{"id":57879,"date":"2017-09-11T09:00:41","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T13:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=57879"},"modified":"2017-09-11T11:29:52","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T15:29:52","slug":"lorinc-unnecessary-return-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2017\/09\/11\/lorinc-unnecessary-return-ford\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: The unnecessary return of Doug Ford"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Give Doug Ford this much: one has to admire, in a grudging way, someone with the sheer lack of self-awareness required to believe that Torontonians are clamouring for a Trumpian mayor after four years of his late brother, nine years of Stephen Harper, and the Category 5 hurricane that is #45\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n

What this city needs, circa 2018, is a middle-aged white male blow-hard who\u2019s going to, uh, make Toronto great again! His value proposition is just so <\/em>obvious.<\/p>\n

Seriously, the most obvious problem with Ford\u2019s bid for a second appearance on the electoral cat-walk is that Mayor John Tory has spent three years proactively scooping large chunks of his future rival\u2019s platform: Tory saved a nearly useless piece of downtown highway at extravagant cost; he blithely ignored the advice of just about every transit expert this side of the Atlantic and proceeded with the Scarborough subway; he\u2019s imposed across-the-board spending cuts, kept taxes low and refused his city manager\u2019s advice to create new revenue tools; and while he didn’t yelp about the war on the car, he nonetheless made it his mission to ensure that traffic keeps moving.<\/p>\n

Sure, Tory\u2019s tone is more centrist, polite and conciliatory, and he\u2019s mostly resisted the urge to lash himself to symbolic causes (war on graffiti, gravy train, etc.). But programmatically, Tory\u2019s track record unquestionably hugs the right side of the road. A Ford in Tory clothing, so to speak.<\/p>\n

Which means Ford\u2019s campaign will likely rely heavily on a confection of populist half-truths, ominous allegations, and a re-do of the sort of sloganeering that put his late brother in office (such as that he\u2019ll be able to build the Scarborough subway entirely with money from developers; that he\u2019ll freeze taxes; that he\u2019ll cancel something big and allegedly undesirable that\u2019s not really his to cancel; that he\u2019ll contract out the rest of the City\u2019s waste management).<\/p>\n

Ford, in sum, will pledge to pull the emergency brake on the John Tory gravy train, all while invoking the memory of Saint Rob to burnish his own less cuddly image.<\/p>\n

The fact-checking brigades will be loosed upon the political landscape, and it\u2019s really anyone\u2019s guess whether the inevitable torrent of Pinocchio moments will have an impact on how Ford conducts himself.<\/p>\n

I personally think he\u2019s misread the moment. Canadians generally hold a very dim view of Trump<\/a>-style politics. One need only cast one\u2019s eyes in the direction of poor old Patrick Brown, who is forced to disavow his rump of caucus nutbars and Bible-thumpers on what seems like a weekly basis. Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who is working hard to stress his own dimple-cheeked sunny ways, had to scramble recently to distance himself from Rebel Media, which seemed to have cultivated a rather chummy relationship with the non-Harper before its neo-Nazi outburst during the Charlottesville riot.<\/p>\n

Closer to home, a fantasy football Forum Research<\/a> poll released on the weekend by the Toronto Sun<\/em> shows Tory with support of 64% among decided and leaning, compared to about a third for Ford.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s trite to point out that the election is Tory\u2019s to lose, although it most definitely is. Rather, what I\u2019d say will be the key dynamic is how the mayor positions himself versus Ford, and whether he stays in his lane until election day. Does Tory attempt to tack slightly left in order to shore up his support among those centrist and downtown voters who are often disappointed with him? Does he tack right because his spidey senses<\/a> tell him that Ford may actually be able to grow beyond that third of Toronto voters who would support a lawn mower if it promised to freeze taxes? Or does he take a Liberal-esque stay-the-course stance that pivots on his ability to claim he delivered on key pledges while getting City Hall off the New York Times<\/em> home page?<\/p>\n

My guess is that if the left doesn\u2019t ante up a challenger, which seems increasingly unlikely, Tory will mostly take for granted all those centre and centre-left voters in the core. He\u2019ll run a steady-as-she-goes centre-right campaign and do so until Ford spooks him into tacking hard right, as happened to George Smitherman in 2010, and which he\u2019ll do even while warning ominously that a Ford mayoralty will inflict draconian chaos onto the city\u2019s beloved municipal services.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t even want to think about what that defensive right-ist drift may look like: another ridiculous transit pledge (we need a subway to Sherway Gardens more than the Relief Line!<\/em>), aggressive privatization promises, or a moratorium on new revenue tools? Absent a meaningful left-leaning challenger, no one\u2019s going to call out Tory on such policy fiascos.<\/p>\n

His positioning will also be determined by the outcome of the June, 2018, provincial election. If the Liberals and Kathleen Wynne get re-elected, Tory\u2019s got plenty of incentive to remain in the centre. But if Brown figures out how to convince voters that he wouldn\u2019t hand the keys to the GTA to a bunch of rural yahoos in southwestern Ontario, I\u2019d expect Tory to mosey his way towards whatever the Progressive Conservatives are saying about housing, transit, and other like-minded issues.<\/p>\n

It would be nice to think that by this point in his political career and mayoralty, Tory has learned to be his own man, and to understand how to occupy the political space that he seems most temperamentally inclined to support. Yet there\u2019s much to suggest that he\u2019s nowhere nearly that secure, which is why Ford could yet inflict a tidal sort of gravitational force in a race that he is unlikely to win.<\/p>\n

\n

Ethics Watch<\/h3>\n

When former mayor Rob Ford was initially diagnosed with a metastasizing soft-tissue cancer, his family set up a website and online guest-book for well-wishers, GetWellRobFord.com. Spacing\u2019s publisher\/editor Matthew Blackett submitted a note using a cheeky alias email, sandro@spacing.ca<\/em> on the hunch that the email could be put to future use. The website never stated what it would do with the email addrwsses collected. And like clockwork, \u201cSandro\u201d has received two mass emails from Doug Ford in response, one an invitation to a celebration of Rob\u2019s life scheduled for the first anniversary of his death in March, 2016; and the second last week, inviting “Sandro” to the Ford Fest where Doug announced his mayoralty bid. Both emails could be a violation of Canada’s Anti-Spam laws<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Doug was the author of many of the dirty tricks and rule-skirting that occurred on Rob\u2019s watch. The expedient and undisclosed re-purposing of a condolence book into a political email list would certainly fit into this category. Let’s hope Elections Toronto will be watching.<\/p>\n

photo by Ashton Pal<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Give Doug Ford this much: one has to admire, in a grudging way, someone with the sheer lack of self-awareness required to believe that Torontonians are clamouring for a Trumpian mayor after four years of his late brother, nine years of Stephen Harper, and the Category 5 hurricane that is #45\u2019s presidency. What this city needs, circaContinue reading “LORINC: The unnecessary return of Doug Ford”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":57885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: The unnecessary return of Doug Ford - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2017\/09\/11\/lorinc-unnecessary-return-ford\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: The unnecessary return of Doug Ford - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Give Doug Ford this much: one has to admire, in a grudging way, someone with the sheer lack of self-awareness required to believe that Torontonians are clamouring for a Trumpian mayor after four years of his late brother, nine years of Stephen Harper, and the Category 5 hurricane that is #45\u2019s presidency. 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