Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (13 page)

Batra sighed. “Oh, you can’t spin that.”

But they had to try something. They went over the facts. If the
Star
had this tape, why wasn’t it publishing the story? Was it possible the paper was saving it for closer to the election? In fact, there was no
Star
plot to drop the Dieter bomb right before election day. The
Star
’s city editor was uncomfortable about the paper having introduced Doneit-Henderson to Ford. The story had been axed. But the Ford camp didn’t know that.

On the surface, things were going well. Ford had just caught Smitherman in the polls, though a good chunk of voters remained undecided. It made the tape seem even more like an unexploded bomb.

Ford took the matter to his lawyer. Was there any legal recourse to prevent it from being published, given that he had been recorded without knowing it? Nope. In Canada, as long as one person was aware a conversation was being recorded, it was legally admissible.

They knew what they had to do. “We’ll have to get ahead of it, then,” Kouvalis said. If he couldn’t prevent the recording from coming out, then the best option would be to orchestrate its release. The Ford brothers were dead against this strategy. They wanted to test their luck. Maybe it would never come out. And in fact, Rob Ford was still denying he’d even made the comments, even though he knew Kouvalis had listened to
the tape. Eventually, Kouvalis played it for the entire family— Diane, Randy, and Doug. Rob was embarrassed. The Fords still wanted to let it go.

Kouvalis wasn’t having it. The Ford camp leaked it to a friendly news organization.
Toronto Sun
columnist Sue-Ann Levy was the obvious choice. She was one of Ford’s biggest cheerleaders.

The play would be to frame him as the victim. He was just trying to be nice to an emotionally unstable person. He never intended to buy the man drugs. And look how he was repaid. A set-up.

Levy’s article, published on June 17, was written with a predictably sympathetic spin.

City hall’s “enfant terrible”—mayoralty candidate Rob Ford—insists he only was trying to help someone in trouble when he offered to try to find an HIV-positive man some OxyContin on the street.

“I personally feel sorry for him … he needs help … he needs something,” Ford said Wednesday.

The highly questionable offer comes out in a 52-minute conversation Ford had with Dieter Doneit-Henderson on the evening of June 4, a tape of which was obtained by the
Toronto Sun
.

The campaign held a press conference in front of Deco’s office building the morning the story ran. Up until that point, Randy had kept a low profile on the campaign, helping with strategy and signage and volunteering at events. Given the severity of the situation, Doug wanted his oldest brother involved, to show the
Fords were standing together. So when the candidate emerged, he was accompanied by both of his brothers as well as Batra. (There had actually been a big fight with Randy—who went by the nickname Blackjack—over his cowboy hat. Ford’s staff told him it wasn’t appropriate for the event. But he wore it everywhere except in the shower and in bed. Eventually, Randy gave in.)

“I feel that I have been set up,” Ford told reporters. “There are people out there that will do everything in their power to make sure that I’m not mayor of this great city.… I said what I needed to say to get this person off the phone without provoking him.… His tenor became threatening. I feared for my family. He clearly said on the tape that he could see my house.” The matter was now in the hands of the police, Ford concluded.

The public gave him the benefit of the doubt.

No charges were ever laid.

THE FORD CAMPAIGN
had cleared one big hurdle, just in time for another.

In mid-July,
Toronto Star
investigative reporter Robert Cribb and education reporter Kristin Rushowy learned that Ford had “quietly [been] asked to stop coaching” football at a Toronto high school after an incident with a player. This was the confrontation at Newtonbrook Secondary School back in 2001, when Ford got into it with a player he thought wasn’t performing well. Witnesses disagreed about whether the altercation was physical. The story explained: “Ford, one of his players and an assistant coach at the time deny any physical contact took place. But a parent and another player say Ford aggressively manhandled the student in anger. Ford vigorously denied the allegations saying
he’s never assaulted a player and called the claims a ‘political’ attack on his candidacy.”

Ford was furious with the story. It went after the thing he cared about most: his work coaching football. The Ford team drummed up a brilliant rebuttal. They completely ignored the substance of the article—that Rob had been fired from the job for losing his temper—and fixated on the physical aspect, which was always in dispute. Adrienne Batra told the
National Post
the story was “outrageous, it’s slanderous and patently incorrect.”

The campaign team tracked down the former player at a military base and put him in touch with
The Globe and Mail
. “That’s completely untrue,” Jonathan Gordon, then twenty-five, told the
Globe
when asked if Ford had shaken or slapped him. “Trust me, if he had slapped me I would have beat the crap out of him. No word of a lie.” Gordon said Ford had given a halftime speech that he didn’t like. He deliberately blew the next play then walked off the field. “Ford lost his temper, started yelling at me,” Gordon told the
Globe
. “I took my helmet off, threw it off the field [and] basically told him he ‘can go fuck himself.’ We got into a heated argument. We were pretty close, face to face, and then we got separated by the assistant coach and that was it.”

Ford sent a notice of libel to the
Star
—the first step in a lawsuit, which he never pursued—and an edict was issued to his campaign staff that no one should speak to the paper from then on. Canada’s largest newspaper stopped receiving Ford’s press releases. It was the beginning of what would become known as the Ford Freeze. According to sources within the campaign, the Freeze was never meant to be permanent, but Ford fans seemed to love it. The man of the people was taking on the elites. The Ford campaign raised tens of thousands of dollars in a matter of days.

Hurdles kept appearing as the weeks went by, and Ford cleared every one.

When John Tory announced he was reconsidering a run, Kouvalis whipped up a cartoon attack ad, partly to try to shake the conservative radio host’s confidence and partly to placate Doug, who was demanding the campaign go on the offensive. Tory could have derailed Ford’s campaign. The former leader of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party had all the right-wing bona fides, plus he looked and acted mayoral. Ford had actually been one of Tory’s biggest supporters in 2003. “If Tory had got in, he would have won,” Kouvalis said. The video started with a speeding gravy train whipping past the CN Tower and knocking out a wimpylooking Tory, who was trying in vain to stop it. Then superhero Rob Ford swooped in to save the day. It was sort of lame, but it got news coverage. Next, Kouvalis had a staffer anonymously call in to Tory’s radio show to question the host’s integrity. Looking back, Tory tells me the character attacks had nothing to do with his decision to stay out of the race. “If you look at the campaigns I’ve been through, my skin has thickened up,” he said. The real thing that gave Tory pause was his numbers in the inner suburbs.

Internal polling showed Tory was neck-and-neck with Ford in Etobicoke. Tory had appeal across the city, including in the core, but he wasn’t far enough ahead in the old boroughs.

This was what had done him in in the 2003 race against David Miller. Tory had carried twenty-one of the forty-four wards, including most of the suburban terrain, but he didn’t win by high enough margins. When the ballots were counted, Miller had edged him out after taking twenty-two wards, with support concentrated in the old City of Toronto. (The fourthplace candidate, John Nunziata, won one ward.)

As veteran political operative John Laschinger explains, conservative candidates running in Toronto need to own the suburban vote, but left-wingers can’t build a winning coalition with the downtown alone. “In order to win an election in Toronto, you have to do reasonably well in Scarborough and North York. That’s just over half of the total population. You don’t have to win them, but you can’t lose by more than 20 to 25 points. In Scarborough, you have to win at least 30 to 35 percent or you’re toast.” (Laschinger, who has worked on dozens of campaigns at every level of government, is the man who delivered Miller’s victory in 2003.)

For Tory, his 2010 numbers looked even less favourable. In August he made it clear he was definitely staying out.

With three months to go, the polls on his side, and no John Tory to worry about, it was now Ford’s race to lose. This was the time when a typical candidate would ease off and play it safe to avoid making unforced errors.

But the missteps kept coming.

There was the hasty endorsement of a Christian fundamentalist, Pastor Wendell Brereton, who was running for council and believed that same-sex marriage could “dismantle” democratic civilization. In a press conference with Ford and Brereton outside City Hall, reporters asked Ford if that meant he opposed gay marriage. “We’re together. We have the same thoughts.… I support traditional marriage. I always have. But if people want to, to each their own. I’m not worried about what people do in their private life. I look out for taxpayers’ money.”

Sources on Ford’s staff say the event was “a bad one for us.” Most of the staff heard about the endorsement an hour before
the press conference. The Ford brothers had done it on their own. Brereton had not been vetted.

A week later, Ford seemed to step in it again. During a televised debate on CP24, a Tamil in the audience asked how the city should handle immigrant refugees. Ford responded, “We can’t even deal with the 2.5 million people in the city. I think it’s more important that we take care of the people now before we start bringing in more.” His campaign office was inundated with calls and emails. They were messages of support—many from immigrants.

When Ford suggested to the
Toronto Sun
’s editorial board— without any specific proof—that council was corrupt, many voters ate it up. The allegation infuriated sitting mayor David Miller and numerous councillors from across the spectrum. Even Doug Holyday, the Fords’ old family friend and future deputy mayor, took issue. “Corruption is a strong term, and I think in order to use it, you have to have proof,” he said. “I really don’t have proof of corruption here and I don’t know that anybody else has.” It didn’t matter. Ford’s supporters loved it.

For anyone else, these could have been major gaffes. But the regular rules didn’t apply to Rob Ford. On August 12, a week after the Brereton press conference, a telephone survey from Pollstra Research showed Ford had pulled way ahead. He was at 37.6 percent, while Smitherman was barely treading water at 28.7 percent.

A week later, when Ford’s 1999 drunk driving and marijuana story surfaced, an Ipsos Reid poll showed he had widened his lead to 11 points. This was when Kouvalis knew they’d won. The momentum continued to election day.

Torontonians knew Ford was flawed, but enough of them
were prepared to accept his rough edges because his message of ending City Hall waste was clear. George Smitherman’s director of communications says that focus groups and polling revealed that no one had any idea what their candidate stood for. “We had enough policy to run a small country. There was a substantive plan behind George, but there was also too much policy. It confused our key messages with voters,” said Baranski. “We lost the outsider [status]. The ‘agent of change’ mantra belonged to Rob Ford, and this guy had been on council a number of terms.”

Smitherman’s campaign manager, Bruce Davis, said he knew they were in serious trouble when at a focus group a woman announced, “If I have to choose between someone who wastes our money and someone who beats their wife, I’ll choose the person who beats their wife.” Even a last-ditch attempt in which Smitherman scrapped every message except “I’m not Rob Ford” couldn’t slow the Etobicoke juggernaut.

In the end, it wasn’t even close.

On October 25, 2010, Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto in a landslide.

INAUGURATION DAY
at City Hall, December 7, 2010.

Hundreds of visitors, mostly of the Ford Nation persuasion, had crowded around a giant projector screen in the groundfloor rotunda to watch the ceremony. Many had camped out for hours. They were wearing Ford campaign buttons and T-shirts. They’d fashioned hats out of “Ford for Mayor” bumper stickers. They were waving Canadian flags, sometimes also decorated with “Ford for Mayor” bumper stickers.

“He’s the best Christmas present Toronto could get.… I’m just so excited to be here,” gushed Antionette Wassilyn, who had taken the day off work to attend.

Seats in the council chamber were available by invitation only. Standing front and centre was Rob Ford. He was beaming, even blushing, in a crisp black suit, with cufflinks and a white pocket square to match his shirt. His thinning blond hair—slicked straight back for the occasion like his brother Doug’s—was the same colour as the stripes of gold on his necktie and City of Toronto pin. Standing next to Ford was a man in a thunderously loud flamingo-pink sports jacket, with an oversized white shirt collar up to his chin and a red rose in his lapel. The man was Don Cherry, a Canadian hockey and broadcasting icon, who was as famous for his outlandish taste and hockey smarts as he was for his knack of offending people. Cherry, a former player and NHL coach, co-hosted a TV segment during
Hockey Night in Canada
called “Coach’s Corner.” Cherry had used this platform to attack the federal government for not supporting the American invasion of Iraq, to scoff at multiculturalism, and to complain about the “whiners” in French Canada.

Ford had selected Cherry, who lived just outside Toronto, to place the chain of office around his neck. (David Miller had opted for the chief justice of Ontario, Roy McMurtry.) Said
Toronto Life
of the decision, “Aside from the fact that they’re both coaches—though not even in the same sport—we can’t see what, exactly, is bringing these two together, except for their shared love of speaking without thinking.”