On Rob Ford

So the Mayor of Toronto smoked crack. "Probably in a drunken stupor" - his words, not mine. Toronto has devolved into an endless discussion over how fucked up this is and why this guy is still the Mayor. And everyone is making the same mistake - it isn't about Right versus Left (or right versus wrong). It isn't because the suburbs are horrible little backwaters of bigotry and willful ignorance (although they might be for all I know, I've lived here for two years and still can't tell Scarborough from North York). It isn't because his supporters are stupid or gullible. It isn't because his opponents are weak or cowardly.

Rob Ford is still the Mayor because no one has done anything (in at least six months) to have him legally removed from office. And he still has supporters because the people who elected him did so because he told them he would keep their taxes low and stop the "gravy train". I'm not sure there ever was a gravy train in Toronto municipal politics - at least not since Mel Lastman, who a person I know but can't identify because of his extremely checkered past disparagingly referred to as a gangster. So stopping the gravy train probably wasn't that hard. And he hasn't initiated any of the kinds of projects that infuriate the people who voted for him.

In case you are wondering who those people are, this should tell you. It's from Torontoist (a great website if you live in Toronto or give a shit about it for some other reason):

The purple part in the centre is what I think of when I say Toronto. The rest is the result of the amalgamation - a trick the provincial Conservative Party pulled off a couple decades ago when they got sick of getting whipped by the leftists in Toronto elections. The little chunk of what looks like compromise at the bottom of the purple block is water. So, imagine you live in the top right or top left corners of the map, your taxes go to pay for all the things that require tax money in the purple part that you never use or even see. Subways, streetcars, garbage collection by unionized workers, about a million other things necessary to have the population density of the purple part - you pay for it all, just as much as the people who get the results. Research has consistently shown people who live in the blue areas make less money than those in the purple - which makes a kind of intuitive sense, living downtown is more expensive than living in the suburbs. I complain frequently about my rent but I chose to live downtown and it's a choice I can make because I'm not married, don't have kids, don't have to worry about the quality of their schools, where they are going to play, etc. Remember, those people didn't ask to become part of Toronto - they were their own separate municipalities with their own governments and own tax bases and then they weren't.

So, from the perspective of someone who lives in the core I would consider a new subway line running along Queen St a huge victory of intelligent planning over political entropy. If I lived out in the corners, I'd consider it yet another victory for the elitists in the core. And elitists isn't too strong a word; those of us who live in the core (as you can tell from the tone of this entry) don't think very much (or very often) about those who don't live in the core. They are worse than people who live in other cities - hangers-on, hicks, members of the Ford Nation (which has become about the most damning thing a person can be called these days by people in the core). 

A lot of Ford's supporters are being filmed by the media, or drawing attention to themselves by saying ridiculous shit about how this is all a "Left-wing media conspiracy" and a witch-hunt. The media eats that shit up because the people who buy the papers live - want to take a guess? It isn't that the media is left wing, the readership is left compared to the suburbs. National papers (The National Post and Globe and Mail) are reporting the story too and in much the same way but it is the locals who get attacked as the lynch mob out to get Ford. 

I like to think of it this way - because it helps me make sense of it - The Rolling Stones best album was made when Keith Richards was so fucked up on heroin he couldn't stand sunlight and never went outside. I didn't say he should get fired from the Stones (in point of fact I was probably about 2 years old but you get the analogy). At the moment people who voted for Ford are probably equally pissed at Ford and the Toronto media for making this city a laughing stock on the world stage. But since they already disliked the Toronto media, it's easier to get pissed at them. And Ford will either get removed from office by some kind of procedural move, criminal charges resulting from an on-going police investigation, or by election next year. His replacement will be the next person in line who promises not to make the suburbs pay for things the core desperately needs. 

Toronto civic politics is ugly. And not in the interesting way American politics is ugly. It's ugly in that we have moved far beyond the stage where anything can be negotiated. The essence of politics is negotiation but the suburbs are like the Chinese empire prior to the Opium War; they won't negotiate because they don't want anything except to be left alone. Which isn't to say the citizens of the core hold any kind of high ground. Our failure to find a way to negotiate with the suburbs has turned us into spiteful dicks. 

I used to flip flop between hating the Mayor for a combination of his political positions and his playing the "stupid equals authentic" role so baldly and liking the Mayor because he was a joke with a punchline delivered every other day. Now I don't hate him or like him. I feel bad for him. Everyone knows politicians lie. Everyone knows addicts lie. This guy doesn't know what's real anymore. He went into a scrum of reporters using the excuse "I was too drunk to know what I was doing" as a way to get around the fact he'd been caught on camera smoking crack. He doesn't need ridicule at this point, he needs help and the only way he's going to get any is if his brain trust (which unfortunately seems to be composed of a group of petty criminals organized by his brainless, sadistic older brother) decide it is something they can turn into a politically useful narrative. 

So we are stuck with Ford (and, more unfortunately, he is stuck being the Mayor) until we can find someone with exactly the same positions who appeals to exactly the same people to replace him. This is a dim prognosis for Toronto politics but I actually believe things are much worse. Toronto and Chicago have a lot in common - they are both former manufacturing centres on a Great Lake, they are sister cities (officially), they are around the same population - and people often wonder why Chicago is so much nicer. It really is better and not just because the elevator took off there and they lured Mies van der Rohe into moving there. It's better because of their mayoral dynasty. I think what Toronto needs is a monstrosity like the Daley family to run the city with an iron fist for a couple decades. The last Daley mayor is kind of a hero of mine - not in a personal sense because everything I know about him suggests he was a real asshole, in a political sense. He liked architecture, parks, green roofs, and that was about it. So Chicago got a lot of good architect, one of the world's best park systems, and green roofs everywhere. And when he wanted to shut down a little airport because the noise bugged him, he sent the city's snow removal equipment out and tore the landing strip up over night. Toronto needs someone who wants to make the city world class (the whole city, not just the purple part) to rule like a dictator until we remember how important negotiation is and unseat the dirty bastard.