Underdog (15 page)

It was indeed telling how Ford's conflict of interest troubles became a cause célèbre for the
Toronto Star
from the time the lawsuit was first filed until Ford won his appeal, often bumping more important news from the paper's front pages. Just days before the mayor was due to go to court in November 2012, the
Star
published a story claiming Ford was to face a “high stakes public grilling” (from the great man Clayton Ruby himself) and provided a rundown on all the players involved in the lawsuit – as if this ridiculous court case was due the same consideration as the O.J. Simpson trial. The day after Ford lost his initial lawsuit (he subsequently won on appeal), the
Toronto Star
did a huge feature on the annoying Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler, breathlessly reporting that a
mere twenty-seven-year-old had managed to bring the mayor down, as if he was the conquering hero. It was sickening.

At the same time that the mayor was dealing with this lawsuit, he was also forced to defend himself in a six-million-dollar libel suit brought forward by George Foulidis, the owner of the Boardwalk Café. In May 2010, I had blown the whistle on the sweet twenty-year sole-sourced deal handed to Mr. Foulidis – with considerable help from his councillor, Sandra Bussin – which gave him the exclusive rights to sell beverages, food, and trinkets along a five-kilometre stretch of beach in Toronto's east end. The contract, approved in a secret vote at a council meeting while several councillors were absent, was wrong for many reasons, not the least of which was that city officials failed to put it out for tender. Mr. Ford claimed in a
Toronto Sun
editorial board meeting two months before the 2010 election that the deal “stinks to high heaven.” Mr. Ford was right about that. It sure did stink to high heaven. In return, Mr. Foulidis, a hot-headed Greek man who'd threatened me many times with libel chill and who eventually banned me from coming into his café (to interview him) by way of a lawyer's letter, hired Brian Schiller of Mr. Ruby's firm to sue Mr. Ford for allegedly damaging his reputation. It was what one might call a full-court press by the King of Champagne Socialists. Although the Foulidis lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 2012, Mr. Ford was dealing with the libel allegations at the very same time as his job hung in the balance over the municipal conflict of interest lawsuit. The mayor was spending more time in court across the way from City Hall than at City Hall – and his enemies had him just where they wanted him, distracted and unable to focus on his cost-cutting agenda.

But this was hardly the end of it. One May evening, Daniel Dale, a highly ambitious and passive-aggressive
Toronto Star
reporter, decided to check out a piece of property adjacent to the mayor's home that Mr. Ford was hoping to buy from the Toronto Region Conservation Authority. While peering over Mr. Ford's backyard fence with a cellphone camera in hand, the reporter was noticed by a neighbour, who called the mayor, thinking it was an intruder. When the mayor came out to see who it was, Mr. Dale got frightened and ran away, dropping his cellphone. Why didn't he behave in a professional manner and just knock on Mr. Ford's door? Or stand and face the music when caught? Because he would have realized what he was doing would be seen by many as an invasion of the mayor's privacy, particularly just after 7:30 p.m. This was yellow journalism at its finest. When Mr. Dale first started at City Hall, I thought him a fairly decent journalist. Inexperienced, but decent. But the brown noser quickly got co-opted by the
Star
's editor-in-chief to do nothing but try to dig dirt on the mayor or his family and friends; he rarely covered anything else at City Hall during Mr. Ford's entire mayoralty. After the incident at the mayor's house, I lost all respect for him. He milked it for all its worth, even threatening to sue Mr. Ford for libel (and writing a self-serving column about it) when the mayor questioned Mr. Dale's intentions in peering over his fence in a Vision TV interview with Conrad Black. While Mr. Ford never actually said the word, Dale implied he was called a pedophile. His response became very personal and bordered on self-indulgent. My goodness, the first rule of journalism is to try to not become part of the story! Yet, for months his media colleagues continuously painted the wimpy Mr. Dale as the victim.

In late November 2012, Justice Charles Hackland, who heard the conflict of interest case, found that Mr. Ford was indeed guilty of breaking the municipal conflict of interest act and would need to step down from office within thirty days. The long list of characters at the
Toronto Star,
who'd long before ceased to have any objectivity on the mayor, were over the moon, promoting the weasel Mr. Chaleff-Freudenthaler on their front page the next day as a “hero” for bringing the mayor down. But Mr. Ford wasn't giving in that easily. He launched a judicial review so he could remain in office until an appeal was heard. Clayton Ruby and friends, who were becoming subject to public backlash from Ford supporters, agreed to a stay of the original judge's order. When a three-judge panel threw out Justice Hackland's ruling in late January 2013 and granted the mayor a stay of execution, there was no acknowledgement that a lawsuit over $3,150 in donations to a children's charity had cost the mayor personally $300,000 and taxpayers the expense of using up valuable court services, and been a general waste of the voting public's time. Still, what I found far more hideous and telling was that Janet Leiper, after being found by the appeal judges to have overstepped her authority under the City of Toronto Act for imposing the $3,150 financial sanction in the first place, never apologized. Not once. The integrity commissioner, who forced too many apologies to count out of the Ford brothers – and even chastised them for not being sincere enough in their apologies – never once conceded she'd overstepped her authority or made a mistake. I still get angry when I think about the piling on, the stalking of Mr. Ford's family, the obsessive witch hunts, and the almost daily and very personal attacks in the
Toronto Star
and other like-minded media
that crossed over the line of objectivity and decency every time they licked their lips in delicious delight at the idea of beating up on this man.

Unfortunately, this was all just a dress rehearsal for the left's crowning achievement, which began, ostensibly, on May 22, 2013, the date when there was the first whiff of a video about Mr. Ford's crack cocaine smoking, reported first by the U.S. blog
Gawker
and subsequently by the
Toronto Star.
Within a heartbeat, the Toronto Catholic District School Board announced they were removing the mayor as coach of his beloved Don Bosco Eagles football team, a volunteer position he'd held for ten years. They also made it clear they would not allow him to coach at any school in the board. He gave his heart and soul to those football players. They were like his sons. I often wondered if he loved coaching more than being mayor. Either way, it was cruel. It proved how prepared even the school board brass were to kick a dog when he was down. Looking back at the tremendous pressures on the mayor and the horrible, vindictive way in which he was treated, I can only imagine how all of this ate away at him. I highly doubt many of the various and sundry media, politicians, and members of the public who laughed at, mocked, and turned their backs on him after he slid into his addictive state would have been able to handle the daily abuse he took without either quitting, having to take stress leave, or turning to a bottle or pills themselves. In fact, in early 2015, I revealed that more than 1,230 city employees were on long-term disability over stress issues (many of those with issues far more minor than those the mayor faced).

As of January 2013, after Mr. Ford won his appeal in the conflict of interest case, I hoped – a fantasy, I guess – that he
would put the sideshow behind him and salvage the rest of his term. With the help of the strong councillors who were part of his inner circle – Mike Del Grande, Doug Holyday, Frances Nunziata, Cesar Palacio, and his brother Doug – he could even pick up where he left off, implementing his cost-cutting agenda. But it was too late. As February turned into March, Mr. Ford started turning up late for work and showing up at public events appearing inebriated. When, in March, perennial self-promoter and
Women's Post
publisher Sarah Thomson accused the mayor of groping her at a Canadian Jewish Political Action Committee event, I had a hard time believing it because, well, I had a hard time believing anything she said. I suspect he probably was inebriated that night, but as a real victim of not one – but two – assaults in my lifetime, I was incensed at what I saw as her shameless attempt to get publicity at the mayor's expense, IF he did indeed grope her. Sadly, his slide continued, and just before the long weekend in May,
Gawker
and the
Toronto Star
came forward with the story that they'd seen a video allegedly being shopped around by Somali drug dealers showing the mayor smoking crack cocaine with some pretty dodgy characters outside an apartment complex known to police on the western fringes of Toronto. Of course, Rob Ford denied smoking crack and the very existence of the video. But it was as if nothing else was going on in the world as far as the press were concerned. They ran and reran every salacious detail in what seemed like a twenty-four-hour loop. The circus continued right into the next week, when Mr. Ford and his chief of staff, Mark Towhey, had a tremendous falling out. Mr. Towhey tried to push the mayor to go into rehab, and the mayor, channelling his inner Amy Winehouse, said, no,
no, no. Mr. Towhey was fired for his attempts to do the right thing, which was a real shame.

Former Toronto police chief Bill Blair – more often a politician (and a liberal one at that) than a champion of law and order – got immersed in the circus. Clearly upset at Mr. Ford's ongoing efforts to make him rein in his out-of-control spending on toys and overtime for the boys in blue, Blair spent a million dollars investigating Ford's drug ties, even engaging in costly air surveillance to do so. Throughout, Blair crossed the line many times with political comments about the investigation, and often tried to intimidate anyone who dared criticize him about the investigation or about his spending. When he was forced to hand the investigation over to the OPP, who subsequently found no grounds to charge the mayor with any drug offences, I never once heard any contrition or an apology out of the power-mad police chief either.

At the time, I refused to call Mr. Ford guilty without seeing the video or being provided solid proof that it existed. I wasn't in denial. I just wanted proof. Predictably, the very people who were out to crucify the mayor for a possible addiction were and are the same ones pushing harm-reduction programs, safe injection sites, and publicly funded safe crack kits for those with the same addictions. I surmised that addiction was only acceptable if one was the right kind of addict. It didn't matter that I wrote a column clearly stating that he'd lost my trust in early November of 2012 when he finally admitted to his crack cocaine smoking. I was quickly branded an enabler of the mayor's addictions for merely suggesting we rely on due process before assuming guilt. I wrote the column long after I'd left for Queen's Park and it wasn't my beat to be writing about him. Nor was I asked by my editors
to do so. I wanted to do it because I felt I needed to state my feelings about the uncertain existence of the video and the mayor's need for professional help, after making it clear a few months before that I would not judge the situation until the video appeared.

I will never condone many of the things Mr. Ford did, or his hiding of his condition. I would have respected him far, far more if he'd been honest about his crack use and his binge drinking from the get-go, and about the stresses that led him to lose control. He most certainly should have sought professional help when Mr. Towhey suggested it instead of lying about it for months and pretending he was okay. He had a perfect reason to disappear and get his life in order. He could probably have salvaged the situation if he'd done so, and been returned for a second term. I said many, many times that, while I empathized with what drove him to drink and smoke crack, Rob Ford was his own worst enemy. He had come undone and he refused to admit it. Instead he spiralled out of control, embarrassing himself, his family, and the office of mayor many times. He repeatedly asked for trouble from the media when he said things that were crude or offensive – including homophobic and sexist comments – or he made a drunken public spectacle of himself and made a mockery of what was a serious addiction. I knew from my own dealings with him that he wasn't homophobic, but he just provoked the endless attempts by his detractors to paint him that way. I didn't really care much that he'd appeared on
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
or that he became known around the world, even in my Florida community, for his crack cocaine scandals and his outrageous behaviour. Even though it drove the left nuts – since they're very adept at manufacturing
outrage – as far as I'm concerned, there is no bad publicity. I joked many times that he'd done what no other mayor had managed to do – that is, put Toronto on the map. Even jaded Americans seemed to be fascinated by his chutzpah. Despite David Miller's swanning around the world purporting to be the environmental guru to end all environmental gurus, he never managed to get much publicity at all for Toronto. Even during SARS, and with all the costly promotional attempts to draw tourism to Toronto – including his appearance on CNN – Mel Lastman was never subject matter for Jon Stewart.

What really troubled me was that the more Mr. Ford spiralled out of control – deluding himself into thinking he could keep his house in order – and the more he became the butt of every talk show joke, the more he played into the hands of his detractors. He completely lost sight of his agenda, particularly the fiscal one. The bureaucrats were free to do and spend what they wanted, and they took full advantage of the situation. By the late fall of 2013, when most of his supporters had deserted Mr. Ford and council had cruelly revoked most of his powers, giving them to that long-time Liberal teat-sucker and deputy mayor Norm Kelly, he wasn't even pretending to do what he'd been elected to do. It got even worse when more cellphone videos surfaced of Mr. Ford engaged in a late-night drunken, Jamaican-accented rant at a restaurant near his home, and in another drunken episode after the St. Patrick's Day Parade. I wanted him to get off the stage and get into rehab. By then I was exhausted with the nonsense and angry with him for letting down all those who'd relied on him to clean up City Hall, for giving the Lib-leftists all the fodder they needed to contend that the right wing couldn't run Toronto, and for feeding into the media sideshow that
just wouldn't quit. As Mr. Kelly took over his role and started to enjoy the perks of office (including a car and driver, free junkets, and free meals), I knew all checks and balances were gone and it would just be a matter of time before council started spending with impunity from their office slush funds and the bureaucrats started taking liberties again to undo all the good Mr. Ford had done.