Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story Read online

  Mark Towhey was one of the original staffers who had tangible experience. Towhey, a former infantry captain who had moved into the private sector at a crisis management consulting firm, was a long-time staple in Etobicoke conservative circles. Kouvalis and Ciano put him in charge of policy.

  Roman Gawur, another Etobicoke conservative, was also assigned to help with policy. His wife and daughter signed up too. Liz ran the office, and young Stephanie became Kouvalis’s assistant. Gawur was eventually put in charge of sifting through all the councillor candidates in every ward, pulling out those who would be most likely to vote with Ford. Then they would endorse them, sometimes helping out with signs and strategy. The Fords were essentially trying to put together a slate of like-minded councillors to get around the fact that the mayor had only one vote. It was a new concept in Toronto municipal elections.

  Rounding out the early talent was data analyst Mitch Wexler, a political veteran who’d been a Queen’s Park staffer during the Mike Harris government and had a résumé stacked with federal, provincial, and municipal campaign experience. As a member of Team Ford, Wexler was to build a voter database. Ford had spent a decade telling people to call him personally if they ever needed anything. And they did. At the end of each day, Ford would get a sheet of blank printer paper and write down every missed call. After returning each one, he’d toss it in a cardboard box. When that box filled up, it would get stashed in a corner. Kouvalis shipped four of these fifteen-pound boxes to his call centre in Windsor, and one of his employees spent two weeks punching the numbers into a spreadsheet. Wexler’s job was to extract the value from that gold mine. He logged the numbers into a telemarketing program, and through automated phone polls he built a profile of each voter. If the election were held tomorrow, would they vote for Rob Ford? If yes, did they want a lawn sign? How about volunteering? Perhaps a donation? It could all be done at the push of a button.

  Kouvalis and Ciano tackled the organizational charts. The campaign needed a fundraising arm, a communications arm, and a leadership structure. They needed a platform. Kouvalis looked to the voter data. People were unhappy. Transit was one of the biggest issues, and several of Ford’s competitors had honed in on it, thinking it a vote-winner. Kouvalis saw something different. He saw a common theme in the issues. Complaints about unions, potholes, high taxes, congestion, those fancy espresso machines, all suggested one thing: frustration with the way the city wasted money on frills. “The gravy train” was a term Ford had used as a councillor to symbolize this waste, and it resonated with focus groups. It meant something to everyone. There were far more votes to be won by stopping the gravy train than by fixing transit. It would be victory by a thousand cuts.

  “Rob won for all sorts of reasons, but this was really important,” said Stefano Pileggi, the Ford campaign’s fundraising manager. “Nick read the data right where the other campaigns didn’t.”

  Avoiding the transit issue—besides the occasional rant about ripping up streetcar tracks—had another benefit. Ford did not do well in intellectual debates. That wasn’t his forte. He was the dark horse, the everyman’s man. He wasn’t going to talk down to you, or pull that politician’s thing of confusing you with stuff like “monetizing assets” or “revenue tools.” Straight talk was part of his brand.

  The campaign crafted a simple three-point platform. Rob Ford would “stop the waste” by halving the size of council from forty-four seats to twenty-two and slashing councillors’ expense accounts. He would “make Toronto a better place to live” by contracting out garbage collection, hiring more police officers, improving customer service at City Hall, and making it illegal for transit workers to strike. Finally, he would “cut unnecessary taxes” by abolishing David Miller’s land transfer tax and the vehicle registration tax.

  With a framework in place, the next challenge was their candidate.

  Ford came with baggage. His ten years in public life had produced an arsenal of attack ad material. The trick was figuring out a way to neutralize his past. “We knew the mainstream media was going to question him harshly. We had to turn it around,” Macdonald said. First, Kouvalis and Ciano sat their candidate down for a grilling. Was there anything else about him they needed to know? Any skeletons the campaign should prepare for? Ford was adamant: absolutely not. So the team built a strategy to deal with what was already out there. They felt that all of it—the domestic assault charge, the incident at the Maple Leafs game, the AIDS comment, the comment that “Oriental people work like dogs”—was manageable. If questions came up, Ford would reiterate that he never claimed to be perfect, then turn the conversation back to the gravy train. In fact, no matter what was being asked, Ford’s answer was “gravy train.”

  And the best way to handle unwanted questions from reporters? Avoid the reporters! Ford’s team devised a media strategy that sidestepped big news outlets. Kouvalis and Ciano were among the first to use phone-in town-hall forums in a major Canadian election. This emerging technology, popularized in the United States, allowed candidates to take questions from—and speak directly to—thousands of voters all at once, away from the glare of the media. For an unpredictable candidate like Ford, it was an invaluable secret weapon. Campaign staff got to screen which questions made it through to the candidate. Even when they tossed him a curveball—and it was a good place for Ford to practise answering the tough ones—the odds of a reporter being on the line to hear a stumble were slim.

  Ford’s team started working on the candidate’s publicspeaking skills. He needed to sound less angry, more in control and reasoned, to show voters he was a leader, not a critic in opposition. His staff gave him talking points to memorize, then techniques to redirect questions back to those key messages. In the safety of a boardroom, Ford did well. But in real-life interviews, he was still easily knocked off script. Sometimes with embarrassing consequences.

  Three weeks into the campaign, in a Toronto Sun interview, Ford was asked about the domestic assault incident with his wife. “I’m glad you asked me about that,” he told columnist Michele Mandel. “I came home one night. She was drunk, and she said, ‘If you fucking touch the kids, I’ll call the cops and say you hit me.’ … I have never laid a hand on a woman in my life.” Mandel asked if Ford had ever considered divorce. “I don’t bail on people who make mistakes. I’ve been married 10 years. Is it perfect? No, but we have two beautiful kids … and she supports me.”

  A senior campaign staffer phoned Ford the morning the Sun profile appeared. “We need to think about what kind of information we share with the media. If somebody asks you about private stuff, asks about your family, just say, ‘I’ve said what I’m going to say on that,’” the staffer told him. To the relief of the campaign, there was zero reaction to the story.

  Ford had never before been politically coached. He and his family bridled at the control. Macdonald would write speeches that Ford wouldn’t read. Doug Ford spent money without asking. He showed up one morning in a giant Winnebago—the Fordmobile—slathered in campaign decals.

  The brothers, for their part, struggled with the concept of a city-wide campaign. They knew how to run a campaign in Ward 2 Etobicoke North, which had about 55,000 residents, and to an extent Etobicoke Centre—the provincial riding where Doug Ford Sr. was forced out in the nomination process in 1999— with its population of about 111,000. But a mayoral bid was an entirely different beast. No political candidate in Canada, at any level, had to win more individual votes than a candidate running for mayor of Toronto. At the provincial and federal levels, people voted once in their own riding for a local member of parliament. In the 2008 federal election, for example, only 38,548 people voted directly for the prime minister of Canada. No one outside of Stephen Harper’s Calgary Southwest electoral district even saw Harper’s name on a ballot. Premiers and the prime minister were determined based on which party won the most seats.

  For this reason, a mayoral race in Toronto was much more like an American gubernatorial or senate race, where vo
ters elected individuals, not parties. And in Toronto, there were 1.5 million votes up for grabs. Yet in the 2010 municipal election, the Fords kept trying to organize door-knocking blitzes, as if they were still campaigning in a small ward race.

  “It would help with the area in terms of visibility, but not the bigger goal we were trying to achieve,” Wexler said. Worse, the Fords would plan time-consuming canvassing missions without consulting staff. This caused last-minute scrambling and stretched resources, and resulted in higher-priority events getting sidelined.

  At one point, staff called in Ford’s mother, Diane. She was the only one who could get through to him. According to someone in the room, she turned to her youngest son and said, “You’re being ridiculous. Listen to these people, they know what they’re doing.”

  Ford was learning fast, but brother Doug was still interfering. He would often gripe about not being included on the campaign’s press releases, “because people are voting for the Ford family brand and the Ford brand is not just Rob.” (A few months later, Doug Ford announced that he too would be on the ballot, vying for his brother’s vacated Ward 2 seat.)

  The campaign antics were too much for Ciano. He quit in May. Kouvalis would steer the ship solo.

  NICK KOUVALIS HAS A LOT of enemies. He’s built a career in business and in politics with a win-at-all-cost mantra. Standing six feet two with broad shoulders, Kouvalis cuts an imposing figure, although it would be much more intimidating if he didn’t always slouch. He’s Greek, with olive skin, jet black hair, which he keeps short, and a perfectly manicured goatee. Always well dressed, he takes pride in his appearance, because before Kouvalis became the shrewd strategizer behind Rob Ford, he was a poor fat kid growing up in public housing in Windsor, Ontario.

  After a lacklustre academic record, Kouvalis worked blue-collar jobs, eventually landing on the Chrysler assembly line. It wasn’t the life for him. When the workday was done, Kouvalis would come home and start planning his escape. He didn’t want to spend his life making money for someone else. First, he tried running an electronic sales and repair company. After it failed, he launched a car service. The business showed promise, but Kouvalis was having trouble getting the right kind of insurance. A friend recommended he start associating with some local politicians to see if they could help speed things along. So, in November 2003, he joined the federal Conservative Party. In politics, he found his calling.

  Kouvalis started out selling party memberships. He was really good at it. He volunteered with Belinda Stronach’s leadership campaign. (“I was new. I didn’t know any better,” he jokes now.) He thought the plotting, the twists and turns, of politics was fun. He wanted to do it for a living. He dug through campaign financial records and was astonished at how much money was being spent on phone work such as polling and get-out-the-vote calls. He opened a call centre out of his living room with some cheap VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) technology. The more work he did with the Conservative Party, the more business came his way.

  Kouvalis met his future mentor and business partner, Richard Ciano, during the 2004 federal election. Ciano was managing Peter Van Loan’s federal campaign, and Kouvalis was the campaign manager for Jeff Watson, who was running in the riding of Essex, outside Windsor. Kouvalis’s and Ciano’s candidates both won.

  Even in those early days, Kouvalis attracted controversy. Despite his win, Watson had a falling-out with Kouvalis that got personal fast. In the next election, Kouvalis went to work in a neighbouring riding for another Conservative candidate. Hostilities with Watson escalated. In a dramatic climax, Kouvalis was charged in the summer of 2005 with threatening to kill Watson. A year and a half later, he was acquitted. Justice Lloyd Dean said he was “troubled” by evidence that the charges might have been politically motivated.

  Kouvalis didn’t hold a grudge. Politics was a dirty sport.

  Such a combative background meant Kouvalis was wellsuited to running Rob Ford’s mayoral campaign and trying to control the formidable Doug. He wasn’t afraid to say no to the older Ford brother, or threaten to resign if the pushback continued. Once Richard Ciano stepped aside, Kouvalis packed his suitcase and moved into the Deco office. The Fords put him up in an empty room above the factory floor. It had a mattress, an ironing board, a lamp, and little else. He would shower with the factory workers. This would be his home for the next six months. The Fords are cheap, but Kouvalis didn’t mind if it meant saving the campaign a buck or two.

  Despite the internal campaign hiccups, Ford was doing well with the public. In mid-April, just weeks after declaring his candidacy, he was sitting in second place. A Toronto Star– Angus Reid poll put George Smitherman at 34 percent, Ford at 27 percent, and Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone at 14 percent. The surge caught the competition off guard. During the first debate—held on March 29, four days after Ford entered the race—Smitherman had barely bothered with the Etobicoke councillor. He trained his fire on business executive Rocco Rossi. Rossi, the former national director of the federal Liberal Party, had run John Tory’s mayoral campaign against David Miller in 2003. With Tory staying out, Rossi had been hoping to inherit that right-of-centre base. On policy, Rossi was the change people wanted. But on delivery, he couldn’t connect. Rossi was polling fourth, at 13 percent, above the only woman in the race, Sarah Thomson. “This is when I first started to get worried,” said Stefan Baranski, Smitherman’s director of communications. “The trend lines were going in the wrong way.”

  Smitherman corrected course at the May 5 Toronto Real Estate Board debate. On stage, Smitherman questioned Ford’s fitness for the job of mayor after his 2006 comments about AIDS and the gay community. “You said, on the floor of council, ‘If you’re not doing needles and you’re not gay, you wouldn’t get AIDS, that’s the bottom line,’” Smitherman, a married gay man, shouted. “I’d like you, Mr. Ford, to explain to people how your character, and especially these comments, is justifiable, now that you present yourself as someone who wishes to be mayor of the City of Toronto, one of the most diverse places to be found anywhere in the world.” The debate, held at the Toronto Congress Centre, was on Ford’s home turf of Etobicoke. People in the audience booed the question.

  “Let me tell you what Rob Ford’s character is about,” Ford fired back. “It’s about integrity, it’s about helping kids get off the street, helping thousands of kids get out of gangs.… I have a Rob Ford football foundation.… You want to get personal, go ahead … I’m not gonna play games, like you have, blowing a billion dollars on eHealth when [you were] the health minister.”

  This was Smitherman’s Achilles heel. In October 2009, Ontario’s auditor general, Jim McCarter, had released a damaging report about the provincial government’s efforts to create electronic health records. McCarter found that since 2002, one billion dollars had been spent developing a system that wasn’t being used. Not enough of the right kind of information was available, so doctors and the public still weren’t accessing it. The auditor also criticized the province’s eHealth agency for hiring pricey consultants without a competitive bidding process. The scandal was a long, messy, and complicated fiasco that spanned both Liberal and Conservative governments. But George Smitherman had been health minister for four and a half of those years, from October 2003 to June 2008, leaving him to bear the brunt of the blame. It was a liability that according to insiders caused him to have second thoughts about running for mayor. His team was still figuring out a rebuttal to the kind of attack Ford was hurling his way that afternoon at the Toronto Congress Centre.

  As soon as “eHealth” came out of Ford’s mouth, the friendly audience erupted in cheers and applause. Smitherman shook his head and it was on to the next question.

  Ford had done well sidestepping the AIDS comment trap, but his handlers were irritated with themselves. They should have seen Smitherman’s attack coming and prepared a better response.

  Although the narrative was taking shape, the growing pains continued through May. At dawn, a week after the deba
te, Kouvalis climbed out of bed at Deco and headed to the nearby convenience store for a coffee and the morning papers. To his amazement, on the front page of the Toronto Star’s city section, he read, “Mayoral Candidate Tells HIV-Positive Gay Man: ‘I Feel Terrible.’” Without telling anyone working on the campaign, Rob and Doug Ford had met with Dieter Doneit-Henderson, an HIV-positive married gay man who had been offended by Ford’s comments about AIDS. He had contacted the Star, and when the newspaper called Ford for comment, the candidate asked to meet the man. The Ford brothers went to Doneit-Henderson’s apartment in an Etobicoke high-rise with a reporter and photographer. “I apologize if I offended you or your husband in any way—that’s not my style,” Ford said. Brother Doug chimed in, “I’ve had my gay friends come and visit me in Chicago. Gay men have slept in my bed.”

  Kouvalis stared at the paper in disbelief and fury. For any other politician, this was the kind of gaffe that could have repercussions for weeks. It was off-message, drew attention to an issue they were trying to avoid, and left readers with images of Doug Ford having sex with men. Kouvalis wanted to scream. Something needed to be done.

  Doug Ford was leaving for Chicago that day on business, and Kouvalis offered to drive him to the airport. They made the short trip in uncomfortable silence.

  “Nick, I know, I know,” Doug said finally as they pulled up to the terminal. “The article was a mischaracterization. It was just supposed to be about how much we love the community.”

  “Just stop,” Kouvalis said. “I bought you a gift.” He handed Doug an extra-large box of condoms. “In case any gay men climb into your bed while you’re in Chicago.”

  Doug got the point. But that would not be the last of Dieter Doneit-Henderson.

  BY JUNE, FORD’S TEAM had learned to work with the brothers’ unconventional behaviour. The campaign had averted some minor crises and could feel some momentum. They hired a new staff member, the charismatic Adrienne Batra, to head up communications. Volunteers were pouring in. Campaign staffer Roman Gawur said, “It was very grassroots. All kinds of people were showing up wanting to work because [Rob] had helped them before.” It was starting to seem like the kinks had been smoothed out, like they were a real, functioning, normal political campaign.