For the record, I think that Rob Ford should ideally be removed from office in an election. However, if Justice Charles Harkland decides Monday that the mayor's violation of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act (and no one now seriously argues that he didn't violate it) was so egregious as to warrant removal from office, I'll take it.
I don't think that's going to happen, and neither do most of the lawyers who have been asked about it.
First, the dollar amount was so small, especially given Ford's personal wealth. I can just as easily see Justice Harkland concluding that this violation is more a reflection of Hizzoner's fantastic hubris and remarkable stupidity than actual corruption, at least as corruption is traditionally defined.
Second, appointed judges are properly highly reluctant to remove elected officials from office. The optics of that are horrible. In a perfect world, the removal of an elected politician would be accompanied with a criminal conviction and possible jail time. And it should be rare. I oppose recalls, in every instance, for the same reason. If you're dumb enough to vote somebody into office, you should suffer the consequences of it until the next election. Not only should politicians take some responsibility, so too should voters.
If I were to bet actual money on what happens Monday afternoon, it would be on Ford surviving in office. But I'm just as sure that he'll take a bad situation and make it infinitely worse, further tarnishing himself.
Etobicoke Slim is singularly incapable of humility. I guarantee you that he'll be on the courthouse steps declare some kind of bizarre "victory," despite his having just been found to have broken the law. I'm pretty confident that he'll include in his remarks moronic references to an "activist judiciary."
In short, Rob Ford will do everything in his power to arrogantly make himself as unelectable as he possibly can.
If it seemed as if Ford was capable of actually understanding that he has brought all of his troubles on himself and modifying the way he deals with people and carries out his duties, it might be possible to rehabilitate himself. But he isn't. He's every bit as haughty and self-entitled as he says his opponents are.
How do I know this? Well, I've been following his testimony in his current libel trial, for one. Just as in his MCIA trial, his testimony in the Madger libel action is evasive, mealy-mouthed and an almost Clintonian exercise in parsing words. If nothing else, it undercuts his self-proclaimed "No bull" style to the point of silliness.
Even after his humiliating court experiences, the mayor took two city buses out of service to drive his dopey football team home from a game. And I should add that it was a game that he left a City Council meeting to coach in the middle of a business day.
Everyday people who couldn't bail on their jobs for a child's sport were left standing around at bus stops for no other reason than their mayor's breathtaking sense of entitlement.
Ford sees some kind of victory in his own repeated disgraces and the demeaning of his own office. The idea of amending the City of Toronto Act to give the mayor greater executive powers is a dead letter so long as people like Rob Ford occupy the office. He can barely get through the day without abusing the little power he has in the most embarrassing way. Why would the province respond to that by granting him more power?
Ever since he declared himself a candidate for the mayor's chair, I wondered why any self-respecting conservative would support an oaf like Ford. It's not as though his incredibly damaged and self-aggrandizing personality was a secret during the campaign.
In today's National Post, Christie Blatchford gives the most predictable and disappointing answer of all.
I'd love to believe that Ms. Blatchford is kidding. But given her widely known stands - cops, hockey players and the Conservative parties of Ontario and Canada good, everything else bad - I doubt that she is.
That week in court refreshed my memory, as the lawyers say. It was never that I loved Mr. Ford, either the detail of his politics or who he is particularly.
Rather, I liked who he wasn’t.
He wasn’t David Miller, his pretty-boy predecessor. He wasn’t the late Jack Layton. He wasn’t Sandra Bussin, the former councillor. He wasn’t Olivia Chow, another former councillor, Mr. Layton’s widow, who may yet return to run for the mayoralty (but only, of course, if “the people” demand it).
Mr. Ford wasn’t a part of that soft-left ruling class which, during my time at City Hall in the mid-1990s, ran the show, and appears to still. He wasn’t an earnest subscriber to the conventions of downtown city politics, with its sure convictions about What We Believe In.
I remember that so vividly, the smugness, the preening disdain for outsiders, even if, sometimes especially if, they were actual citizens.
As Mr. Ford’s lawyer at the libel trial, Gavin Tighe, said rather forcefully in his closing argument, institutional corruption “isn’t done with packets of cash anymore,” but through lobbying, campaign donations, the crass horse-trading of votes and backroom deals, and, Mr. Tighe didn’t mention this, a collective sort of moral superiority.
Mr. Ford is surely deeply flawed. Well, so are most of us, me anyway. But, to use a modern term, he is also authentic.
Watching him being cross-examined by Messrs. Shiller and Caplan – who once used the word “lacuna” in his closing submission, then, for the rest of us not so smart as he is, added helpfully, “that gap” — was a brilliant reminder of why once upon a time, I marked an X by Rob Ford’s name.
This something that warned about repeatedly during the campaign two years ago. I said at the time, and subsequent events has demonstrated, that Rob Ford is a menace to conservatism in this city.
The Harper Tories didn't win the federal seats that they in 416 because of Ford's support, or even because Harper himself is supposedly so awesome. Those seats went to them because the Liberal Party was in a state of national collapse. No fewer than four former Grit leadership candidates (Ken Dryden, Martha Hall Findley, Joe Volpe and Gerard Kennedy) and the leader himself lost their Toronto seats last year. Who else was realistically going to pick up those seats?
Ford's close association with the Hudak Ontario Tories was probably a factor in the party failing to win a single seat in Toronto last fall against an immensely unpopular McGuinty government. Not one. I'll grant you that Tim Hudak might be the only person alive more intellectually challenged than Ford himself, but if the people of Toronto so love the supposed "Ford Nation," it stands to reason that they'd want more of it at the provincial level. They chose otherwise. Hudak's one saving grace was that he didn't have Toronto seats to lose because he almost certainly would have.
Blatchford's column is a representation of what supposedly intellectual conservatives think, which is truly horrifying.
There was a time when conservatives could proudly stand on what we are and what we believe. We honestly thought that we had ideas that could make people's lives better. Conservative intellectuals for decades insisted that we were more than capable of standing on our own in the forum of ideas and argument. We were right and the left was, well, "misguided." We might not win the battle of elections all the time, but we would win the battle of ideas.
And you know what? We did! Look how far the left has moved to the right in the last three decades. Even when we lose, our ideas are largely adopted and legislated. No honest adult that knows anything at all about the issues can say that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jean Chretien were traditionally leftist leaders. The history doesn't support it. Looking at his pre-2006 positions on almost everything, Michael Ignatieff likely would have been a pretty sucessful Conservative leader.
If Christie Blatchford's opinion is widespread among the movement - and everything I've read in the last twenty years tells me it is - that's no longer true. We're surrending in the battle of ideas in not pointing out that the left has moved right.
According to Blatchford, the standard by which conservatives are to be judged is by what we aren't, which is the other guys. That school of thinking suggests that we exist only to win when the other side makes such a godawful mess of everything that they can't possibly continue in office. It suggests that we can't win on our own.
The fact is that we moved the needle. We moved the left to the center. It's what happened afterward that doomed us.
Yes, we can occasionally win by pointing out that we aren't paleolithic cartoon liberals like David Miller, Jack Layton, Olivia Chow or Sandra Bussin, but so what? What does that gives us other than a populist retard that promises to spend untold billions on subways to everywhere with no plausible way of paying for it?
What do you suppose Ford's supporters would say if Mayor Miller disappeared from Council in the middle of the day to teach advanced crotchet to disadvantaged trans-gender youth and, better still, re-routed TTC buses to move them about without creasing their pretty new tube-tops? I can't imagine that it would be anything good. But we're spposed to forgive Ford for taking the afternoon off to coach football? Is there really a paucity of football coaches with less important jobs out there?
Ford differs from Miller, Layton, Chow and Bussin only in his rhetoric. His sense of entitlement is arguably worse than theirs because it's personal, rather than political. Ford can hit lobbyists up for money because it's for his stupid football team, rather than for him personally. Ford can libel business owners out of some idiotic idea that he's "protecting the taxpayer." And conservatives never call him on it.
Perhaps the worst thing about modern movement conservatism is the trait that Rob Ford personally embodies. The idea that nothing is ever our fault. No matter how grievous the sin, no matter how outlandish and contrary to common sense the conduct, it's always somebody else's fault. Always!
When was the last time you heard a conservative say "Boy, that was stupid! I wish I hadn't done that?" No, the first instinct is to attack a malign the press (which we hilariously say is also impotent) and play the victim. Not only has blaming the press replaced the liberal defense of "racism and sexism!," we all too frequently combine racism and sexism with attacks on the press to defend our own monstrous self-entitlement, stupidity and hubris.
Worse still, this is from a moveent who's entire raison d'etre is supposed to be personal responsibility. We're our own bete noire and virtually no one out there is willing to point it out. If we're not better than liberals in our conduct, we're worse, if only because we're supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Rob Ford is hardly the only example of conservatism destroying itself, but he's easily the most cartoonish and self-destructive. The Harper Conservatives made a conscious political decision in becoming the Trudeau Liberals, but Ford is stupid for stupid's sake. And no one should spend an ounce of their energy or a minute of their time defending him.
If Rob Ford is still mayor by this time Monday, he has exactly one way of surviving the next election. There's always going to a core vote of about 20% that supports him no matter what he does. But the left is so utterly undisciplined and given to hating one another than us that it's hard to imagine them putting up one candidate that would easily beat him. That means that Ford would go through a campaign with a 20 point advantage over anyone else, maybe even 30%.
The only way that we can take him out ourselves is by convincing John Tory into declaring at the earliest possible date and hoping it forces the mayor into retirement. Otherwise, we're done.
Rob Ford is our Nixon figure. Even with a huge mandate, he can't win all of the conservatives on Council, let alone the moderates. And that's not going to get better in a second term, it's going to get worse. There's a very possibility that the Ford allies who rode his coattails in 2010 are going to lose their seats, and a mayor that didn't have a serious agenda in the first place is going to wind up with even less support at City Hall.
Ford's freshman allies are in a predicament. They can either abandon him and maybe survive, or stick with him and lose. Either way, Council is almost certain to be more left wing that it is today. And there's nothing in Ford's biography that suggests that he'll be in a compromising mood, even though his second term will be the result of the left's inability to do anything right.
Hoping that he changes his attitude is a fool's errand. Rob Ford's entire life is a textbook exercise in entitlement. Since he inherited his money and his political career, there's no reason to believe that he's going to re-evaluate his character at this late date. After his near-constant, self-inflicted humiliations, he still blames everyone but himself. We're even seeing that in his libel trial, where he's throwing his most steadfast (and only) media allies under the bus.
In the summer of 1974, defending Richard Nixon had finally become a bridge too far for all but a minuscule number of Republicans. Yes, they lost the '74 congressional and '76 presidential elections. But the losses likely would've been much worse if Nixon barely survived and still controlled the agenda and the party machinery. Had a disgraced and thoroughly discredited Nixon handed off the nomination to a successor, the stench of Watergate might have stuck to the party - and the movement - for a generation. And it may never have gone away.
But just six years after the GOP repudiated Nixon themselves, they made impressive gains in Congress in '78 and began 12 years in the White House in 1980. The same is true of Rob Ford.
The longer Ford stays in office, the more damaging he is to conservatism in this city. In the long run, it's far better for conservatives that Toronto have a Trotskyite mayor than Rob Ford slowly destroying everything that we're supposed to believe in, thereby making it impossible for us to elect another, more sensible conservative for a generation.
He has to be beaten. Although I think that it would be wrong to judicially remove him from office for what he's done, the longer he stays, the harder it's going to be to further our agenda for decades to come.
Although I don't think that removing him from office is legally justified, it might just be the greatest political favour the Court can do for us.
Link ruthlessly stolen from Dawg's Blawg. Gif ruthlessly stolen from Lisa Kirbie.
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