Bill Dunphy, Ford reflected on his early years as a councillor. Dunphy did the interview at the Etobicoke Civic Centre, which Ford sometimes used as a free meeting space.

  “I was the laughingstock for the first while,” Ford told him. “I got hammered in the papers pretty bad. I got hammered on TV a few times, because of my antics. Did I deserve it? I probably did.… They were out to get me, they got personal. They made fun of my weight, it bothered me, deep down. I sort of flew off the handle a few times, I just lost my temper at council … I just got so mad.” Ford said it was “a lonely time. It still is.”

  The article recounted an incident in which Ford, on being ruthlessly heckled by his colleagues on council, had stood up and bellowed, “Mark my words!,” hitting the desk over and over. “Mark my frigging words, I’ll be mayor one day.”

  Everyone had laughed.

  “They thought that was hilarious,” Ford said. “Anything can happen. In football or politics, upsets happen all the time. You just try your best, let loose with a Hail Mary and you know what? A lot of Hail Mary passes get caught.”

  Ford would seriously consider running for mayor in 2006, but the climate wasn’t right. Torontonians were happy with the job David Miller was doing. Miller—a devoted environmentalist who as a councillor had represented a ward in the core of Toronto—had been elected three years earlier with a broom in hand, vowing to sweep out corruption. It was a time when the MFP computer leasing scandal was still fresh in voters’ minds. Miller spent his freshman term as mayor creating accountability safeguards such as the integrity commissioner’s office, working to beautify the city’s waterfront, and investing in public transit. There were still plenty of left–right squabbles at City Hall over issues like spending, garbage collection, and the future of the rapidly deteriorating Gardiner Expressway, one of Toronto’s most important roadways, but for the most part Miller’s first three years lacked the kind of lightning-rod issues that garnered much public attention. Miller was a safe choice. The only person willing to take him on in 2006 was an unknown right-winger from East York, Councillor Jane Pitfield. Late in the mayoral race, Stephen LeDrew, former president of the Liberal Party of Canada and future CP24 news anchor, added his name to the ballot. For Miller, it was a cakewalk. He finished with 332,969 votes; Pitfield with 188,932; and LeDrew with 8,078.

  By 2010, things had changed. Now the recession, not the MFP scandal, was top of mind. People were looking hard at how their tax dollars were being spent, and they didn’t like what they saw. Sole-sourced contracts. Out-of-control expense accounts. Rising taxes. The deathblow for Miller came in the summer of 2009, when he led Toronto into a smelly thirty-nine-day garbage strike. The outdoor workers had walked off the job after the Miller administration went after their union’s expensive practice of banking unused sick leave. City parks were turned into temporary dumps. Torontonians were willing to endure the trash if it meant abolishing this extravagant union perk, but then the city caved, opting for a compromise. The “sick bank” would be phased out over many years. It was a significant concession, but after a summer of living in a garbage dump, residents weren’t in the mood for middle ground. Miller was already on thin ice with voters. Midway through his second term, he had introduced two unpopular new taxes: the vehicle registration tax—a bill that arrived every year on your birthday—and the land transfer tax. There was a feeling that City Hall was out of touch and wasting money. Miller announced he wouldn’t run again.

  In January 2010, the Fords commissioned a poll.

  The numbers showed that Rob Ford was the third-place choice for mayor. He saw an opening and made a run for that Hail Mary.

  FIVE

  THE GRAVY

  TRAIN

  Nick Kouvalis pulled into the parking lot at Deco Labels & Tags in Etobicoke unsure of what to expect. He had never met Rob Ford. In fact, until a few weeks earlier, he’d never heard of him. But Kouvalis’s business partner, Richard Ciano, had gotten roped into joining the councillor’s mayoral campaign by a mutual friend of the Ford family. Ciano and Kouvalis, both in their mid-thirties, owned a political consulting firm called Campaign Research, which specialized in polling, voter identification, and strategy. The Fords wanted them to put together a campaign plan. Ciano had warned Kouvalis that they were in fact dealing with the Fords, plural. Brother Doug was the campaign manager, and he was very, uh, opinionated.

  Ciano took Kouvalis through the sales office entrance and up to the second-floor boardroom. There was a wall of windows, a long grey table, some simple chairs, and a whiteboard. It was all very plain. The candidate stomped through the doors in an old black suit, a crooked collar, and a tacky red tie. He was big, nearly as big as Kouvalis had been before losing 180 pounds. “Hey, buddy, nice to meet you,” Ford said, extending a hand. “Listen, I just want to let you know, I’m not going to tolerate any cancer on my team.” A startled Kouvalis wondered, That’s how you greet people? When Ford was out of earshot, he turned to Ciano. “How much are these guys into us for, and when are we getting paid?”

  Next, Kouvalis met the brother, who was a slicker, thinner version of Ford. The team was small, maybe ten people. Most didn’t seem to have much political expertise. As far as Kouvalis could tell, the majority were just friends of the family. After some obligatory go-team sabre-rattling, Kouvalis got down to business. Where were they with fundraising? What policies were they promoting? He was greeted with blank stares.

  Looking back at that first meeting still makes Kouvalis chuckle. “We were there to talk about the campaign and what it would be like. They were talking about door-knock
ing. They were talking about the lefties and the socialists, the Republican Party and the Tea Party, and their friends in the States who gave them advice. And I was trying to understand the policies.”

  Despite the rhetoric and shabby suit, Kouvalis liked Ford. They had a lot in common, especially politically. Ford wanted to make the Toronto Transit Commission an essential service, because two years earlier chaos had reigned when the union went on strike. He wanted to cut the size of council in half, because there were forty-four municipal wards and only twenty-two provincial ridings. It would save millions. Ford said the size and cost of the public sector had exploded under Mayor Miller, who was a lefty-socialist who cared only about downtown Toronto. Ford wanted to cut the waste at City Hall.

  Kouvalis bought the message, but he wasn’t sure how they could win. “They just didn’t strike me as normal political candidate types,” he said. “I didn’t realize, at that moment, that that’s exactly the campaign we were going to be running: the antiestablishment campaign.”

  THE CAMPAIGN THAT Kouvalis and Ciano inherited on April 1, 2010, wasn’t really a campaign. Several people involved at the time described it to me as “a train wreck.” The Fords had done little more than register a website, make a bunch of T-shirts, and print a few hundred “Ford for Mayor” placards. There was no policy. No platform. No budget. No message. No fundraising strategy. No battle plan. And no real understanding about why that was a problem.

  Kouvalis and Ciano needed a team. They recruited a twenty-four-year-old keener named Fraser Macdonald to handle communications. After graduating from Queen’s University, Macdonald had gone to work with Ciano at the Manning Centre, a conservative think tank founded by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning. Macdonald was ambitious, smart, and willing to work for peanuts, which is what the Fords were willing to pay.