Three Reasons Why Ford Should Stay

Everyone’s clamouring for Ford to resign: he lied, he smoked crack, he was wasted on the job, the city needs a competent administration. Balls, I say. I’ve seen competent administrations and I can say for certain in the present climate that a “competent administration” will focus its attention on further austerity and attacking those who resist austerity. Need I remind that the entire left wing on council voted to applaud the role of the police in attacking G20 protestors? Well, a couple of them stayed away for the vote but you don’t get bravery points for that now, do you? So I can think of three good reasons why we will be better off as a city if Rob Ford stays and then runs in the next election:

1) His removal will be on a conservative basis that does nothing to strengthen the left. Sorry, folks – Police Chief Bill “martial law” Blair is the hero in this story, not the left, not the unions, not the LGBT movement. In fact the list of Ford’s enemies looks increasingly like a who’s who of the right in this city. The clamour for Ford’s head is not because he wants to close libraries, end daycare subsidies or because he refuses to attend Gay Pride. It is a moral panic about a guy who is too trashy to do the elite job of being a mayor. If he goes now he will be replaced by a new standard bearer who most of the right can rally around to implement the very same agenda pursued by Ford.

2) By Ford staying the right wing can spend the next year tearing the shit out of each other and can then proceed to split the vote three ways. A deeply fractured right creates more space to resist austerity and build a fightback. After Ford was elected there was a sense amongst the left on council and outside in the real world, that Ford Nation was unassailable. Pessimism leads to passivity and acceptance of austerity because there appears to be no alternatrive. Doug Ford’s call for Chief Blair and Polices Services Board chair Andrew Pringle to resign demonstrates that the dynamic duo have no red lines and they will escalate the fight as much as necessary to save their careers. These guys are not normal politicians. And Dougie is also correct: Pringle, the head of the body whose job it is to oversee the cops and keep them on a tight leash of accountability has no business going on a fishing trip with the damn chief. If the Ford's want to go down swinging and take down a bunch of right wing power brokers with them (saying things that the left has never had the spine to say) then I say let 'em rip. I'm not a fan of UFC but this is the kind of cage match that I could get into.

3) The left and the unions need time to rebuild confidence and activism. Let’s be honest – the left has been for shit. Besides the librarians – who fought a good strike and basically won – and one significant, union-led, anti-austerity protest of several thousand people at City Hall, Ford has faced less resistance than even David Miller. Garbage collection was privatized without a whimper from CUPE. If Olivia Chow is elected mayor – and, again, let’s be honest it will be with a Miller-esque team that includes “progressive” business leaders – and there is no anti-austerity movement in the streets or in the unions, she will implement a more socially progressive version of the same pro-business policies. I would bet money that her “cabinet” would include Karen Stintz, the anti-Ford Tory councilor who is chair of the TTC (and being touted as the person to beat Ford by the media). We’ve seen this story before with the Ontario NDP government – elected on high hopes, does progressive stuff for about a year, then collapses under pressure from the right into harsh austerity and scapegoating of the poor as the unions are split and provide little resistance. The unions, the NDP and the "social movement left" could start by mobilizing now against Ford on the basis of challenging his politics, not his lifestyle.

So, be careful what you wish for Toronto lefties because you just might get it. At worst you will end up with Stintz or, god help us, John Tory as mayor by this time next year. At best we will end up with effectively the same policies with a progressive gloss and the right wing will have ridden out a major crisis and been allowed to regroup.

The Fall Of The House Of Ford

Taking a moment to pray for peace

You gotta admit that it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Rob Ford is a bully and a hypocrite - quick to condemn the perceived weakness of others, to pounce on the supposed privileges of unionized workers or the effete absurdity of riding a bicycle instead of driving an SUV in our congested city. And yet he is clearly a man with many personal flaws whose (unearned) privilege as the son of a successful businessman has not only shielded him but has allowed to rise above his ability to function. Were he not the same guy who wanted to cut daycare subsidies for single mothers and wanted to close libraries, I might have had some sympathy for him. But I don't.

Nonetheless, I have to say that I honestly don't care if Ford smokes crack or performs Satanic rituals in his basement. The more I hear people - especially media commentators - talk about his personal failings the more uneasy it makes me. Most of it, frankly, just smells like nothing so much as simply snobbery and elitism. Ditto the comments about the fact that Ford's support base hasn't wavered in the face of the scandal. The Fordites are stupid and dogmatic, a cult, etc etc etc. Funny thing, I had a conversation last week with a Ford voter in a local haunt. He also smelled the snobbery of the whole thing: "the media hate him because he's a regular guy and not a slick politician." I mean, that piece in the Globe & Mail about Doug Ford selling hash in high school? Really? It might dismay the city's elite, who will drink martinis and snort cocaine but who would never stoop to something so pedestrian as hash or, god forbid selling it (it's one thing to buy the stuff, but dealers are so... so... gauche). But for most of us we probably knew people in high school who sold grass or hash or LSD, etc. It was like a higher paying, higher risk part-time job, more fun than working for McDonald's but with higher potential consequences. Very few high school dealers went on to become Scarface. If you don't like teenagers furtively selling dime bags and doobies in the school smoking area, it's pretty simple really - decriminalize it. They some big corporation can sell it and hire the former teenagers for half the pay and put them in stupid uniforms.

But I digress.

Personal attacks & mockery make Ford's base support him more

Normally, I'd say that the decimation of a (minor) right wing dynasty would be something to relish, particularly if the possibility existed to discredit the right wing more broadly. But this stuff is so apolitical that it will do nothing to advance an anti-austerity agenda, or more progressive politics in the areas of equal rights for LGBT, women, minorities, etc. The clamouring for Ford's noggin is not about creating a greener, more equal Toronto. It is a clamouring for a more effective, slicker, right wing dirtbag. As Rosie DiManno put it recently in The Star, "this is not about left or right." And that's exactly the problem. I say that if we have to have a right wing, pro-austerity, anti-equality mayor, I want an incompetent one.

The one bright light in this whole fiasco - I mean besides the sort of sports fan, voyeuristic pleasure one gets from watching a mock-Shakespearean tragicomedy unfold - is the way that it has expanded with the police drug raids to implicate Ford in a broader criminal conspiracy. Again, Rosie DiManno put it succinctly when she wrote:

"Yet this is no longer about the contents of a video that’s been seen only by three journalists. Toronto’s mayor, however peripherally, remains a character in a criminal tableau that now encompasses a sophisticated network of alleged drug trafficking, gun-running, robberies, a Dixon-turf street gang and attempted murders, and the mysterious plunge from a Fort McMurray apartment where police made an arrest three weeks ago linked to the alleged Ford crack video."

I have no doubt that the elite are only too happy to use drugs - likely something "higher class" than crack - while condemning dealers and low end users. If this at least exposes some of that hypocrisy - and the rumour is that the late Anthony Smith, of the infamous photograph, was a "dealer to the stars", then it will have been worth something. However, one of the many unfortunate sides of all this - the moral panic from the chattering classes about drug use, the snobbery, etc - is that Ford's political demise should have and could have been precipitated on a political, left wing basis if any of the leaderships of the official left or the trade union movement had ever really stood up to Ford and mobilized in a serious way to defeat him. Ford was always a shell and it was only the left's fear of his supposed invincibility that made him so. Instead of celebrating the defeat of an austerity warrior all we get is a soap opera spectacle.

I Heart Rob Ford

Well, well, well, it’s been quite a week or two. Rob Ford supposedly smoking crack on video. Doug Ford’s past as a supposed hash dealer exposed – along with the drug related charges and violence connected with his other siblings. This follows and endless string of scandals, foibles and general foolishness on the part of the mayor of Toronto. What fun!

 There has been lots of handwringing about Ford embarrassing our great city on the world stage. We need a better mayor, they say. Nonsense, I say. Of course, we could use better political leadership. But that wasn’t what was on offer in the last election. We had the choice between Ford and Smitherman. And Smitherman is a right wing liberal who just happens to be a) gay and b) a very smooth operator. If Smitherman had been elected he would have been just as much of an austerity mongering hatchet man as Rob Ford. The difference would have been that he would have been effective. The incompetence of Rob Ford has ensured that his wacky agenda has been derailed at every turn – even by this largely spineless council (remember the unanimous vote to commend the police for their handling of the G8 fiasco?). Fools give confidence to the weak. Sad but true.

The other element that is heartening is that, ignoring Rosie DiManno’s jibes about Ford’s supporters being mindless dupes, working class people have not been that impressed by the scandal-mongering of the media. Doug Ford, scumbag that he is, is partly right that the media are going after the Ford brothers because they can’t touch their politics. The media by and large don’t disagree with their austerity agenda. They hate them because they have the kinds of personal “flaws” that plague many working class families. We all have relatives who struggle with substance abuse, mental health issues, etc. etc. So, when the media attack Ford for these things people feel like the elite are snobbishly attacking them – and they are. Remember all the brouhaha about Bill Clinton screwing around with Monica Lewinsky? Nobody cared. It had no impact on his popularity. The left shouldn’t fall into the trap of this kind of moralistic snobbery, which does little to build the left or opposition to the right. Stick to principles.

And, most deliciously perhaps, is that Rob Ford’s incompetence has helped deepen that growing crisis of the right. The expenses scandal that is engulfing the Harper Tories and the meltdown of the Ford mayoralty could be the tipping point that devastates the right wing in Canada in the way that the sponsorship scandal unwound the Liberals. The only real obstacle is the tepid opposition of the NDP, which has waged their usual race to the middle in order to appear respectable enough to govern. That worked really well in the BC election where a double-digit lead was thrown away. But the NDP are like the embodiment of that old definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result. If the left actually stood up and fought the right they would galvanize people to join them. By refusing to be any different the NDP merely ensures that they will fail endlessly. Let’s hope that someone talented steps into the breach, at least in Toronto, and wipes out Ford Nation. My biggest fear is that the left will all fall in behind Karen Stintz and her centre-right agenda. Stintz might win but we’ll hardly be better off (transit aside) and we’ll have far less entertainment.