Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story (6 page)

Toronto’s future mayor still didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career, he just knew he wanted to be successful. “He used to say he’s going to be the first in his family to make a million dollars,” said one friend.

But in those early days after Carleton, twenty-year-old Rob Ford seemed most committed to “having a good time.” After all, he was young, well-off, and his dad was his boss. He started to party. Primarily, he liked to drink and smoke pot, but he dabbled in cocaine as well. Said the high school friend, “What do you expect? He’s been around drugs his whole life.”

By that time, Randy’s substance abuse had worsened. Randy and Doug Sr. stopped speaking for a while. Kathy was not doing well either, and she was no longer working full-time at Deco.

For his part, Rob had never had a strong interest in the family business, but he wanted to be a team player, so he stuck around and joined the Deco sales force. Doug Jr. was running the company, although his father was still officially president for the time being. When the moment was right, Doug Sr. would step back and give the company to his middle son, who had more than proven himself worthy. Doug Sr. was getting ready to retire.

Then fate intervened.

IT WAS EARLY 1994
, election time in the pre-amalgamation City of Etobicoke. Long-serving local councillor Doug Holyday had decided to run for mayor of Etobicoke, and he needed help with his campaign signs. A friend recommended Deco Labels.

Holyday was hoping to reuse his old white-and-blue councillor signs rather than print all new ones. He met with Doug Jr., who suggested covering the word “councillor” with a big red sticker that said “MAYOR” in white letters. Holyday loved it. But he got more than just signs that day. Doug Jr. asked if he needed help on his campaign.

Holyday recalled one of Doug Jr.’s first days on the team. Doug Jr. was livid that their political rival was winning the sign war.

“I remember Doug coming down to say, ‘You don’t have any signs in the Six Points, Kipling, and Dundas area. It’s all Bruce Sinclair,’” Holyday said. Doug Jr. vowed to take care of it. “The next day, I drove down Kipling and the area was covered in my signs.”

Doug Jr. joined Holyday’s steering committee. He attended breakfast strategy meetings and helped with door-knocking. Against the odds, Holyday won, beating out the incumbent Sinclair.

Doug Jr. was hooked. The next year, he encouraged his father to run provincially. Doug Jr. would be his campaign manager.

“Dougie loved politics,” said Moody, Deco’s former general manager and long-time friend of Doug Jr. “He never talked about running, though. I think Rob had more time on his hands. Dougie couldn’t. He was running the business and taking care of his family.”

This dynamic would haunt the brothers’ relationship for years to come. Doug Jr. had been left with the responsibility of running Deco, leaving baby brother Rob the freedom to pursue his dreams. Both worshipped their father, craved his approval, and spent their lives trying to emulate him. Doug Jr. went the
business route. Then Doug Sr. changed careers and decided to run for the provincial Conservative party. A few years later, brother Rob launched his own campaign, at least in part off of his family’s business credentials.

Those close to Doug Ford Jr. say that not so deep down, he resented Rob. Glimpses of this tension surfaced during Rob Ford’s first year in office, with Doug hijacking news coverage. Friends and former staff go so far as to say that none of the three brothers get along very well. Sometimes they go months without speaking. This is especially true for Doug and Rob, despite the fact that Rob frequently refers to Doug as his best friend, and that Doug is his brother’s fiercest defender.

Their loyalty is ultimately to the family name, not necessarily to each other.

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1995
, hundreds of people wearing Doug Ford baseball caps and waving Doug Ford placards marched into Scarlett Heights Collegiate to pledge their support for the scrappy tell-it-like-it-is owner of Deco Labels & Tags.

It was the night of the Progressive Conservative nomination for the Etobicoke-Humber riding. The premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, a New Democrat, was expected to call an election in a matter of months. If the polls were any indication, his beleaguered government was going to take a beating.

The early 1990s was a period of recession in Canada. Voters felt that Rae and the Ontario New Democratic Party had mismanaged the economy. The province was running a staggering deficit of twelve billion dollars. In an attempt to tame that beast, Rae had passed an austerity measure in the spring of
1993 that forced public-sector workers to take unpaid leave, or “Rae Days,” as they came to be known. In doing so, he became just as unpopular with the left as he was with the right. New Democrat support was barely breathing at 14 percent. All the polls indicated a Liberal sweep. The party, led by Lyn McLeod, had the second highest number of seats in the legislature. They appeared poised to form a majority government.

Enter Mike Harris, the colourful leader of the third-place Progressive Conservative Party. Harris positioned himself as the exact opposite of Rae. He pitched a “Common Sense Revolution” that would cut income tax rates by 30 percent, slash spending by six billion dollars, and force able-bodied welfare recipients to work for their cheques. Harris vowed to do away with affirmativeaction programs and get tough with criminals.

Four candidates in Etobicoke-Humber were vying to become soldiers in Harris’s revolution. Doug Ford Sr. was up against a lawyer named Tom Barlow, local business manager Alida Leistra, and a small businessman and lawyer named Joe Peschisolido. The winner would take on Liberal incumbent Dr. Jim Henderson, a physician who had represented the riding since 1985.

Doug Sr. won on the third ballot.

It was the first political step by a Ford, and the beginning of a movement that would come to be known as Ford Nation.

THREE

THE CANADIAN

KENNEDYS

C
hris MacIntyre headed straight home from school on the afternoon of March 31, 2005. The fourteen-year-old was new to the neighbourhood and still making friends. Five weeks earlier, he had moved in with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend, Kathy Ford. They lived in an apartment above Kathy’s parents’ garage, which Doug Sr. and Diane had built for her after she ran into some trouble a few years earlier. The Fords were rich. They had their own label business, and Mr. Ford used to be in the provincial parliament. One of the sons was a city councillor.

Chris figured they were pretty important people.

Kathy, like his dad, wasn’t perfect. She’d had a lot of hard years, and she wore every one of them on her face. Both Kathy and Chris’s dad had drug problems. Both had criminal records. His dad had spent a lot of time in jail. But things seemed to be better.

Chris had never seen his troubled father so happy. Kathy Ford was forty-five and Scott MacIntyre was thirty-eight, but the age difference didn’t seem to bother either of them. Scott said Kathy was “soulmate” material. She was good to Chris. She treated him just as well as she treated her own two children, a
seventeen-year-old girl and eleven-year-old boy. Now, the five of them all lived together.

Scott was an excellent cook. In the morning, he would make the kids eggs and hash browns with sausage. Scott would come into Chris’s room whisking a bowl of fresh hollandaise sauce, letting the noise wake him up. Kathy took care of the laundry and the cleaning. Some nights they would skip cooking, and the whole gang would go out for Chinese food or pizza. There was a lot of laughter in their lives. Scott and Kathy liked to banter. They would rib each other all day, trading increasingly ridiculous barbs, each hoping to catch the other off guard.

Chris was happy.

This March day, when he got home, he had the apartment to himself. Kathy’s two kids were around somewhere, but he didn’t see them. His dad and Kathy were with some friends in the kitchen of the main house. A woman—the girlfriend of one of Scott’s buddies—was staying with them in the apartment. This was not unusual. People were always crashing for a day or two. Kathy and his dad were generous with their space.

Chris dropped his backpack and headed straight for the television, as Grade 9 boys will do. He was deep into the video game Mortal Kombat when he heard shouting from downstairs.

He dropped the controls and walked to the door connecting to the main house. Something was going on. Chris jogged down the hallway and rounded the staircase to the main level. There were a lot of people in the kitchen. Kathy’s daughter was standing by the door. Suddenly, a deafening crack split the air.

The rest Chris remembers in slow motion.

Kathy slumped to the floor. People started to run. Scott put down a 12-gauge shotgun, pushed someone out of the way, and
ran to Kathy’s side. Kathy’s daughter balled up her fists, tilted her head upwards, and began screaming louder than Chris had ever heard anyone scream in his life.

“Kathy! Oh, Kathy! Oh, God!” Chris recalled his dad yelling. “Can you talk to me? What’s your name? What’s your birthday?”

Her head was gushing blood.

Scott turned to Chris and yelled at him to call 911. Chris ran for the upstairs phone. The screaming didn’t stop. By the time Chris got back to the kitchen, his father was gone. He and another man had taken off in Kathy’s parents’ Jaguar.

The police arrived. Kathy was whisked to the hospital, and Chris was driven to the police station. He sobbed as they questioned him. He knew his dad was in trouble. He wanted to protect him. At first, he lied and said Scott had been at work all day. “He wasn’t even home at the time of the shooting,” Chris claimed. But the detectives were unrelenting. They told him they already knew everything from Kathy’s children. Chris, scared and tired, eventually confessed what he knew.

He emerged from the police station to see Kathy’s councillor brother, Rob Ford.

“Rob, please. Please let me stay with you. I have nowhere to go,” Chris wept.

Rob looked down at him. “I can’t do anything,” he said, and turned away.

Chris had to leave Toronto to live with his mom.

Kathy survived. The bullet had grazed her forehead, leaving a scar but no lasting damage. Police tracked Scott down the next day and charged him with careless storage of a firearm, careless use of a firearm, and possession of cocaine. He pleaded guilty to all three offences and went to jail.

Investigators determined that the shooting had been an accident. Scott was trying to break up a fight between his friend and the girlfriend who had been staying with them.

“Somehow or another he was jostled or lost his balance and the gun discharged,” Detective Colin Kay told the
National Post
. “I am not of the belief that the victim was the intended target.”

The shotgun wasn’t Scott MacIntyre’s. It belonged to Doug Ford Sr., an avid collector, according to family sources. MacIntyre promised the judge he’d never touch another firearm again. He spent a year in jail.

Once he was released, he and Kathy got back together. They moved into an apartment, for which Kathy’s parents were paying, across the street from Scarlett Heights Collegiate. Every few months, Chris would visit the couple. They looked as happy as ever, but trouble never seemed far from Kathy.

DESPITE THE VARIOUS PROBLEMS
at home, the Ford family was on its way to becoming a political dynasty.

Doug Sr. had spent just a single term in the Ontario Legislature. The premier consolidated the number of ridings, and Doug Sr. lost his seat in 1999 after only four years as an MPP. But he was still a significant player in the party, plus his youngest son was a city councillor.

In his short time as an MPP, Doug Sr. had made his mark as a staunch conservative warrior, ready and willing to toe the party line even in the face of crumbling public support. His combative speeches at Queen’s Park became something of legend. In one famous incident, he began heckling the people who had come to make deputations about not having jobs. It was in 1997, and the
legislative assembly was debating Bill 103, the bill that would bring about amalgamation.

“The greatest economist I ever met in my whole life was my mother,” Doug Sr. said. “My mother had nine children, and she didn’t take any welfare and she had the kind of pride I haven’t seen for many, many years.”

Someone interjected, “What’s that got to do with Bill 103?”

Doug Sr. kept going. “We’re talking about living in two rooms with nine kids. The older ones took care of the younger ones. My mother worked every single day of her life. She used to brush my hair, and I used to say to her, ‘When I get older, you’ll never have to work,’ and she used to laugh. Every day, I’d see her go out, and I’d see her come back with a bag of groceries or something. Heating those two rooms—I used to go down to the coal cars, down on Eastern Avenue, take the coal, put it in a bucket, and bring it home on my wagon. Some of you people don’t even know what life’s all about … the people over there who are lobbying from the audience every day. I’ve been listening and I watch them all. I wonder if they’ve got time or they work for a living. I don’t know.”

Gilles Bisson, a New Democrat, admonished Ford for attacking the public.

But Doug Sr. pressed on. “Everyone agrees that the status quo is not an option. The mayors, the business community, even the leader of the Opposition all agree there must be change.”

By this point, the chamber was deteriorating as people began to shout. The Conservative Party whip gave Doug Sr. the signal to sit down.

Bisson: “The whip is too embarrassed by what you’re saying and he wants you to sit down.”

Doug Ford: “Why don’t you shut your mouth.”

Doug Sr. may not have earned himself many friends on the other side of the aisle, but within his own party, his passion, loyalty, and flamboyant charm won people over. They respected his rags-to-riches story. And while Doug Sr. didn’t broadcast it, he donated every penny of his political salary to charity.